Sidney Rigdon
Sidney Rigdon: A Portrait of Religious Excess
Richard S. Van Wagoner
In the late 1820s a fiery young minister in western Ohio converted nearly one thousand proselytes to the Reformed Baptist Movement. As these schismatics organized themselves into the new Disciples of Christ church, the Reverend Sidney Rigdon was already aligning himself with another, more radical movement, the Latter-day Saints, where he quickly became the LDS prophet’s principal advisor and spokesman. He served Joseph Smith loyally for the next fourteen years, even through a brief spat over the prophet’s romantic interest in his teenage daughter.
Next to Smith, Rigdon was the most influential early Mormon. He imported Reformed Baptist teachings into Latter-day Saint theology, wrote the canonized Lectures on Faith, championed communalism and isolationism, and delivered many of the most significant early sermons, including the famous Salt Sermon and the Kirtland Temple dedicatory address.
Following Smith’s death, Rigdon parted company with Brigham Young to lead his own group of some five hundred secessionists Mormons in Pennsylvania. Rigdon’s following gradually dwindled, as the one-time orator took to wandering the streets, taunting indifferent passersby with God’s word. He was later recruited by another Mormon faction. Although he refused to meet with them, he agreed to be their prophet and send revelations by mail. Before long he had directed them to settle far-off Iowa and Manitoba, among other things. At his death, his followers numbered in the hundreds, and today they number about ten thousand, mostly in Pennsylvania.
“Rigdon is a biographer’s dream,” writes Richard Van Wagoner. Intellectually gifted, manic-depressive, an eloquent orator and social innovator but a chronic indigent, Rigdon aspired to altruism but demanded advantage and deference. When he lost prominence, his early attainments were virtually written out of the historical record.
Correcting this void, Van Wagoner has woven the psychology of religious incontinence into the larger fabric of social history. In doing so, he reminds readers of the significance of this nearly-forgotten founding member of the LDS First Presidency. Nearly ten million members in over one hundred churches trace their heritage to Joseph Smith. Many are unaware of the importance of Rigdon’s contributions to their inherited theology.
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Richard S. Van Wagoner was the author of Mormon Polygamy: A History (1985, 1989), Lehi: Portraits of a Utah Town (1990), Sidney Rigdon: A Portrait of Religious Excess (1994), Pioneering Lehi City: A 150-Year Pictorial History (2002), editor of The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young, five volumes (2010), and coauthor of A Book of Mormons (1982). He published articles in BYU Studies, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Sunstone, Utah Historical Quarterly, and Utah Holiday. He received writing awards from the Dialogue Foundation, the John Whitmer Historical Association, the Mormon History Association, and the Utah State Historical Society. He earned an M.S. degree from Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah) in 1970. Trained as a clinical audiologist, he owned and operated Mountain West Hearing Center in Salt Lake City. He was a lifelong resident of Lehi, Utah; a founding member of the Lehi Historical Preservation Commission; and served as Lehi City’s Historical Archivist. He was a co-founder, a member of the Board of Directors, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of Signature Books (Salt Lake City).
History
ISBN: 978-1-56085-197-4
