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.
Hegseth is a wicked and despicable drunkard, but let’s be honest, Mormons were never Christians, and if people started to consider them as such, they might as well consider Muslims and Jews as Christians too. I am more surprised that Jehovah’s Witnesses are considered Christians on that list.
Speaking strictly as an ex-Mormon, I’m going to have to disagree with you there. Personal lived experience, they’re definitely Christian. They’re also a cult, and the religion is based on a pack of lies, but no bones about it; they do, in fact, believe in Jesus. They put Joseph Smith on the same level as St. Peter, but they don’t worship him.
I don’t get why people say they aren’t Christian. Every time someone tries to explain it to me, it’s a wildly different set of guidelines every time.
The traditional guideline is the Nicene Creed. I dont know if LDSers would sign up to that.
Mormons believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, that makes them Christian. Sorry that you don’t like that, but it is what it is.
This is really the core of it. If someone starts nitpicking over the other details, they’ve just joined a crowd of ~46,400 other groups all called Christians arguing in a similar way.
Also it’s understandable the source would focus on Mormons but I find Unitarian Universalists getting cut way more offensive. They’re like the care bears of religion, come on now.
We are kind of interested in joining up as a family, and it’s more about the community than any kind of doctrine.
Personally, I’d probably join a pagan/OTO thing but that might not be the best model for the kids, LOL.
One of my favorite stories about the UU, though, was that someone said they learned how to read Tarot at one of the church events as a teenager - and later became a Wiccan or pagan, I forget which. I’m picturing some of the church ladies I know/have known and thinking how they’d react to the divination stuff. Never mind later becoming a literal pagan.
I had a friend that was really involved in UU (now ordained), and one of the great things they do is sex education. Age appropriate and queer affirming, better than anything you get at public school.
The impression I get is some UU congregations lean more pagan, while some lean more Jesus, but in general they’re all willing to welcome everyone. My local one hosts atheist meetups even. The sermons are usually more focused on social justice and history than focusing on holy texts - I’ve attended just for some medieval history lectures.
Really, it seems the perfect space to get all the social connections of church without all the extra baggage. If I had kids I’d be 100% taking them every Sunday.
“And you get a planet, and you get a planet. But not you, until 1978.”
It’s fan-fic all the way down.
Bro, all of Christianity is a fan-fic.
Jesus never once sought out a literate person to write down his teachings in his lifetime. Everything we know about him was written by his fans quite a while after his death. The New Testament was cobbled together by several different writers and then attributed to the apostles.
If that ain’t fan-fic, I don’t know what is.
Comparatively, Mohammed had three scribes take down his words. If the story of Moses is to be believed, he delivered the Ten Commandments on a stone tablet with his own hands. Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon himself (or translated it himself from golden tablets if you believe that). Aleister Crowley wrote his own holy books and graded them with a system to let readers know which documents were sacred and which ones were commentary. The teachings of Buddha are similar to Jesus in that they were passed down orally for generations before they were written down, but nobody is claiming that those documents were penned by the Buddha or anyone who knew him in his lifetime.
So, as far as claimed prophets go, the story of Jesus is one of the most fan created documents of them all.
Yeah I remember learning about Islam and the story about how it’s supposed to be the untranslated word of god, directly from an angel or whatever, rather than just some shit a handful of people wrote 3 decades after it allegedly happened, and thinking that gave them a much firmer claim on the truth.
Of course they’re all bullshit, but at least they kind of address that issue in Islam
It’s all bullshit, my dude. Do you really want to go down that road?
But they also believe that anyone can become a god, which, in the eyes of others, denies the uniqueness of the divinity of Jesus.
That’s how other denominations define it though. They all fall under the sect of Christianity because they believe in and center their teachings around Jesus. Not because they have other beliefs as well.
Edit:I may have misused denomination and sect but point being there is a larger grouping of “people following Jesus and his teachings central to their religion” And dozens of smaller groupings that go about that process differently.
So does the triune god
Not really, since all three are still the one, unique god.
Poor Zoroaster, never getting recognition
Is that the only thing that matters in defining a Christian? Mormons have a whole other testament, which no other Christian denomination does.
Is it in continuity with Protestantism? Yes, but I think the addition of a whole other holy text is enough of a ruptural break from Protestantism to consider it something new
I have a Muslim friend whose mom grew up in a Mariam cult (Mary, mother of Jesus), and their household feels more Christian to me than a Mormon one does.
To be fair though, I’m pretty sure Mormons would describe me as having grown up in a Mary cult (Catholicism).
The older variants of Christianity have more books of the Bible (the Apocrypha, and others) than are recoginized by Protestants. So I’m not sure that’s enough to disqualify the Saints.
In that case, why are protestents considered Christians when most of them also have a different Biblical cannon from the Catholic Church?
There’s no easy way to do it; I consider “Christian” the umbrella term for anyone who considers Jesus to be their savior, then get more specific about type from there.
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.
That’s why there are different denominations within the sect of Christianity. It’s all Christianity because it centers on Christ and his teachings. But it’s done in a million flavors.
Edit:I may have misused denomination and sect but point being there is a larger grouping of “people following Jesus and his teachings central to their religion” And dozens of smaller groupings that go about that process differently.
Yes, but when you add a whole other testament, featuring even more teachings of Christ, than surely there’s something distinct about that theological baseline of Mormons from your average Christian
How does having more scripture that centers on Christ make them less Christian? Is it really any different than just having a bunch more recorded sermons from any teachers of Christ? It all centers on Christ, so whether they have no scripture or infinite scripture their belief and their teachings are centered on Christ, which is what makes a religion christian.
Right? I find it interesting how certain xtians are certain that other xtians are not “real” xtians. Most especially when the xtians that seem to be most certain that they are the real xtians seem more like Paulians when you look a lot closer at what they emphasize…and Paul never even met the character of Jesus from their text!
I personally find it all rather wild. BTW, I was raised as an xtian, at least nominally. Also, my parents and just about everyone I knew viewed LDS with very much side-eye.
The point is that virtually all of this stuff is made up. When people are like, bu-bu-but the Mormons say that Mormon men can have their very own planet where they are a god - I can only shrug. They worship the same guy, though, and you guys are all making unprovable claims, sooooo this sounds like a real playground “but MY dad can beat up YOUR dad!” kind of thing to those of us that reject it…
So do Muslims =]
No they don’t. Jesus is a prophet in Islam, but he’s not deified
My fault. I thought prophet fits under divinity.
Depends on denomination and sect.
So what makes Mohammad special? He is just a prophet but for some reason he has much more weight.
He’s the last one, that’s all. But still a man.
Yeah I don’t get why that point is controversial? If Mormons are Christian then why aren’t Muslims? They both had a new prophet reveal the errors of the new testament, creating a doctrinally distinct new religion.
The central figure in Islam is Muhammad. Hence, not Christian. The central figure in Mirmonism is Jesus Christ. Hence, Christian.
Different sects of the same cult all of them. Differentiating is pointless really. All clinically insane and a danger to society.
I don’t think the Quakers or the Unitarians are a danger to anyone.
Checkmate fundies! So brave tips fedora
Atheists also can be dangerous to society. What is this New Atheist revival shit? It’s fucking cringe. Go read some Terry Eagleton and come back later
What part of atheism is dangerous? They just don’t believe in a god(s).
Also, what qualifies as “New Atheist” and why is it cringe? I’m not familiar with Terry Eagleton - is he part of the New Atheists or is he some critic of it?
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.
What’s an Atheist? I’m just a normal person who grew up in a normal family, instead of a cannibalistic and/or genital mutilating cult.
Would you say that, in this moment, you are euphoric?
You don’t genuinely believe that the only people who circumcise their babies are people who believe in God, do you?
No but it’s but it is a hit factor of why it is done. Someone was religious and then says I don’t want my son looking different then me. And so on and so on.
Oh, that’s what Latter-day Saints are. Yeah, no, not Christian even by the loosest definition.