Bruce D. Porter

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Bruce Douglas Porter (born September 18, 1952) has been a general authority of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) since 1995. He is a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy.

Porter was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and later began attending Brigham Young University as a recipient of a David O. McKay scholarship. In 1970 he interrupted his studies to serve as a full-time missionary for the LDS Church in the Germany Central Mission, based in Düsseldorf, West Germany. Porter served in Germany under two mission presidents who were both native Germans holding United States citizenship, Walter H. Kindt and Rudolf K. Poecker. They served as consecutive mission presidents and had served as missionary companions in the immediate postwar period in what became communist East Germany. Kindt and Poecker had both been arrested a number of times by Soviet authorities because of their missionary activities, and Poecker used his time in Russian incarceration to learn the Russian language and tried to teach the doctrines of the church to any Russians he met. The stories that these two men frequently related to the missionaries under their supervision inspired Porter to change his university major to Russian Affairs.

Before attending Harvard University, where he received a doctoral degree in political science emphasizing Russian affairs, Porter spent a summer in the Soviet Unionas an exchange student. He has worked for the federal government on the United States Senate Armed Services Committee and as executive director of the U.S. Board for International Broadcasting. He also worked for two years for the Northrop Corporation. Before accepting a professorship at Brigham Young University (BYU), he served for three years (1990–93) as the Bradley Senior Research Fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. During this period he authored War and the Rise of the State (Simon and Schuster, 1994.)

Porter continued his service in the LDS Church. In the 1980s, while a resident in Munich, West Germany, where he worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as a foreign policy specialist, Porter served as the president of the church's Munich Servicemen's Branch. He later served as a bishop in Virginia, and after he accepting a position of Associate Professor, was called to serve as a counselor to Noel B. Reynolds in a student stake presidency at BYU.

Porter was initially called to the Second Quorum of the Seventy in 1995, but in 2003 was transferred to the First Quorum of the Seventy. Since being called as a general authority, he served in the presidencies of the church's Europe East and Salt Lake City areas. Since 2004, he has been Executive Director of the church's Correlation Department, and since 2008, he assists in coordinating the Middle East/Africa North areas of the church, administered from the church's headquarters in Salt Lake City.

Porter is the author of several books dealing with politics and religion:

USSR in Third World Conflicts: Soviet Arms and Diplomacy in Local Wars 1945-1980 (1984)

Red Armies in Crisis (Csis Significant Issues Series) (1992)

War and the Rise of the State (1994)

The King of Kings (2007)

 

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