For nearly a decade, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been engaged in a top-down rebrand meant partly to solidify its focus and bona fides as a Christian religion.
The U.S. Department of Defense, led by conservative evangelical Pete Hegseth, appears unconvinced.
On Friday, spokesperson Sean Parnell confirmed on social media a report that the department had trimmed its list of recognized religious affiliations, used by its chaplains, from more than 200 to 31.
The Latter-day Saint faith was among those to make the cut. But there was a catch.
The list denotes 20 faiths as Christian, including Catholic, Orthodox Christian, Baptist and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Not, however, the Utah-based faith.
Asked by The Salt Lake Tribune if this omission was intentional, a member of the department’s press team pointed to the statement posted by Parnell.
The Office of the Secretary of War is announcing a significant change to the Department’s categorization of religious affiliation. In a long overdue move, we reduced the list from over 200 unmanageable categories to 31. With this move, we are returning to the original intent of… https://t.co/dgHX5ytzjJ pic.twitter.com/eho537O08J — Sean Parnell (@SeanParnellASW) June 5, 2026
“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,” he wrote. “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 warfighters of all faith groups.”
However, an accompanying video by Hegseth seemed to suggest the change wasn’t entirely one of streamlining bureaucracy.
“In previous administrations, our Chaplain Corps was infected by political correctness and secular humanism,” he said. “...Faith and virtue were traded for self-help and self-care. We started correcting that drift [in December], and today we’re going further.”
Asked if the church planned to respond, a spokesperson for the faith pointed to the FAQ portion of its website. It reads: “Latter-day Saints believe God sent his son, Jesus Christ, to save all mankind from death and their individual sins. Jesus Christ is central to the lives of church members.”
Utah Sens. Mike Lee and John Curtis, both members of the church, took to social media Saturday to condemn the seeming snub, with Curtis stating he is “working now to ensure a correction is made.”
Among those eliminated were Unitarian Universalists, various Wiccans, deists, atheists and others, according to Military.com, the first to report the news.
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This is the way. You'll see some people get red-faced over the "Nicene creed" and so on.
Bringing up the Nicene creed is not really quite the flex that some xtians seemingly think that it is, though. If anything it only serves to highlight all the problems of trying to define something like "True Christianity".
First of all, it's clear the fractures were coming very early. Also, they apparently had to vote on what is alleged to be revealed holy scriptures, and what they mean.
This is all rather problematic. You'd think a divine creature(s) would be able to construct a way to know what is absolutely, without question and without debate, what is the real, unaltered true original texts (something like a digital signature for example) and how to interpret it.
We definitely do not have that. Instead we have endless centuries of scribblings from apologists, lots of violence and schisms and declarations of heresy and apostasy.
It's also worth noting that the Emperor was looking over their shoulders as they voted, and expressed a firm opinion as to which way the vote should go.
And as for knowing what the true texts are, early Christians just didn't engage with that notion in the same way as modern people do, when we use textual criticism and other techniques. It was known that sacred texts and traditions would drift over time (Islam includes a critique of earlier monotheistic religions in that regard), but the very early churches recognized a large number of holy books (everyone and their dog who had any connection to Jesus had a gospel attributed to them, and there were lots of other oddball works like the Shepherd of Hermas), and only much later was there an effort to establish a baseline set of canonical works-- which largely meant excluding anything that might support the Gnostics or might not agree with the authority of the Church or the notion of the Trinity.