Pentagon is playing God with 180 cut faiths, leaving behind pagans, deists, atheists and Unitarians

The Department of Defense has reduced its official list of recognized religious faiths from over 200 to just 31, erasing nearly 180 belief systems—including Atheism, Wicca, Druidry, Unitarian Universalism, and Asatru—in a sweeping administrative overhaul that critics are calling a brazen act of Christian nationalist favoritism.

The May 20 memo, signed by Under Secretary Anthony Tata and obtained by Military.com, frames the purge as a matter of efficiency.

The old system had become “impractical and unusable,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in March, noting that 82% of religious service members use only six codes.

The new streamlined list includes a single catch-all for “Other Religions” and one for “No Religion.” Agnostics get their own code. Atheists do not.

But out on the far side of the Potomac, where the marble halls give way to barracks and foxholes, this tidy paperwork reads like a declaration of second-class spiritual citizenship.

A former Army chaplain, speaking on condition of anonymity, put it plain: “When I raised my hand, I swore to defend the Constitution. The First Amendment is the free exercise of religion for everybody. This list is an excuse to fail that duty.”

The secretary says chaplains will still serve everyone. But a soldier who follows the Norse gods, or a sailor who finds truth in a Humanist gathering, will now have a dog tag stamped “Other.”

That little word, said one Army veteran who is ordained in Wicca, Asatru, and Druidry, is a license to be ignored. “The chaplain looks at your tag, doesn’t see your faith, and says, ‘I don’t know how to help you. Go off base.’ That’s not support. That’s a dismissal.”

Here is the strange and sorry arithmetic of it. The Department of Veterans Affairs will carve a Pentacle or a Hammer of Thor onto a soldier’s headstone.

The dead get their emblems. The living get a shrug.

As Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, told this reporter, “If you’re dead, you’ll get your emblem. But if you’re alive, you can’t even get it on your dog tags unless you’re one of the approved traditions.”

Weinstein called the new list a “middle finger to the Constitution.”

Now, any fair observer would note that a military chaplain cannot be expected to carry seminary degrees from every faith under the sun. But that is not the issue.

The issue is that the old system worked—imperfectly, yes, but it worked. It told a young Pagan infantryman that his country saw him, that his conscience mattered, that there was a code for his soul.

That code is now deleted. And in its place is a system that looks less like administrative reform and more like a theological loyalty test designed by Christian nationalists.

Consider what was cut.

Deism—the quiet, clockwork faith of Jefferson and Franklin.

Unitarianism—the creed of John Adams and William Howard Taft.

Whole branches of the human search for meaning, pruned away because someone in the Pentagon decided they were too much trouble to spell.

While the list keeps 24 varieties of Christian denominations, from Assemblies of God to Seventh‑Day Adventists, it sweeps entire traditions of indigenous, neo‑pagan, and non‑theistic belief into the dumpster of “Other.”

One veteran, who served three tours in Iraq, told Military.com that when he first went to a chaplain for help with combat trauma, the chaplain spent eight months trying to convert him.

That was twenty years ago. This new list, he said, “rekindles that anger. Stripping these codes puts service members at risk of being re‑traumatized or re‑abused without it even being intentional.”

He has a doctorate in interreligious chaplaincy. He knows what spiritual abuse looks like. And he says this is it, dressed up in a memo.

The Department of Defense did not respond to requests for comment on whether this move violates the First Amendment or what specific chaplain training will now be provided for the 180 erased faiths.

However, the silence itself is instructive. When you cannot defend a decision with a straight face, you hide behind the word “streamline.”

Make no mistake. This is not about saving paper or mouse clicks. This is about telling tens of thousands of service members—many of whom have bled for the flag—that their deepest convictions are an inconvenient footnote.

It is about a quiet, bureaucratic push toward a Christian nationalism that does not need a state church because it has a state-approved list.

It is a betrayal of the very oath that every chaplain, every general, and every private takes: to support and defend a Constitution that promises the free exercise of religion for all, not just for the many.

A soldier in the field does not ask whether his chaplain shares every syllable of his creed. He asks whether the chaplain will sit with him in the dark and honor what he believes.

That honor starts with a dog tag.

When you erase a faith from that little metal rectangle, you are not streamlining. You are telling that soldier, in the plainest possible language, that his god does not rate a line.

That is not efficient. That is not American, but it is a damn poor way to treat the people you send into the fire.