People hated him.

He was tarred and feathered; a furious mob in Ohio once ordered a local doctor to castrate him. Some of the passions he aroused were prompted by financial chicanery. (“To take from the Gentiles,” Smith said, was “no sin.”) Some were prompted by politics (rumors that he was behind, for example, the attempted assassination of Missouri’s governor). Some involved polygamy, which Smith publicly denied practicing, even though, as Beam points out, he had “dozens of polygamous wives.” In theory, polygamy was the restoration of a tradition of the ancient Israelites. In practice, it meant that Smith could deploy his cronies to groom teenage girls. “Sister Martha,” his lieutenants would ask, “are you willing to do all that the prophet requires you to do,” which included learning “the mysteries of the kingdom”? Even almost two centuries on, this makes creepy reading, particularly since the women weren’t always offered much of a choice: Smith slandered a woman who refused him as “a whore from Canada.”

But people also loved him.

They were willing, when it came down to it, to die for him. Fawn Brodie’s “No Man Knows My History” remains among the greatest of American biographies because it shows how the Mormons’ faith in their prophet transformed Mormonism into something far grander than its founder could ever have envisioned, and how a Podunk treasure-hunter became a tragic king, destroyed, like Macbeth or Boris Godunov, by the very power he had sought.

The story Beam tells is full of dramatic detail: the precautions the Mormons took to prevent the Smiths’ bodies from being snatched; Emma Smith’s dogged, pathetic delusion that she was Joseph’s only wife; the capers of the kangaroo court that acquitted the murderers; the Mormon fantasies about divine punishments meted out. (According to a colorful legend, one mob member “died from a cancer in his eye, and when his meals were brought to him, the pus from his eye would drop in his plate.”)

What’s missing, though, is the tragedy. One understands why people hated him, but not so much why they loved him. One mourns Beam’s Joseph Smith as one would mourn any human being trapped by a murderous rabble baying for his blood. But there is no sense of why Joseph’s story is still worth telling; of why, out of all the wacky sects that grew out of America’s Second Great Awakening, his church, and his alone, endured.

After all, it may be easy to make fun of Mormon theology, but it is surely no more absurd to believe that the resurrected Christ visited America in A.D. 34 than it is to believe that Moses parted the Red Sea, or that Muhammad ascended to heaven on a winged horse, or that Jesus was born of a virgin. To see Mormonism in this broader context is to be constantly confronted with questions of belief, of how much nonsense humans will suffer for the sake of making sense of their lives.