They were certainly seen as radical at the time, and Joe was compared to "Mohamet" by critics of Mormonism. Read the damning presentation in the center column of this 1842 New York Herald: "The Discussion by General Bennett about Joe Smith and the Mormons"
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030313/1842-08-31/ed-1/seq-2/#date1=1836&index=0&rows=20&words=God+Gods+Joe+Smith&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=&date2=1848&proxtext=joe+smith+god&y=0&x=0&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1There was also a screed, written in Joe's own hand, to a presidential candidate, in which he threatened violence if he didn't get money from the government:
"If the Latter Day Saints are not restored
to all their rights and paid for all their
losses, according to the known rules of
justice and judgement, reciprocation and
common honesty among men, then God
will come out of his hiding place and vex
this nation with a sore vexation yea,
the consuming wrath of an offended God
shall smoke through the nation, with as
much woe, as independence has blazed
through with pleasure and delight...
"While I have power of body and mind ; while water runs and
grass grows; while virtue is lovely and
vice hateful ; and while a stone points
out tho sacred spot where a fragment of
American liberty once was ; I or my
posterity will plead the cause of injured
innocence, until Missouri makes attonement for all her sins, -or sink disgraced,
degraded and damned to hell 'where
the worm dieth not, and tho fire is not
quenched...'
"Oh, vain men, will ye not, if ye
do not restore them to their rights and
$2,000,000 worth of property relinquish
to them, (the Latter Day Saints) as a
body, their portion and power that be-
ongs to them according to the constitu
tion? Power has its convenience, as well
as inconvenience. The world was not
made for Caesar alone, but for Titus too...'
"I will give you a parable; a certain
lord had a vineyard in a goodly land,
which men labored in at their pleasure;
a few meek men also went and purchased
with money from some of the chief men
that labored at pleasure, a portion of land
in the vineyard, at a very remote part of
it, and began to improve it, and to eat
and drink the fruit thereof: when the
lord of the vineyard, rose up suddenly
and robbed these meek men, and drove
them from their possessions, killing many.
This barbarous act made no small stir
among the men in the vineyard where
the men where robbed, rose up in grand
council, with their chief man, who had
firstly ordered the deed to be done, and
made a covenant not to pay for the cruel
deed, but to keep the spoil, and never let
those meek men set their feet on that soil
again, neither recompence them for it.
Now these meek men, in their distress,
wisely fought redress of those wicked
men in every possible manner and got
none. They then supplicated the chief
men, who held the vineyard at pleasure.
and who had tho power to sell and defend
it, for redress and redemption, and those
men, loving the fame and favor of the
multitude, more than the glory of the lord
of the vineyard, answered, your cause is
just, but we can do nothing for you because
we have no power. Now when
the lord of the vineyard saw that virtue
and innocence was not regarded, and his
vineyard occupied by wicked men, he
sent men and took the possession of it to
himself, and destroyed those unfaithful
servants, and appointed them their portion among hypocrites."
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84038582/1844-02-23/ed-1/seq-1/#date1=1836&index=1&rows=20&words=God+Joe+Smith&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=&date2=1848&proxtext=joe+smith+god&y=0&x=0&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1