In January of 2016, Patheos invited the diverse blogs hosted here to participate in an “interfaith round table” responding to the question “Are Mormons Christian?”
I accepted that invitation by offering a Series of Unhelpful Questions that I still consider to be helpfully unhelpful.
That’s some useful background, I think, for a story that emerged over this past weekend, first reported by Military.com: “DOD Officially Drops 180 Faiths From Military’s Recognized Religion List.”
The revised list, according to documents obtained by Military.com, includes Agnostics, Buddhists, Hindus, Islam (Muslims), Judaism, Sikh, and a wide range of Christian-based groups like Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans and Methodists. …
This restructuring of faith codes, which help identify service members as well as the military in planning for appropriate religious coverage to include them, has now excluded minority faith/worldview groups including Atheists, Asatru, Deists, Druids, Eckankar, Heathens, Humanists, Magick, New Age churches, Pagan, Rosicrucianism, Shaman, Spiritualists, Troth, Unitarian Universalists and various Wiccans.
The list of religions was “streamlined” from 211 groups down to just 31. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS church officials recently decided to discourage the name “Mormons”) made the cut, but while it is still on the Department of Defense’s list of officially recognized religions, it is no longer officially grouped among the “Christian” religions.
So that same Patheos prompt from 10 years ago became a front-page headline for the Salt Lake Tribune: “Are Latter-day Saints Christian? The U.S. Defense Department doesn’t appear to think so..”
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.
The local paper expresses some gentle, polite “concern” about this change, goodness gracious, but the Military.com follow-up story focuses on the alarm and anger the change has sparked: “DOD’s New Official Recognized Religions List Draws Strong LDS Rebuke.”
Utah lawmakers are among those expressing discontent with the Department of Defense’s new list of recognized religious faiths and beliefs, specifically alarmed at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) being excluded as a Christian religion.
… The change, now officially acknowledged by the DOD after Military.com’s initial reporting, has ruffled the feathers of LDS followers—who include Republican lawmakers at state and federal levels—openly criticizing the new list.
Among them are Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who on Sunday took to social media calling for the Pentagon to “not just reconsider it, but undo it.”
Lee — a far-right, ultra-MAGA senator — then wound up spending much of his weekend on Twitter, replying to white evangelicals and fundamentalists condemning his faith as heresy and apostasy and a lie from the pits of Hell. That’s not a new thing, mind you — evangelicals and Latter-day Saints have long regarded one another as false or mistaken religions and each has long considered the other to be a legitimate target for proselytizing, as people who need to convert and get saved lest they suffer eternal peril. But most of these Twitter Christians were not trying to evangelize. They were, instead, celebrating the exclusion of LDS believers as a victory for the hegemony of their forms of Christianity and of religion.
They were emboldened and, they seemed to think, legitimated by this new list of religious classifications issued by government officials.
“Jesus loves me, this I know, for Pete Hegseth tells me so.” For these MAGA Christians, government officials have the power to officially confirm and affirm their faith. This is what makes that faith, and them, real and true and official. It has Caesar’s official seal of approval. (A seal that might be worn, perhaps, on their right hands and their foreheads.
These Christians are confused. A similar confusion was expressed this weekend by another [in]famous Twitter Christian, the MAGA activist and “worship” singer Sean Feucht, who posted this in the comment section of Elon Musk’s personal blog: “When the separation of church and state was created, people didn’t realize WHY it was created. The separation of church and state was NEVER meant to keep the church out of the government, but it was meant to keep the government from putting their hands on the church..”
This is a popular bit of rhetoric for white/Christian nationalists who regard the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment as being in conflict with the Establishment clause. In their view, the establishment of religion — their religion — is the only sure way to guarantee their right to free exercise.
That’s a trap. It’s the foolishness of the kind of fool who imagines that tyranny is a great system as long as you get to be the tyrant.
Establishment is a prison for the established religion just as much as it is for all of the other sects and slight-variations of that religion that establishment would officially forbid or disfavor. It puts the government in charge as the arbiter of true religion and true orthodoxy, inviting and empowering that government to determine the difference, and to enforce that determination with the sword.
Sean Feucht sees Pete Hegseth as an ally — as a fellow (white) Christian on his side in the battle to establish (white) Christianity as the official, hegemonic religion enforced by the full power of the government. So when the Pentagon whittles down its list of officially recognized “Christian” religions to just 20 he can celebrate this as a victory because that list still, for now, includes his own form of nondenominational Charismatic Pentecostalism. But that sect is ultimately incompatible with the Neo-Confederate Pseudo-Calvinist Reconstructionism taught by Hegseth’s mentor, Doug Wilson. And religious establishment cannot accommodate such a broad diversity of officially privileged sects.
The list will always have to be whittled down again. And again.
Religious establishment is like The Highlander: In the end, there can be only one.
The cleverest Christian nationalists understand this — the tenured Catholic Integralists and the Theonomists and the handful of intellectual-ish types amongst the New Apostolic Reformation. They understand that what they’re doing now is clearing the board for the end game, when the ultimate winner — the one very specific, singular sect — will emerge as the final and only acceptable form of true religion. And so while they’re working together now with these other (and, in their view, false and illegitimate) strains of white Christianity, they’re already planning for how they will ensure that it is their ever-more particular sect that winds up on top.
But, again, they still won’t be “on top.” Because the prize of establishment is surrender to Caesar — granting the government the power to decree which sect is the official one, and to determine what makes anyone a legitimate member of that sect, and what tests and inquiries and inquisitions it sees fit to require those official believers of the official sect to perform in order to prove their official status.
Establishment can never be a right, only a privilege, and privileges are always conditional. Even for the most earnest members of the established sect, someone else — Caesar, the government — will be the one setting those conditions.
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