The Defense Department dropped a big shoe yesterday (June 4): it released a revised list of “faith groups” (aka religions) that will continue to be recognized by the military.
And the “good news” is, ” Quakers are on it.
(There’s “bad” Quaker news on it too; we’ll get to that shortly.)
This paperwork “shoe” is big, though, because it’s so little. It’s slimmed down from a previous 2017 list of 220+ recognized churches/faiths/no-faiths, to 31. Yes, 180 religions (give or take a few) are erased from the Pentagon’s viewfinders , just like that.
Hegseth announced his plan for a diet religious spectrum back last fall, when he drop-kicked a new Spiritual Fitness Guide the Army put out. He denounced it as secular, new age, full of feelings, and woke.
Soon he fired the (yes, Black) general who was head of military chaplains, and vowed to Make the Chaplaincy Great Again. And the faith list would have to do bariatric surgery, Ozempic infusions, slim down and muscle up to 100 pushups one-handed before it would be deemed lethal enough to be re-released (I exaggerate slightly for effect).
But not about the slimming: 221 to 31 is an 84% drop.
The old obese 2017 list (in full) is here; and the lithe (and lethal??)) new one is below:
New list in full-from military.com:
- 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)
Hegseth asserted that the old list was much too large, unwieldy and a mish-mash (my technical term); and he was surely right about that.
But then: American religion is a divine mish-mash to beat all mish-mashes. (So , jeez, guys: what did you expect when you let your “Founding Fathers” pass something like the First Amendment, which bans an official church, and tries to guarantee free speech and exercise to all the others?? You better stand the heck back & be ready to duck, because there’s sure to be an explosion, –and hurrah for it.)
All-knowing AI utterly failed to spit out a plausible estimate for me of the number of distinct religious groups in this country. (The machine god couldn’t even define “denominations”– noting as an excuse that there are over 35,000 “independent” congregations — each its own micro-“denomination” with some in all 50 states.) So even 221 names is a piddly chip off a tiny slice of the American religious maelstrom.
So neither the old 2017 “IN-group” list or the new skimpy one tells us much about American religion, inside or outside the military. Instead, they offer clues about their authors more than anything else.
The 2017 list-makers wanted to be expansive. So they made space for Druids, Pagans, Wicca (several flavors), even Deists, Unitarians, Swedenborgians, Native American and “New Age churches,” plus lots more, some I’d never heard of.
Including — four entries for Quaker groups. (Two yearly meetings, an association & a generic; look them up.)
And the bad news: we’re in the “Christian” prefix section. (Not a surprise; the couple of “Quaker” chaplains I met were from very evangelical groups. Liberals, not so much. I won’t bother petitioning for a more expansive entry. Hegseth left himself an escape hatch for “Other religions”; it will do the heavy lift for the rest of the world.
For the new list, anyone who’s been following the Hegseth crusade will guess that he wanted less “diversity” and more Christian Nationalism and flies into a rage when the word “New” bumps up against, “Age.” So that’s gone, along with all the others in bold in the previous paragraph, and —
— Yeah, also deleted are the “Native American” churches and. . .
. . . you guessed it: all five entries from 2017 of predominantly Black denominations. One of these, the Church of God in Christ, was listed as the fifth largest Christian denomination in the USA, with several other Black denominations close behind.
But maybe they were woke. Not that Hegseth or his minions are biased or anything. But one other mathematical point: of the 31 entries in the new short list, which purportedly is meant to help equip chaplains to assist in the free religious exercise of troops and sailors across the full spectrum of American religion, twenty of the total thirty-one entries begin with the word “Christian” (and a 21st entry, for the Mormons, doesn’t use the word, but they are definitely Christians in their own distinctive way).
So that’s a quick scan of this new wrinkle in the unfolding religious “reformation” of the U.S. military. Note that it is part of a determined effort to turn this war machine against the “enemy within,” and that the man at the steering wheel has “God Wills It” tattooed on his body (in Latin, for cover). Other pundits are just taking hold of this list and its implications as this is written. I trust they’ll put a spotlight on the implications.
One last comment from here — when searching, my browser dropped me at the VA’s list of different headstone “logos” for religious affiliations. They have more than 80. Here’s are some samples. They don’t seem to mind the variety when the troops are dead . . . .
I wonder what will happen if Hegseth gets his hands on their list.
