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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I'm not saying Atheism, the lack of god belief, is dangerous. I'm criticizing the position that religion is somehow the source of the world's problems.
The "New Atheist" movement of the 2000s was a reaction, on the one hand, to a genuinely problematic encroachment of Evangelical Christianity into American public life.
On the other hand, a blanket unnuanced opposition to religion as a concept, caused a lot of these ostensibly liberal atheists to be cajoled into supporting the same War on Terror being Championed by the Evangelical Christians they opposed so much.
For the New Atheist, Islam was, "the motherlode of bad ideas" and that we should be waging wars in the middle east, not because of Gog and Magog or whatever Bush was on about, but because Islam was illiberal, and that the US should impose secular liberalism in places like Iraq, by force.
New Atheism got a lot right about the ways reactionary religiosity was damaging at home, but ended up walking hand-in-hand with those same people, when it came to blindly supporting disastrous US foreign policy.
And I'm calling if cringe, because is the same millieu that birthed the sterotype of the fedora tipping le euphoric Reddit Atheist. Many of whom would themselves go on to be the exact kind of "anti-SJW" online influencers who would help meme Trump into the Whitehouse in 2016.
Eagleton is an Atheist, but is also very critical of the New Atheist movement. Both for the reasons of supporting US imperialism like I mentioned above, but also because he takes issue with the philosophical underpinnings of the movement.
Essentially, he argues that New Atheism is premised on a set of category errors, wherein they misunderstand religion as a primitive version of science, which means they misunderstand modern American Protestantism, and then apply their critiques of that misunderstood Protestantism across all religions, without actually meaningfully understanding or criticizing any of it.
He has a book about this called Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, if you're interested
It's one source, but very much not the only source. And I'm reasonably sure someone could do a root-cause analysis to show that it's not a primary one. The root cause is more "believing things without evidence" or "not recognizing when you're being conned."
I don't even think that's correct. Problems like war, social stratification, etc. Don't come down to people's wrong beliefs. They're material.
"Not recognizing when you're being conned" can't be a root problem because it begs the question, why are people conning others in the first place? What systemic factors are incentivizing that behavior?
This is my issue with 'anti-theism' as a position. It's entirely idealist and focuses entirely on people believing the wrong things, and not at all on the material factors that drive those beliefs to begin with.