Two months before he argued that demons wrote the Book of Mormon, Ethan Muse argued that demons staged the miracle at Fatima.
That is not a coincidence. Muse has built a small genre out of the move. Take a supernatural claim that one Christian tradition reveres, then argue the spirit behind it was a demon. In April, he ran the proposition against the Marian apparitions, with the Anglican Sean Luke defending Fatima and Muse calling it a counterfeit. The Catholic Answers apologist Joe Heschmeyer reviewed that one for his audience. On June 9, Muse aimed the same proposition at Joseph Smith.
The venue was Capturing Christianity, the apologetics channel run by Cameron Bertuzzi, who moderated. Bertuzzi is a former Protestant who has since become Catholic and started a companion channel called Capturing Catholicism. Defending the Book of Mormon was Luke Hanson, Editor-in-Chief of Ward Radio News and a familiar voice to Latter-day Saint audiences, where he is known as "cool-headed Luke" for an even temper in these fights. The resolution Bertuzzi read aloud: it is more likely that the Book of Mormon was inspired by demons than by God. You can watch the full debate here.
It traveled fast. In Utah, anything that calls Joseph Smith's scripture demonic travels fast. Within days, the reaction videos stacked up. An ex-Mormon lawyer taped a review sitting beside Muse. A triumphalist recap promised the Catholic had instantly regretted his case. Breakdown videos arrived from both camps. The debate also kept malfunctioning in ways that became a joke in itself. Feeds froze. Hanson's video stalled four or five times. Bertuzzi's camera overheated because his air conditioning had failed. Each time, somebody said it was the demons, and each time, everyone laughed and went back to arguing about blood sacrifice.
How the question was framed
Bertuzzi set one constraint at the start. Natural explanations were off the table. The question was not whether Joseph Smith made the book up. It asked only which of two supernatural authors was more likely, God or a demon. A listener who thinks the Book of Mormon has an ordinary human origin was given no box to check.
Both men understood that the framing shaped the fight, and they spent much of the night contesting what it required. Muse argued that the way the book was produced pointed to a demonic source. Hanson argued that the exclusion of natural explanations cut the other way, that a book so saturated with Christ pointed away from demons once supernatural authorship was on the table, and he pressed Muse to name the demonic motive. A great deal turned on a prior question the two never resolved: whether the occult and possession reports surrounding Joseph Smith should be read as real supernatural events or as folklore. Muse needed them taken as real and pressed Hanson to grant them. Hanson treated them as a feature of Smith's cultural world, citing the historian Dan Vogel's view that the magic worldview was simply part of Smith's environment.
Muse puts Joseph Smith on trial
Muse barely touched the text of the Book of Mormon. He said so plainly, and built his case around the claim that inspiration is about how a book is made and who makes it. So he prosecuted the maker.
His spine was a dilemma he set in the opening and returned to all night. Either Joseph Smith knew how demons work, or he did not. Smith taught that false spirits can affirm true things and that even the regular signs of discernment often fail, which Muse used to argue that the warm Christian content of the Book of Mormon proves nothing about its source. If Smith was right about that, the content cannot vindicate the book. If Smith was wrong about that, his prophetic authority falls on its own.
The rest was Joseph Smith's documented life in the 1820s. Money digging. Seer stones. A sworn affidavit from a neighbor, William Stafford, describing a black sheep led bleeding around a circle to appease a treasure-guarding spirit. A second affidavit, from Willard Chase, describes a guardian who first appeared as a toad and then as a dead prophet. Muse argued the angel-and-golden-plates story came later, a religious recasting of an earlier tale that had no angel in it. He noted that when one early revelation failed, Joseph Smith explained it by saying some revelations come from God, some from men, and some from the devil, an admission preserved by the Book of Mormon witness David Whitmer.
Then the fruits. Converts convulsing. A man seized at the moment Smith laid hands on him to ordain him, an episode Joseph himself judged to be of the devil. Sidney Rigdon, the church's second-in-command, preached a revelation that Smith had to disown. Smith translated the book by burying his face in a hat with the same seer stone he had used to hunt for buried silver. Muse called the choice maximally suspicious, as if the method had been designed to look like a séance. He was blunt with his language, calling the Book of Mormon an "American Indian origins fan fiction" and Smith himself a demon worshiper.
Hanson asks what a demon would do
Hanson ran one question on a loop. What would a demon do? Demons oppose God in everything. They do not want people praying, giving to the poor, or trusting Jesus Christ. The Book of Mormon, he said, does almost nothing else. He stacked the numbers. Christ is named or titled thousands of times. A climactic scene of the risen Jesus visiting believers in the Americas. He quoted the Catholic theologian Stephen Webb, who found the book almost tedious in its fixation on Jesus.
From there came his central question. What is the payoff? Demons are intelligent. They would not pour centuries of effort into the most Christ-soaked scripture imaginable without a clear return, and Hanson argued Muse had not named one. Polygamy could not be the goal, he said, since the Bible already permits it and the Book of Mormon restricts it more tightly than the Bible does.
He brought data on fruits. Pew findings that Latter-day Saints attend worship more often than nearly any other major U.S. tradition. A 2021 analysis of Pew data putting Latter-day Saint divorce below Catholic and evangelical rates. University of Pennsylvania researchers calling Latter-day Saints model citizens. He tied the outcomes to a culture of daily Book of Mormon reading and argued the book cannot be pried loose from the lives it shapes.
His last line of attack went after Muse's sources. The affidavits Muse leaned on were collected by a paid, twice-excommunicated antagonist, Doctor Philastus Hurlbut, and form a hostile sample whose reliability scholars have long questioned. Hanson offered a specific rebuttal. The affidavits uniformly call the Smiths lazy, he said, yet the family cleared and built a farm assessed higher than the land of several neighbors who testified against them. He read off a roster of non-LDS scholars, John Turner chief among them, who decline to call Smith a fraud, and argued that Muse's reading of Smith's character sits outside the consensus of historians who have studied him.
The cross-examinations
The cross-examination rounds produced the sharpest exchanges.
Muse pressed Hanson on polygamy. He focused on a single marriage that produced no children and laid out a fork. Either Smith wanted the relationships, which makes him no reluctant polygamist, or God commanded the sex, which raises its own questions. Hanson answered that the historical record does not specify, and held that line through follow-ups on the failed Canada revelation and the ordination possession. The Church's own Gospel Topics essay acknowledges the hardest facts here, including Smith's marriage to Helen Mar Kimball several months before her fifteenth birthday and an early union with Fanny Alger.
Hanson pressed Muse on the book itself. He walked him through its teachings one by one, prayer, charity, humility, faith in Christ, and drew a concession on each. Muse's reply every time was that demons can affirm true things with bad intent. Hanson then established that Muse had read about a third of the Book of Mormon and could not name its longest book. At another point Hanson argued that anyone worried about evil spirits should be more troubled by vicious online behavior than by the Book of Mormon, a line he aimed at the genre of channel the debate was airing on.
The Q&A
The audience questions went straight to the fault lines. Asked to weigh Joseph Smith's visions against Fatima, Muse returned to familiar ground. Documented child seers, a predicted public miracle, contemporaneous records, set against what he called the weak and conflicted testimony of the Book of Mormon witnesses. Hanson answered that the comparison ignores scale, since the Catholic Church produced one Fatima across centuries and tens of millions of members.
The plates drew the sharpest disagreement. Muse argued the witnesses never plainly saw them and cited Vogel's claim that the reported weight fits tin better than gold. Hanson countered with a 2025 study by Josh Coates, published in the Interpreter journal, that models the alloys and dimensions and argues a gold plate set could satisfy both the witness accounts and the text. The two could not agree on the underlying facts. They could only name which scholar to trust.
The debate ran more than two hours and ended where it started, with the proposition unresolved and each man holding his ground. The full video, and a growing stack of response videos from both sides, are where the argument now lives.
