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Pentagon rewrites its list of religions (again)

Pentagon rewrites its list of religions (again)

Last updated on: June 9, 2026 at 4:53 pm by Fred Clark

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Pentagon rewrites its list of religions (again) 2026-06-09T16:53:10-04:00 Fred Clark

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OK, so the United States military has chaplains. A lot of chaplains. More than 3,000 chaplains work for the various branches of the armed forces to serve the spiritual needs of those in uniform — offering counsel or comfort or conducting services appropriate to each soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, etc.

The corps of chaplains is thus, by necessity and by design, diverse and pluralistic. This is not a new or a recent development.

A stained glass window honoring the Four Chaplains.

Consider the famous story of “The Four Chaplains” who served aboard the troop transport ship the SS Dorchester in World War II. The ship, carrying some 900 American military personnel, was sunk by a German U-boat in 1942: “The chaplains helped the other soldiers board lifeboats and gave up their own life jackets when the supply ran out. The chaplains joined arms, said prayers, and sang hymns as they went down with the ship.”

Those four men were a Methodist pastor, a Catholic priest, a rabbi, and a Dutch Reformed pastor. They came from different faiths and different traditions because they were there to serve a ship full of people of different faiths and different traditions. Their diversity still could not hope to match the full diversity of the personnel they were called to serve — there were lots of people on that ship who were not Catholic, Methodist, Dutch Reformed, or Jewish. And so all of those chaplains were also prepared, as best as they were able, to minister to the spiritual needs of people from faiths and traditions other than their own.

This gets into some interestingly murky territory in terms of church and state and in terms of pluralism and particularity. The Department of Defense employs a whole bunch of clergy. They are military officers, but officers whose place and role in the chain of command is unlike that of others who share their nominal rank. The chaplains are people of faith and conviction, but also people who are willing and able to subordinate their own personal faith, convictions, or orthodoxies in service of others. Their own personal beliefs center them, but do not bound them. (I admire that.)

All of this is why the U.S. Department of Defense has long attempted to keep track of the vast religious diversity of the more than two million people now serving in the American military and to maintain a corps of chaplains capable of serving such a diverse group of service members.

That’s why the Pentagon had that list of 211 religious groups we talked about yesterday. That list served two important functions. It helped the armed forces ensure that they were maintaining a corps of chaplains that reflected, as much as possible, the diversity of the troops they were enlisted to serve. And it provided guidance to the chaplains themselves when they — as a Catholic priest, or a rabbi, or a Southern Baptist pastor — found themselves called upon to offer spiritual guidance to a soldier or a sailor from some faith or tradition far different from their own.

That latter function of the list is why it’s especially worrying that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently decided to pare the list of religions down from 211 to just 31. I don’t know how many Unitarian Universalists there are in the military. I’d guess not so many as to create an urgent demand for the armed forces to enlist a bunch of UU chaplains. But it’s still necessary for other chaplains to understand that Unitarian Universalists exist, and to be prepared to assist them appropriately should that situation arise. The same is true for all of those other less-represented faith groups recently purged from the Pentagon’s list — “Atheists, Asatru, Deists, Druids, Eckankar, Heathens, Humanists, Magick, New Age churches, Pagan, Rosicrucianism, Shaman, Spiritualists, Troth, Unitarian Universalists and various Wiccans.” That list wasn’t assembled because of “woke” or “DEI” or “political correctness.” It was compiled to include and to represent the actual religious beliefs of actual service members.

Slashing that list down to just 31 groups seems to invert the role of the chaplaincy — forcing the service members of minority religions to subordinate their particular beliefs in order to receive spiritual care instead of training chaplains to offer such care to every member appropriate to them, regardless of the chaplain’s own particular faith.

And now, in response to criticism of the new, less inclusive (which is to say, more exclusive) list, they’ve made additional changes: “Defense Department rejiggers list of recognized religions after backlash, narrows it to 30.”

The big change here was to stop classifying various traditions under the category of “Christian.” That was in response to criticism from Latter-day Saints who were dismayed to learn that their church was not classified as “Christian.” (And in response to criticism from white evangelicals and white fundamentalists who were incensed that Jehovah’s Witnesses were included as “Christian.”)

The list also no longer includes “Other Christians.” Christians who belong to denominations (or non-denominations) other than the 20 still listed are now lumped in the catch-all category of “other religions.” This is turning into something like that unhelpful filing system where the biggest category is labeled “miscellaneous.”

Of the 30 faiths in the new recognized list, 20 are Christian denominations. The remainder include Buddhists, Jews, Baha’is, Muslims, Sikhs and people in broad categories of “no religion” or “other religions.” Among the Christian denominations, there is no distinction between various Presbyterian, Lutheran or Baptist denominations, which differ significantly on theological issues.

I suppose it’s not surprising that the U.S. military still refuses to recognize that there’s more than one gigantic, uniform category of “Muslims.” And yes, as a Baptist, I find it hilarious that our unruly tradition is also treated as homogenous, as though Al Mohler and Raphael Warnock, and Paige Patterson and Tommy Douglas, and Billy Graham and Samuel Sharpe are all identical and interchangeable because they’re all Baptist pastors.

“There are definitely denominations here, Christian denominations, that are not listed,” said Gen. Steve Schaick, who served as Air Force chief of chaplains from 2018 to 2021, when asked by RNS about the newest list. He noted the speed with which the document has been “evolving” was highly unusual.

Members of Wiccan and other earth-based religions said the cuts to recognized faiths would make it far more difficult, if not impossible, for active-duty military personnel to request a day off for a religious holiday, have access to their faith’s sacred books or get permission to gather for a religious service or study. It would also make it far more difficult for military personnel to select a chaplain to provide active military personnel with pastoral care, they argued.

My guess is that a couple of different things are going on here with this stumbling change in the Department of Defense’s list — one nefarious and one merely incompetent.

The incompetent dynamic is, it looks to me, related to some new software or app or official paperwork. That’s why DoD spokesman Sean Parnell keeps talking about “codes” and “data.” The new software/database/filing system probably couldn’t handle 211 different “codes” to “code” the religious affiliations and beliefs of all two million service members, so that list had to be pared way down to just a few dozen to make the new system workable:

“This decrease in religious affiliation codes is not designed to make any claims on the legitimacy of any faith or religious belief, nor is it intended to provide a list of ‘officially approved’ religions,” Parnell said. “Rather, it is designed to allow chaplains to quickly look at the religious composition of their units and determine how they structure resources to best provide for [service members] of all faith groups.

“The Department of War places a high value on the First Amendment and the free exercise of religion. Chaplains play an instrumental role in providing spiritual care and facilitating the [service members] ability to freely exercise their religion of choice, or no religion at all. With this new change, we believe we can provide the best data to support our chaplains in that effort.”

The tone there sure sounds to me like the kind of things companies say after they’ve rolled out new software that doesn’t work as well as the older version.

But this snafu is also happening in the context of Secretary Hegseth’s “anti-DEI” crusade. The MAGA TV host has repeatedly vowed to stamp out “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from the military. That means, of course, that he is determined to impose conformity, inequity, and exclusion — something this reduction in the Pentagon’s list of religions seems designed and intended to do.

The exclusion of 180 religious groups is a feature, not a bug. The weird insistence that “Baptist” and “Jewish” and “Presbyterian” are indistinctly homogenous categories without any internal diversity is a feature, not a bug. The hardship it creates for those Wiccan soldiers is deliberate.

None of this will actually help or equip chaplains to provide spiritual care or help service members “to freely exercise their religion of choice.” And that, too, is deliberate, intentional, and by design.

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