By Decree, 180 Faiths Erased: Hegseth’s Pentagon Purge and the Constitution It Tramples
A single Pentagon memorandum stripped recognition from atheists, pagans, Wiccans, humanists, Druids, and scores of minority traditions worn by Americans in uniform. What officials call “streamlining” is what the First Amendment was written to prevent — and what the President of the United States has chosen to defend.
On May 20, 2026, a memorandum signed by Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Anthony Tata — and issued at the direction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — quietly stripped roughly 180 faiths from the Pentagon’s official list of recognized religious affiliations. First reported by Military.com and made public on June 4, the directive collapses a 211-entry roster that had stood since 2017 down to just 31 codes — the majority of them Christian denominations. Erased, by administrative fiat, were Atheists, Deists, Druids, Heathens, Humanists, Pagans, Wiccans, Spiritualists, Unitarian Universalists, and dozens of other belief systems that American troops carry into battle.
The Pentagon’s framing is bureaucratic. Hegseth has said the previous system had “ballooned” to over 200 codes and was “impractical and unusable.” Press secretary Sean Parnell described the cut as a “long overdue move.” That framing collapses the moment you set it beside what Hegseth has actually built at the Pentagon over the past year: monthly Christian worship services broadcast from the building’s auditorium, public prayers asking God for “every round to find its mark against the enemies of righteousness,” a chaplain corps reform announced under the slogan of making it “great again,” and a Defense Secretary who routinely invokes scripture to explain American war-making.
This is not data hygiene. It is the codification of a religious hierarchy inside the most powerful military on Earth.
1. The Memo and What It Erases
The 2017 list, expanded under the first Trump administration, recognized approximately 211 distinct faiths and belief systems — an acknowledgment, hard-won over decades, that the American servicemember is not monolithic. The 2026 list contains 31. Twenty-two of those 31 categories are different Christian denominations. The remainder include Bahá’í, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, agnostic, and the catch-all categories of “no religion” and “other religion.”
Removed are the traditions that have long required the most active institutional protection precisely because they are minorities: Atheists, Deists, Druids, Humanists, Magick practitioners, New Age churches, Pagans, Shamans, Spiritualists, and Unitarian Universalists, among others. These are not exotic curiosities. They are the recorded faiths of men and women who have signed contracts to die for the United States.
The practical mechanism matters. A service member’s recorded faith code determines which chaplain can be assigned, what religious accommodations are tracked, what end-of-life rites are documented, and whether the institution acknowledges the existence of their belief at all. As Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, put it after obtaining the memo, the change is “a direct hit on the Constitution’s First Amendment.”
“Reducing the number of religious faiths from hundreds down to 31 is another absolute, clear, filthy and disgusting, unconstitutional, immoral and unethical attempt to force only the approved solution.”
— Mikey Weinstein, MRFF Founder & Retired Air Force Officer
Weinstein, himself an Air Force Academy graduate, says his organization is “very seriously considering” filing a federal class action suit on behalf of affected service members. A military chaplain endorser quoted by his foundation described the practical reality bluntly: a chaplain glances at the list, doesn’t see the soldier’s faith, and tells them to go find help off the installation. That, the chaplain said, is not the American way.
2. The Mormon Episode — A Glimpse of Selective Accountability
The initial version of the new list, released to media on June 6, did something that even MAGA Republicans could not abide: it categorized The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as something other than Christian. The backlash was instant and bipartisan in tone — though it came from Hegseth’s own coalition. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a practicing Mormon and Trump ally, called the move “repugnant” in a video posted to X, demanding the Pentagon “tear down that wall” and reverse course. Rep. Mike Kennedy (R-Utah) and Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) joined the protest.
Within roughly 48 hours, after Lee spoke with President Trump by phone, the Pentagon revised the list, this time refusing to specify which denominations fell under “Christian” at all. A Pentagon social-media post framed the rapid reversal as “redundant and unnecessary labeling” that had been “fixed.”
The lesson is the one progressives have been warning of for two years: the Hegseth Pentagon will respond to political pressure when it comes from inside the Republican coalition and the President’s personal phone line. It will not respond — and to date, has not responded — to the constitutional concerns of atheist soldiers, Wiccan sailors, pagan Marines, or humanist airmen, because they hold no comparable political leverage. The Mormon walkback was not a vindication of the First Amendment. It was a demonstration of who, in this administration, counts as a real American.
3. The Constitution at the Pentagon Door
The First Amendment contains two religion clauses that work in tandem: the government may neither establish religion nor prohibit its free exercise. The military chaplaincy has long existed at the seam between them — courts have permitted government-funded chaplains precisely because the alternative, denying servicemembers far from home the ability to practice their faith, would itself violate free exercise. The constitutional bargain only holds, however, if the chaplaincy serves all faiths.
Retired Lt. Col. Rachel E. VanLandingham, former chief international law adviser at U.S. Central Command, has been one of the most consistent legal voices warning that Hegseth is dismantling that bargain. In a June 10 opinion piece, she argued that the new list strips full freedom of religion from those service members whose beliefs no longer appear on it. “It is dangerous to our military,” she told the Christian Science Monitor of Hegseth’s broader pattern earlier this spring. A Pentagon attorney who left the building in April described Hegseth’s Christian prayer events as “incredibly problematic” under the Establishment Clause.
The legal analysis is not exotic. A government that publishes an official list of which faiths exist — and which do not — has placed its thumb on the scale of religious belief. The administration’s stated justification (data management) cannot survive even cursory scrutiny: the previous list contained codes for “no religion” and “other,” meaning the bureaucratic problem Hegseth claims to be solving had already been solved.
Hegseth has hosted monthly Christian worship services in the Pentagon auditorium, livestreamed on the building’s internal network, featuring his own pastor from Tennessee. A current Pentagon attorney called it a clear Establishment Clause violation.
At a June service held during the Iran conflict, Hegseth recited a prayer asking that “every round find its mark” against “the enemies of righteousness” — language fusing American military operations with religious holy war.
In December 2025 Hegseth announced his intention to “make the Chaplain Corps great again,” framing a top-down cultural shift in religious priorities — separate from but feeding into the faith-code purge.
Hegseth has also ordered that military chaplains wear religious insignia rather than rank on their uniforms — a symbolic shift that elevates sectarian identity over military hierarchy inside the chain of command.
4. What This Does to the Force
The cliché holds that there are no atheists in foxholes. It has always been wrong — there are, and there have always been, and many of them have died for the country. What is true is that men and women who deploy to dangerous places, far from their families and traditions, need the institution to which they have given their bodies to acknowledge that their inner lives exist. Hegseth’s directive tells a Wiccan Marine, a humanist airman, a pagan soldier, a Druid sailor: your belief is not real enough for the United States Department of Defense to record.
The recruiting consequences are direct. The Army has spent the past several years struggling to meet enlistment goals, and military researchers have long understood that the chaplaincy functions as what one scholar called a “mediating structure” — lowering the barrier to service for religious minorities by signaling that their faith will be respected in uniform. Hegseth has now sent the opposite signal. The pluralistic country he is asking young people to defend will not, while they defend it, treat their family’s faith as fully real.
The morale consequences are subtler but more corrosive. Unit cohesion depends on mutual respect inside the smallest team. When a Defense Secretary stages official prayer services in the name of one religion, when 22 of 31 recognized faiths are Christian denominations, when the only chaplain that can be assigned to a non-Christian soldier may be unfamiliar with that soldier’s tradition, the message reaches every barracks. There is a preferred faith. There is a tolerated faith. There is, now, an unrecognized faith.
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5. The Signal Abroad
Adversaries study what we do, not what we say. For two decades, American officials have argued — sometimes credibly, sometimes not — that the United States represents a pluralistic alternative to theocratic regimes. That argument has been used to recruit allies, to justify wars, to distinguish the American military from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard or the Saudi religious police. It is now significantly harder to make.
A Defense Secretary who declares from the Pentagon podium that Americans should pray “in the name of Jesus Christ,” who publishes a list of approved faiths in which the vast majority are Christian, and who fuses scripture with combat operations does not draw a sharp line between the United States and the regimes American troops are sent to confront. He blurs it. The Interfaith America organization, in its analysis of the directive, observed that prioritizing one interpretation of a religious faith over others undermines the service of non-Christians and stokes divisions even within Christianity itself. Our enemies will not need to invent propaganda. They will only need to quote the memo.
“Government officials need not leave their right to be religious at the front door. But it is dangerous to our military.”
— Lt. Col. Rachel E. VanLandingham (Ret.), Former Chief International Law Adviser, U.S. Central Command
6. The Leadership Question
None of this is happening in a vacuum, and none of it is the work of Pete Hegseth alone. Hegseth serves at the pleasure of President Donald Trump. He was appointed by Trump over the explicit warnings of veterans in both parties. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), the Army Black Hawk pilot who lost both legs over Iraq and sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called Hegseth “an incompetent fool and misogynist” earlier this spring. She had warned during his confirmation that he was “dangerously unqualified” to manage an $830 billion enterprise. The President installed him anyway, and continues to back him as Hegseth uses the office to advance what critics across the ideological spectrum have called a Christian nationalist agenda.
The faith-code purge is, in this sense, a leadership choice that runs all the way up. The President of the United States has selected a Defense Secretary whose project is the religious reshaping of the armed forces. He has retained him through scandal after scandal. He intervenes by telephone — as in the Mormon episode — only when the political cost to his own coalition becomes uncomfortable. The constitutional cost to atheist, pagan, humanist, and Wiccan service members has produced, from the President personally, no public response at all.
The 25th Amendment and the Question of Fitness
Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, provides that the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet — or “such other body as Congress may by law provide” — may transmit to Congress a written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office. Power passes immediately to the Vice President as Acting President. The provision exists for precisely the moments when ordinary politics cannot reach a President whose conduct or capacity has placed the country at risk.
The current effort. On April 14, 2026, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced legislation with 50 Democratic co-sponsors to establish an independent Commission on Presidential Capacity — the “other body” the amendment contemplates. Raskin had earlier requested that the White House physician conduct a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment of the President following what he described as a pattern of incoherent and threatening public statements. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.), and Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) have all publicly called for the amendment’s invocation. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) described the President as a “dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual.”
The argument the religion purge contributes. Standing alone, the faith-code memo is a policy choice, not a medical event. But the 25th Amendment is not, contrary to common confusion, limited to acute incapacity. Its framers contemplated patterns of conduct that render a President unable to faithfully execute the office — and a President who installs and protects a Defense Secretary actively shrinking the constitutional rights of the troops the President commands is, at minimum, evidence of a Commander-in-Chief who has either lost the will or the capacity to defend the Constitution he swore to uphold. The Iran threats Raskin cited, the abandonment of pluralism inside the Pentagon, and the President’s failure to intervene until his own political coalition demanded it form, together, a record.
The Practical Barriers
An honest accounting requires acknowledging that the path is steep. The 25th Amendment requires the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to act — a Cabinet of the President’s own choosing. Congress is Republican-controlled in both chambers. Raskin’s commission bill, by his own staff’s acknowledgment, faces a near-certain veto if it ever cleared both houses. Republicans have already moved to dismiss the effort as political theater.
Why the Barriers Do Not Resolve the Question
The fact that a constitutional remedy is politically obstructed does not erase the constitutional record being built. Each policy that strips rights from servicemembers, each Defense Secretary speech that fuses scripture with military force, each Presidential silence in the face of First Amendment violations inside the Pentagon — these accumulate. The 25th Amendment exists for the protection of the Republic, not the convenience of one party’s majorities. Naming the case for it, and laying out the evidence honestly, is itself a constitutional duty. Whether the Cabinet acts is a question of their courage. Whether the case exists is a question of fact.
7. A Pentagon Reshaped — Selected Timeline
Each line in that timeline, read alone, is a story. Read together, they are a pattern — the kind that historians use to describe regimes, not democracies.
Editorial Conclusion
The United States military does not belong to one faith. It belongs to every American who has signed their name to a contract that ends, if necessary, with their life. By stripping 180 belief systems from its records, the Department of Defense has told atheists, pagans, Wiccans, humanists, Druids, Spiritualists, and the rest that their willingness to die for the country has earned them, in return, administrative erasure.
The First Amendment was written for this exact circumstance. The 25th Amendment exists for Presidents who cannot or will not defend that Constitution from within their own building. The case for naming what is happening — clearly, by name, in the language the framers used — is not extreme. It is the minimum required of citizens who still believe the Republic is worth the oath.
The faiths erased by memorandum can be restored by memorandum. The constitutional damage cannot be undone so easily — and the silence of a President who watches it happen cannot be excused.
Sources & References
- Military.comDOD Officially Drops 180 Faiths From Military’s Recognized Religion List
- Religion News ServiceDefense Department to drop atheists, pagans, 175 others from list of military faiths
- Task & PurposePentagon cuts 180 faiths from recognized religion list
- USA Today / Yahoo NewsHegseth directs DOD to drop hundreds of faiths from recognized religion list
- MSNBC / The Maddow BlogHegseth’s Pentagon slashes the number of religious faiths it officially recognizes
- MSNBC Opinion · Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandinghamThanks to Pete Hegseth, some U.S. service members lost full freedom of religion
- CNN PoliticsPentagon updates list of recognized religious affiliations after backlash from Mormon lawmakers
- The HillPentagon, Pete Hegseth rework ‘offensive’ policy affecting LDS after Mormon lawmakers protest
- The Daily BeastRepublicans Rage at ‘Pentagon Pete’ Hegseth Over ‘Repugnant’ Removal of Mormon Church
- Mediaite‘Repugnant’: MAGA Senator Snaps at Pete Hegseth for Excluding Mormons
- Military Religious Freedom FoundationA “Middle Finger” to the Constitution — Weinstein Reacts to Hegseth’s Slashing of 180 Faiths
- Interfaith AmericaThe DOD’s New Recognized Religion List Disrespects American Diversity
- CNN · Pentagon Prayer ServiceHegseth hosts first meeting of monthly Christian prayer service at Pentagon
- The Independent / AOLHegseth prays for violence ‘against those who deserve no mercy’ at Pentagon service
- Christian Science MonitorPete Hegseth’s religious rhetoric stirs debate in military
- House Judiciary Committee DemocratsRaskin Demands White House Physician Immediately Evaluate Trump’s Cognitive Fitness
- MSNBC / NBC NewsRaskin offers bill setting up 25th Amendment process to remove Trump from office
- Deseret NewsA medical check for the commander-in-chief? Democrats introduce Trump fitness bill
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