Last week, the Pentagon quietly erased 180 religions.
Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense just cut the military’s list of recognized faiths from 211 down to 31. Twenty-two of those 31 are Christian denominations. Judaism? One box. Islam? One box. Unitarian Universalists, Neo-Pagans, and a whole lot of others? Filed under “Other.”
They’re calling it “administrative.” But here’s what it actually does: it makes minority faiths in the military even harder to see — and even harder to support.
A chaplain’s whole job is to make sure every service member can practice their faith. Every single one. If a chaplain can’t serve someone directly, they’re supposed to find someone who can. You can’t do that for people the system pretends don’t exist.
And it’s sloppy. The week before, a draft of this same list decided the LDS church wasn’t Christian — good luck settling that one in a Pentagon spreadsheet.
One former Army chaplain said it best: “The First Amendment is the free exercise of religion for everybody. That’s what I was buying into.” The new list, he said, is “an excuse for the failure to provide the free exercise of religion for all people.”
Religious freedom isn’t freedom if it only counts the religions in charge.
