The U.S. Military Just Erased 180 Faiths From Existence

There is a soldier somewhere right now – Wiccan, Druid, Humanist, Asatru – who will walk into a military chaplain's office in crisis and be told, in effect, that their faith does not exist. Not because the chaplain is cruel, but because the United States government has officially decided that it doesn't.

That is the direct consequence of the actions that have been taken by the Pentagon in recent days.

What the Department of Defense (aka the Department of War) Did

A memorandum signed by Anthony Tata, Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, reduced the military's recognized religious affiliations from more than 200 to just 31. Gone from the list: Atheism, Asatru, Deism, Druidry, Humanism, Paganism, Rosicrucianism, Shamanism, Spiritualism, Unitarianism, Wicca, and over 150 other traditions. What remains is a list dominated by Christian denominations, alongside Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism.

If your faith does not appear on this list, as far as the military is concerned, it no longer exists:

• Agnostic (AN)
• Baha'i faith (BH)
• Buddhism (BU)
• Christian - Assemblies of God (AG)
• Christian - Baptist (BA)
• Christian - Brethren (BR)
• Christian - Catholic (CA)
• Christian - Church of Christ (CC)
• Christian - Church of God (CG)
• Christian - Church of the Nazarene (CN)
• Christian - Episcopal/Anglican (EA)
• Christian - Evangelical (EV)
• Christian - Jehovah's Witnesses (JW)
• Christian - Lutheran (LU)
• Christian - Methodist (ME)
• Christian - Non Denominational (ND)
• Christian - Orthodox (OX)
• Christian - Other (CO)
• Christian - Pentecostal (PE)
• Christian - Presbyterian (PR)
• Christian - Quaker (QU)
• Christian - Reformed (RE)
• Christian - Scientist (SC)
• Christian - Seventh Day Adventist (SA)
• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (CJ)
• Hindu (HI)
• Islam (Muslim) (IS)
• Judaism (Jewish) (JU)
• No Religion (NR)
• Other Religions (OR)
• Sikh (SI)

The official justification, offered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, is administrative tidiness. The old system had "ballooned to well over 200 faith codes – it was impractical and unusable." He noted that 82% of religiously-identifying service members use only six codes. 

That is one way to read the numbers. Another is this: the government just looked at the spiritual lives of tens of thousands of service members, decided they were statistically inconvenient, and deleted them.

Did your belief system make the cut?

What Gets Lost

These codes are not bureaucratic trivia. They tell chaplains what a service member needs – seasonal observances, ritual objects, dietary practices, the specific contours of a tradition. When a faith disappears from the list, the institutional machinery for caring for its practitioners disappears with it. Service members become "other." Their spiritual needs become someone else's problem... or no one's.

A decorated Army veteran who served three tours in Iraq – ordained as a Wiccan cleric, an Asatru Gothi, and a Druid – knows exactly what that looks like. During his first deployment, struggling with the weight of combat, he sought out a chaplain. For eight months, that chaplain used every session to evangelize and try to convert him. It took until 2007 – years later – before "Pagan" could appear on his dog tags at all.

When he heard about the new memo, he told Military.com, it rekindled the anger he felt when he was "actively discriminated against."

A former Army chaplain, speaking anonymously, called the new list a violation of the Constitution he swore to uphold. "The First Amendment is the free exercise of religion for everybody," he said. "All it takes is the chaplain to say, 'Well, I don't see them on this list. I don't know how I can help you.' And that's it. That's not the American way."

The Pattern Behind the Decision

This did not happen in a vacuum. It follows Pentagon prayer services led by evangelical speakers who have treated the military as a mission field, public statements from Hegseth invoking Scripture to describe military operations, and a December 2025 announcement that he intended to make "the Chaplain Corps great again" through a "top-down cultural shift." It follows a broader administrative posture that critics have described, without much ambiguity, as the advancement of Christian nationalism through military institutions.

Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation – whose 100,000-plus clients are roughly 95% Christian – did not mince words. The new list, he said, is a "middle finger to the United States Constitution's separation of church and state." He pointed to a comparison that is hard to shake: the Department of Veterans Affairs recognizes more than 220 belief systems and offers over 80 emblem options for headstones.

"So, if you're dead, you'll get your emblem," Weinstein said. "But if you're alive, you can't get it on your dog tags."

The ULC has long held that Pagan and Wiccan traditions deserve the same respect as any other faith. So has the Constitution. What's striking about this moment is that the government isn't even pretending the decision is religiously neutral – it's framed as common sense, as efficiency, as a return to something simpler. That framing is worth examining closely, because what it calls simple, others call exclusion.

The tensions inside the military chaplaincy are not new. But erasing 180 faith traditions from official recognition is a different order of act. It takes a living, practiced spiritual identity and tells the person who holds it: for the purposes of this institution, you don't exist.

What Do You Think?

 Does the government have an obligation to recognize every faith tradition practiced by its service members – or is some administrative limit acceptable? At what point does streamlining become exclusion? And what does it tell us about a country's values when it will engrave your religion on your headstone, but not acknowledge it while you're alive?