Hegseth Reverses Snub After Offending Utah Lawmakers With Exclusion of Mormons From ‘Christian’ List

The Department of Defense amended its latest list of recognized religious faiths on Monday after its newest and significantly reduced denominations chart removed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from the category of Christians — a move that Mormon members of Congress called patently incorrect and offensive.Last week, the Pentagon announced that it was significantly whittling down the number of religious affiliations its service members can choose, reducing the number to 31 from 200. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had called the prior list an “impractical and unusable system” that needed to be reduced to align better with the faith backgrounds of service members. In its revised version, the Church of Latter-day Saints was initially separated from the 20 denominations of Christian faiths, which include the Seventh-day Adventist and the Church of the Nazarene. Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, posted a video on X on Sunday, requesting that Mr. Hegseth reconsider his “offensive” decision to reclassify the Mormon faith, of which Mr. Lee is a member. On Monday, Mr. Lee said that he had spoken with President Trump about the Pentagon’s new “Christian list” and alluded to the possibility of corrections being made post-haste.Shortly after Mr. Lee’s request, the Pentagon posted a new list of Religious Affiliation Codes and noted on X that “the mistake has been fixed.” Mr. Lee responded that he was “grateful to Secretary Hegseth for correcting the error.”Mr. Lee’s reaction was in line with many Mormons who called out the Pentagon for excluding the Church of Latter-day Saints from the list of Christian denominations. “The reaction I have mostly seen is one of ‘How can they not consider us Christian? It’s in the name of our church,’” host of “The Cultural Hall” podcast, Richie T. Steadman, told The New York Sun. Other Mormons said they were not surprised by the most recent rejection of their form of Christianity — a bias that has existed since the religion’s founding by Joseph Smith in 1820. In 1838, then-Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs issued a so-called “extermination order” demanding Latter-day Saints members be “exterminated or driven from the State if necessary.” In 2011, Pastor Robert Jeffress of the First Baptist Church of Dallas refused to apologize for calling Mormonism a “cult” and a “false religion.” “While fundamentally every Christian knows it is not what the world thinks of you but rather your own personal relationship with the savior, we find ourselves discounted at nearly every turn,” Mr. Steadman said. A recent Cooperative Election Study found that the Latter-day Saints are the second-most Republican-leaning religious group in the United States. However, the composition of GOP-affiliated members of the Latter-day Saints had shrunk to 57.5 percent in 2025 from 68.5 percent 10 years prior.Among other affiliations removed from the Pentagon’s list were atheists, pagans, and Wiccans. A Pentagon spokesman said the prevailing 31 religious groups are not intended to be recognized as “officially approved religions,” but to serve as a guide to help chaplains organize resources to “best provide for warfighters of all faith groups.”

Hegseth Reverses Snub After Offending Utah Lawmakers With Exclusion of Mormons From ‘Christian’ List

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