Pentagon officials reversed course on Monday and announced an update to a list of officially recognized religions that service members use to define their faith practices on their personnel records after Mormon lawmakers led by a top ally of Donald Trump raised hell over the weekend.
The Department of Defense announced the new, shortened list of recognized religious denominations on Friday after stating earlier this year that the system had become unwieldy and overly analytical, with many listed denominations not used by service members at all. The new list contains just 31 recognized religious denominations, down from about 200.
Mormon lawmakers were some of the first to call out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the move, as the new list contained a notable snub: The Church of Latter-Day Saints, the proper name for the Mormon church, was listed as one of the non-Christian denominations on the list.
Mormonism is a branch of protestant Christianity founded in the 1820s and 1830s by Joseph Smith and his followers in New York State, before the movement later resettled in Utah. It is the only major recognized branch of Christianity with roots in the United States.
Sen. Mike Lee, Utah’s senior senator and a close Trump ally, led the charge on Friday as members of the LDS church spoke out against the change made to the Pentagon’s recognized denominations list.
open image in gallery“As of two days ago, the Pentagon recognizes every Christian faith in America as Christian,” Lee posted on X. He added in a video message: “[I]t’s also just repugnant to any sense of decency, any sense of our common heritage and our common belief that the government needs to not weigh in on doctrinal disputes between various religious denominations.”
Other lawmakers followed Lee’s lead, including Utah’s junior senator, John Curtis.
Sensing the rare display of anger from typically MAGA-aligned circles, the Pentagon announced a U-turn on Monday and referred to the list announced on Friday as merely a “proposal”. A post on X was accompanied by a photo displayin the Defense Department’s latest attempt at pleasing all sides: A simplified version of the list which no longer groups labels multiple denominations as “Christian”, while still combining numerous faiths into an “evangelical Christian” umbrella. The Church of Latter-Day Saints is not labeled “Christian” on the latest list.
“Last week, a proposed list of simplified faith codes was released to the media. The Pentagon list included redundant and unnecessary labeling, and the mistake has been fixed. The goal of this effort is to simplify a previously out-of-control “belief” coding system that had ballooned to over 200 codes,” read the X post.
“In order to clarify the work of chaplains, and simplify the work of commanders, the Pentagon has consolidated and simplified the list to roughly thirty codes — using the previously used labels for faiths,” the statement continued. “The Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks.”
open image in galleryThe change appeared to satisfy Lee, who tweeted in response that he was “grateful” to Hegseth for the quick update.
Other denominations remaining on the list include agnostic and “no religion”, which excludes the specific label of “atheist”. Nonbelieving Americans saw that code eliminated along with other less-common codes including Wiccan, Paganism, Humanist and Native American faiths.
Hegseth’s consolidation of religious denomination codes is seen by his critics on the left as part of a larger agenda to spread a Christian nationalist viewpoint at the Pentagon. Counting the Church of Latter-Day Saints, 21 of the religious denominations on the Pentagon’s newest list are Christian religious faiths.
open image in galleryHis remarks to service members and the media often center Bible verses (both real and fake) and the Defense secretary has also promoted such imagery in social media posts from the Pentagon’s various accounts. At a convention of Christian broadcasters in February, he remarked onstage: “there’s a direct through line from the Old and New Testament Christian gospels to the development of Western civilization and the United States of America.” A self-identified Christian nationalist preacher, Douglas Wilson, was invited to preach at a Pentagon prayer service in February. Those services began under Hegseth’s term, in May of 2025.
In December, days before the U.S. launched a military strike on Venezuela and only a few weeks before the president launched a months-long war with Iran, the Defense chief also had evangelist Franklin Graham at the Pentagon, where he preached that the Christian God was a “God of War”.
“Kill them, both man, woman, infant, nursing child, ox, sheep, camel, and donkey,” Graham quoted from the Bible, according to the Christian Science Monitor. For those who don’t believe in a vengeful God, “Well,” he warned, “you’d better believe in him.”