{"id":40610,"date":"2020-07-13T06:00:35","date_gmt":"2020-07-13T11:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=40610"},"modified":"2020-07-12T13:43:25","modified_gmt":"2020-07-12T18:43:25","slug":"by-his-own-admission-a-one-footnote-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2020\/07\/by-his-own-admission-a-one-footnote-review\/","title":{"rendered":"“By his own admission”: a one-footnote review"},"content":{"rendered":"

While pursuing an entirely different topic, I came across the statement, in John Hammond\u2019s Quest for the New Jerusalem: A Mormon Generation Saga<\/em> vol. 3 (2012), that Sidney Rigdon, \u201cby his own admission<\/em>, \u2018made up\u2019 religious experiences in his youth\u201d (5-6; emphasis as in the cited text throughout). That seemed like something worth looking into, as Hammond refers to the point twice more:<\/p>\n

Rigdon\u2014who, it should be recalled, had by his own admission fabricated a miraculous vision in order to gain admission to the Baptist Church… (25-26)<\/p>\n

We know by now that Sidney by his own admission “made up” a vision to get into the Baptist Church… (281-82).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And it seems worth looking into especially because Hammond raises the stakes considerably. He sees in Rigdon\u2019s youthful fabrication of spiritual experience an \u201cinteresting parallel with Joseph Smith\u201d and cautions, \u201cWe should keep this in mind when we examine the visionary experiences Smith and Sidney purportedly shared in the 1830s\u201d (5-6). Hammond later adds, again with reference to Rigdon\u2019s admission of fabricating religious experiences,<\/p>\n

No one else in the room was seeing or hearing what Joseph and Sidney were claiming<\/em> they were seeing and hearing. Why should we, or those in the room with them (assuming there were eye-witnesses), take their word for it?<\/em> (281-82).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since this seems to be an important point, let\u2019s follow the footnote. Hammond\u2019s stated source for Rigdon inventing a vision to gain membership in a Baptist church is Richard Van Wagoner\u2019s biography Sidney Rigdon: A Portrait of Religious Excess <\/em>(1994). Van Wagoner states (9-10):<\/p>\n

The exact nature of Sidney Rigdon\u2019s conversion experience is not known. Years later, as a Mormon, he reportedly said of his Baptist initiation: “When I joined the church I knew I could not be admitted without an experience: so I made up one to suit the purpose, but it was all made up, and was of no use.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So we see already that Van Wagoner\u2019s \u201creportedly said\u201d has managed to turn into Hammond\u2019s \u201cby his own admission.\u201d Duly noted.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s keep going. What was Van Wagoner\u2019s source? His footnote states, \u201cHarmon Sumner recalled Sidney\u2019s statement in J. H. Kennedy, Early Days of Mormonism<\/em> (London: Reeves and Turner, 1888), 64.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turning to Kennedy<\/a>, we find<\/p>\n

When, in later days, Harmon Sumner expostulated with Rigdon as to his teaching and said to him, \u201cBrother Rigdon, you never go into a Baptist church without relating your Christian experience,\u201d he was met by the cool and characteristic rejoinder, \u201cWhen I joined the church I knew I could not be admitted without an experience: so I made up one to suit the purpose, but it was all made up, and was of no use, or true.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kennedy doesn\u2019t provide his source directly, but we can now see (thanks to Google Book Search) that he was quoting from Boyd Crumrine\u2019s 1882 History of Washington Country, Pennsylvania, with Biographical Sketches of Many of its Pioneers and Prominent Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Crumrine offers a lengthy argument for the Spaulding manuscript as the origin of the Book of Mormon. Crumrine writes about Sidney Rigdom<\/a> (435-36):<\/p>\n

As the character established by Rigdon among his brethren in the Baptist Church whilst he was a member of that denomination has a direct bearing upon the question of his probable guilt or innocence, we make two quotations touching his reputation at that time. [\u2026]<\/p>\n

(2) In the (Pittsburgh) Baptist Witness<\/em> of Jan. 1, 1875, Dr. Winter, in the course of a historical notice of the First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh, says, \u201cWhen Holland Sumner dealt with Rigdon for his bad teachings, and said to him, \u2018Brother Rigdon, you never got into a Baptist Church without relating your Christian experiences,\u2019 Rigdon replied, \u2018When I joined the church at Peters Creek I knew I could not be admitted without an experience, so I made up one to suit the purpose; but it was all made up, and was of no use, nor true.\u2019 This I have just copied from an old memorandum, as taken from Sumner himself.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Crumrine\u2019s history appears to be the oldest source for this incident now available.<\/p>\n

The \u201cDr. Winter\u201d cited is John Winter (1794-1878), who had led a bitter dispute against Rigdon in 1823 (over Rigdon\u2019s rejection of the doctrine of infant damnation) at the First Baptist Church in Pittsburgh (see Van Wagoner 23-28). Van Wagoner surmises that Winter was the \u201cold Scotch divine\u201d sent to deal with Rigdon (24), but Winter turns out to have been neither old nor Scotch<\/a>, as he was born in southern England, and a year after Rigdon. Based on Kennedy\u2019s Early Days of Mormonism<\/em>, Van Wagoner dates Rigdon\u2019s statement to sometime after he had joined with Joseph Smith, but the \u201cbad teaching\u201d of Sidney Rigdon that Winter disputed was a Baptist matter of 1823, and it is in this Baptist context that Crumrine cites Winter.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s unpack what we know at this point.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. In 1823, Sidney Rigdon allegedly made a thoroughly self-incriminating statement to Holland (not Harmon) Sumner (about whom nothing more is known) while Sumner was investigating Sidney Rigdon\u2019s deviation from approved Baptist teachings.<\/li>\n
  2. Around the same time, Sumner wrote a memorandum to record Rigdon\u2019s statement. The memorandum itself is not available, so there\u2019s no way to decide if the statement should be punctuated as<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Rigdon replied, \u201cWhen I joined the church at Peters Creek I knew I could not be admitted without an experience, so I made up one to suit the purpose; but it was all made up, and was of no use, nor true.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Or:<\/p>\n

    \n

    Rigdon replied, \u201cWhen I joined the church at Peters Creek I knew I could not be admitted without an experience, so I made up one to suit the purpose,\u201d but it was all made up, and was of no use, nor true.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Both statements would be damaging, but the first possibility would make Rigdon appear even more cynical and dishonest. Winter, followed by all later writers, chose the first option.<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. More than 50 years later, John Winter, Rigdon\u2019s bitter rival in 1823 and with even more reason to oppose him after 1830, claimed to have discovered Sumner\u2019s memorandum and included it in a historical note published in Baptist Witness<\/em>. Like Sumner\u2019s memorandum, this particular issue of Baptist Witness <\/em>is not available today.<\/li>\n
    2. In 1882, Crumrine included Winter\u2019s note in his own historical work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      If I\u2019ve counted correctly, I believe this makes Rigdon\u2019s \u201cadmission\u201d a fourth-hand account relying on two lost documents and the good faith of a bitter personal enemy of Sidney Rigdon.<\/p>\n

      That\u2019s not nothing. It\u2019s relevant to Van Wagoner\u2019s thesis, and overall he treats the source he had available to him responsibly by noting the uncertainty about Rigdon\u2019s Baptist conversion and pointing out that the statement was someone else\u2019s report. Van Wagoner’s biography of Rigdon earns a passing grade. Perhaps I would ultimately disagree with the thesis of the book, but I have some additional confidence that I\u2019ll learn something along the way.<\/p>\n

      But a late, fourth-hand, adversarial account is not at all the kind of thing that can be characterized as an admission \u201cby his own words\u201d\u00a0 or used to cast doubt on Rigdon\u2019s other statements, and on Joseph Smith by association. Hammond\u2019s failure to take a closer look at the source provided by Van Wagoner may have been sloppy, but promoting hearsay into Rigdon\u2019s own confession of guilt is the kind of thing a scholar must not do.<\/p>\n

      I understand that digging into sources, dealing with uncertainty, and conveying complex information concisely to readers is hard work, but it\u2019s work I\u2019m counting on the author to do so I can read a book without wondering if I\u2019ll need to spend an hour or two verifying every footnote. Quest for the New Jerusalem<\/em> is a massive work with many footnotes, of course, and since my interest was in something else I haven\u2019t read the whole thing or looked at any of the other notes, so it\u2019s quite possible I just stumbled across something that isn\u2019t representative of Hammond\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

      But the number of times it\u2019s permissible to misrepresent a source in a multivolume work is zero, and Hammond\u2019s Quest for the New Jerusalem<\/em> has failed this one-footnote review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      John Hammond\u2019s Quest for the New Jerusalem: A Mormon Generation Sagastates that Sidney Rigdon, \u201cby his own admission, \u2018made up\u2019 religious experiences in his youth,\u201d which seems like something worth looking into.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mormon-studies","category-sunday-school-lesson-doctrine-and-covenants"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40610"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40613,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40610\/revisions\/40613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}