The Department of War has stripped approximately 180 belief systems, including Wicca, Druidism, Ásatrú, and other neo-pagan faiths, from the official list of recognized religions for U.S. military personnel. A May 20 memo trimmed the department's roster from 211 faiths down to just 31, a sweeping consolidation that the Pentagon says will sharpen the Chaplain Corps' ability to serve troops who actually need religious support.
The memo, issued by Undersecretary of War Elbridge A. Colby and signed by Anthony Tata, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, ordered a revision of "religious affiliation codes" to take effect within 60 days. The directive, as The Christian Post reported, ultimately came from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
Predictably, the usual critics are treating the move as a constitutional crisis. But the memo's stated purpose is straightforward, and hard to argue with on operational grounds.
The language in the May 20 directive frames the consolidation as a logistics and readiness decision, not a theological purge. The memo states it will:
"Streamline the DoW collection of religious preferences for service members to enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy."
It goes further. The new, shorter list, the memo says, is designed to give chaplains practical, actionable information:
"The new list will provide chaplains with clear, readily available information that will better enable them to anticipate the religious support needs of service members and to provide religious support activities that align with service members' personal faith and practices."
In other words, the Department of War decided that maintaining a sprawling catalog of 211 separate faith categories, many of them vanishingly small, was not helping chaplains do their jobs. A list that tries to be everything to everyone often ends up serving no one well. Consolidating it to 31 recognized categories is the kind of practical reform that bureaucracies rarely have the nerve to attempt.
The religion-list trim did not happen in a vacuum. It fits within a larger initiative Hegseth announced on Dec. 16, 2025, in a video message posted to X. In it, the Secretary of War pledged to "make the Chaplain Corps great again", refocusing military chaplains on religious ministry and stripping out what he described as secular influences that had crept into the role.
Hegseth, an Evangelical whose church is affiliated with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, has made no secret of his view that the military's spiritual infrastructure had drifted from its core mission. He condemned New Age notions that had found their way into the Army Spiritual Fitness Guide and ordered them eliminated.
That kind of directness makes Washington uncomfortable. But the question worth asking is simple: Should military chaplains be spending their limited time and resources navigating a 211-item taxonomy of belief systems, or should they be focused on the faiths that the vast majority of service members actually practice?
Mikey Weinstein, president of the nonprofit Military Religious Freedom Foundation, condemned the consolidation in terms that leave little room for nuance. He called the move a:
"Middle finger to the United States Constitution's separation of church and state."
Weinstein went further, describing it as:
"Another absolute, clear, filthy and disgusting, unconstitutional, immoral and unethical attempt to force only the approved solution, getting closer and closer to Christian nationalism."
Weinstein has characterized Hegseth's broader efforts at the Pentagon as "Christian nationalist." That framing tells you more about Weinstein's political priors than about the memo itself. Streamlining an administrative list is not the same as establishing a state church. The First Amendment protects service members' right to practice their faith. It does not guarantee that every conceivable belief system gets its own line item in a Pentagon database.
An anonymous U.S. Army veteran, ordained as a priest in Wicca, Ásatrú, and Druidism, told Military.com that the new list "rekindled that anger" they felt after allegedly being discriminated against by military chaplains 20 years ago for being a self-described pagan. The veteran served three tours in Iraq, a record that commands respect regardless of one's view on the policy. But personal grievance, however sincere, is not the same as a constitutional argument.
Critics want to frame this as religious persecution. The facts do not support that characterization.
The memo does not ban any service member from practicing Wicca, Druidism, or any other faith. It does not prohibit private worship. It does not order chaplains to refuse counsel to anyone. What it does is simplify the administrative categories the Chaplaincy uses to track and allocate religious support resources across the force.
The Department of War had, over the years, ballooned its recognized-religions list to 211 entries. That included members of The Troth and various other pagan and Earth-based groups. Managing that many categories creates paperwork, not piety. A leaner list means chaplains can focus on the religious needs that are most common and most urgent among the men and women who serve.
There is a legitimate question about whether 31 categories is the right number, and which faiths made the cut. The full list of retained categories is not publicly available from the reporting so far. That gap matters, and the Department of War should make the final list transparent so service members and the public can evaluate the choices on their merits.
Hegseth has also drawn scrutiny for invoking imprecatory psalms against the enemies of the United States weeks after the U.S.-Israeli attack against Iran. His willingness to speak in explicitly religious terms, something that would have been unremarkable from a defense secretary a generation ago, clearly unnerves the Washington establishment.
But the broader pattern is one of institutional reform, not theocratic overreach. Hegseth has promised to root out DEI initiatives and what he called "woke garbage" from the Pentagon. The Chaplain Corps overhaul fits that agenda: strip away the bureaucratic bloat, refocus on the mission, and stop pretending that an administrative list is a substitute for genuine spiritual care.
Whether the revision of religious affiliation codes has already gone into effect remains unclear. The 60-day implementation window set by the May 20 memo would put the deadline in the near future, and legal challenges from groups like Weinstein's Military Religious Freedom Foundation seem all but certain.
The American military exists to defend the nation. Its chaplains exist to support the spiritual well-being of the people who do that defending. Every institution that tries to accommodate every possible constituency eventually loses the ability to serve any of them effectively.
A 211-item list of recognized religions is not a sign of tolerance. It is a sign of a bureaucracy that lost the ability to set priorities. Trimming it to 31 is not an attack on religious liberty. It is an acknowledgment that resources are finite and that the Chaplain Corps should spend its time ministering to troops, not managing a spreadsheet.
No service member is being told what to believe. They are being told that the Pentagon's administrative apparatus will no longer pretend it can custom-tailor chaplain services for every faith tradition ever cataloged. That is not theocracy. That is management.
When the loudest objection to a reform is that it makes the bureaucracy smaller, the reform is probably overdue.