I see that the Boston Globe, as part of their campaign against Mitt Romney, is trying to paint a sinister portrait of the LDS Church working “hand-in-hand” with the Selective Service Board on draft deferments for LDS young men serving full-time missions during the Vietnam era.

What a load of hooey.

Not that the deferments didn’t happen; they did. I should know: I had one. My draft number (in the 1972 spring draft) was 4, an absolute guarantee that I would be drafted after my 2-year (fixed-term) mission was over. The only person on my dorm floor with a draft number under 100 was Glade Roper (now a judge in Texas), who spent the next few weeks calling me “Sarge”. I made my plans to enlist in the Navy when I came back, since I would no longer have a ministerial deferment at that point. As it turned out, I didn’t have to; the draft ended several months before I returned from Central America.

But this is why the Boston Globe story is a load of hooey: during the Vietnam Era, Mormons were almost certainly over-represented in the US Armed Forces. At a time when many universities were banning or discouraging military recruiters and eliminating their ROTC programs, BYU welcomed all such recruiters and had large and active Army and Air Force ROTC programs. Likewise, anti-war protests during the Vietnam Era were relatively rare and small at BYU. US-based Mormons as a rule were at this time fiercely patriotic, pro-military, and generally anti-Communist; they probably questioned the Vietnam War less than any other major religious group in the US, even when the LDS leaders themselves had long-standing concerns and issues.

By and large, Mormons were not draft-dodgers; instead they were volunteers. Yes, ministerial deferments were available for the standard two-year period of serving a mission, but many LDS young men turned around after those two years and either enlisted or were drafted. In fact, the only person I personally knew of who died in Vietnam was Paul Rose, the older brother of an LDS acquaintance in a neighboring ward (LDS congregation) in La Mesa, California.

I know nothing of Mitt Romney’s personal history with the draft and military service; as I’ve noted before, he’s not my choice for President, and I feel no particular need to defend him. But the Boston Globe’s insinuation that Latter-day Saints were collectively a bunch of draft dodgers is just silly.  ..bruce..

I received a very thoughtful and civil e-mail from a reader of this blog, who told of his own brief experiences investigating the LDS Church and in particular of some issues he had with the concepts of temples, temple recommends, and temple ceremonies — and how restrictive and exclusionary LDS practices and doctrine regarding the temple appeared to be. He was somewhat encouraged by my posting on “Who gets saved?” but still had additional questions. I wrote him an e-mail reply late last night; I’m going to use a slightly edited and extended version of my response for this post.

The temples detailed in the Bible (Moses’s Tabernacle, Solomon’s Temple, and what is generally called Herod’s Temple [New Testament era]) all had restrictions on who could enter where and when — and restrictions far more strict than the LDS Church has for its temples. Let me focus on Herod’s Temple for now.

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Richard Bushman is probably the great LDS historian of our generation, much as Leonard Arrington was of his. Under the auspices of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Bushman sat down with a group of journalists to try to explain, from a historical perspective, LDS interaction with society and politics. His comments, as always, are insightful, informed, and honest. A sample:

Joseph Smith was nominated as a protest candidate in February of 1844. Like other protest candidates, he began to warm to his work and got quite excited about it. He may have dreamed for a moment that through some strange concatenation of events, he would get elected. Every candidate has to dream such things.

His involvement in politics was manifested in a political platform of which he was very proud. He would bring it out whenever he had visitors and read from it. It is an interesting document because it represents a man whose world had been his own people, whose own project had been to create a kingdom of God, and who now had to turn his mind to politics.

He began by citing the Declaration of Independence, the famous passages about all men being equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, which of course could be a lead-in to religious rights. But he didn’t use it that way. Instead, in the very next sentence, he talked about the obvious contradiction: “Some two or three million people are held as slaves for life because the spirit in them is covered with a darker skin than ours.” His platform called for the elimination of slavery, proposing that the funds from the sale of Western lands, a major source of revenue along with the tariff in those days, be devoted to purchasing slaves from their masters in order to avoid the conflict that would otherwise ensue.

Josiah Quincy, soon to be mayor of Boston, visited Joseph Smith in the spring of 1844 when this platform was in circulation. Much later, Quincy wrote about that visit, saying that Joseph Smith’s proposal for ending slavery resembled one that Emerson made 11 years later in 1855.

As Quincy put it, writing retrospectively in the 1880s, “We, who can look back upon the terrible cost of the fratricidal war which put an end to slavery, now say that such a solution of the difficulty” – Joseph Smith’s and Emerson’s – “would have been worthy a Christian statesman. But if the retired scholar was in advance of his time when he advocated this disposition of the public property in 1855, what shall I say of the political and religious leader who had committed himself, in print, as well as in conversation, to the same course in 1844?”

I cite this example to illustrate the radical tone of Joseph Smith’s political thought, which seemed to carry over from his religious radicalism. It extended to prison reform and better treatment of seamen, big issues in the 1840s and 1850s. Smith seemed to identify with all of the underdogs in society. I think that was why he thought he might get elected – because the little people, the beat-up people, would rise and select him.

Read the whole thing. Hat tip to Meridian Magazine. ..bruce..

[Inside joke alert -- and weak joke/pun alert -- most of these will only be funny to a Mormon, and not always then.]

My wife just forwarded this from an e-mail making the rounds in LDS circles:

Top 10 Reasons to vote for Mitt Romney

10. We can do away with these dumb secret ballots and manifest our support
of the candidate “by the usual sign.” And we can get rid of costly
recounts by simply saying “opposed, if there be any.”

9. The Secret Service could be renamed the Sacred Service and would have
dark suits, sunglasses, ear pieces, and CTR rings.

8. The vice president could be replaced by two counselors

7. At inaugural balls, everyone would have to dance a Book of Mormon
apart.

6. NASA could commission a satellite to “hie to Kolob.”

5. All official government prayers could include the phrase “that we all
can get home safely.”

4. The President could not only explain things in Layman’s terms, but also
Lemuel’s terms.

3. At his inauguration he would swear on the Bible “as far as it is
translated correctly.”

2. All foreign policy statements would begin with “We Believe.”.

1. The presidential limo would be a black Suburban with a vanity plate:
“RULDS2?”

[Giuliani is still my candidate, though Fred Thompson looks pretty good, too.  ..bruce..]

[UPDATED 02/27/08: I was startled today to find that Jeff Lindsay has written a poem, "Flatland", inspired in part by this paper. And a wonderful poem it is; go read it.]

I have a half-finished post on the nature of eternity, but I realized that I really need to address some foundational issues with regard to it. And since I co-authored a paper on the subject (”Some thoughts on higher-dimensional realms”, Robert P. Burton and Bruce F. Webster, BYU Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Spring 1980), p. 281 ff.) nearly 30 years ago, I thought I’d simply repost the paper, both in PDF format (as transcribed — not scanned — by BYU Studies) and as text that you can read here.

The gist of the paper is that there is evidence in the scriptures as well as in LDS sources (historical and doctrinal) that there are macroscopic physical dimensions outside of the 3D+time continuum in which we appear to reside. I did this as a University Scholar project my senior year (1977-78) at Brigham Young University; it was the first published writing I ever did (though certainly not the last), and so it’s a bit more awkward and stilted than I would write today. But it still brings together the sources that led me to this conclusion three decades ago, and my studies since then have only reinforced them.

The article itself appears after the jump. I have inserted some comments within brackets ([...]) when appropriate. Footnotes are also indicated with brackets ([1], etc.) and are given at the end of the article. Finally, I have noticed some typographical errors in the PDF transcription of the article (there are sadly quite a few) and have corrected these silently.

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