Ranking Faith
Michael D. Peabody July/August 2026A May 20, 2026, memorandum signed by Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of war for personnel and readiness, reduced the military’s religious-affiliation codes from 211 to 31. The memo implemented an order from secretary Pete Hegseth to review the longer list of religions, created during the first Trump administration, that included Druids, Wiccans, Pagans, Unitarian Universalists, and many other smaller traditions. According to Hegseth, the old system was impractical and unusable. The vast majority of religious service members, he said, clustered into a handful of codes, and his review committee recommended cutting the rest. The office that issued that directive styles itself the Department of War, the name this administration has adopted for the Department of Defense. It is worth holding that title in mind while we weigh what it means for such a body to rank American faiths.
Just Paperwork?
First, let’s grant the practical case, because it’s real. Chaplains need usable data. A chaplain assigned to a brigade must know whether their people include a few hundred Catholics, a scattering of Muslims, a minyan’s worth of Jewish soldiers, a handful of Buddhists, so they can schedule services, honor holy days, and bury the dead according to conscience. The codes feed the quiet paperwork that lets a Sikh keep his beard or an Adventist guard the Sabbath. Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, insists the change makes no claim about which faiths are legitimate. Read charitably, then, this is merely filing-cabinet reform.
But the danger lies in what happens next. A list built for logistics can become a list of legitimacy.
A Thickening Civil Creed
America has what sociologists have called a “civil religion.” Almost 60 years ago, Robert Bellah described this as a loose public creed that lets a president swear on a Bible and a chaplain pray over the fallen without the state ever endorsing a single church. Yet this civil creed has always been deliberately thin. It works because it stays vague. It blesses everyone by naming no one. The moment a federal office prints an itemized roster of which faiths count and how they should be sorted, the thin creed thickens. The state stops hosting the nation’s religions and begins grading them.
The grading problem announced itself as soon as Hegseth’s list was made public. The first version placed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints outside the Christian column. Republican senators from Utah, including Mike Lee, a member of that church, asked why Latter-day Saints had been left off the roll of Christian bodies. The department revised the list on June 8 and stopped grouping faiths under broad headings. The correction was sensible. The fact that it was needed proves the point. By sorting believers into “Christian” and something adjacent, the war ministry entered a theological quarrel that has occupied seminaries for two centuries—and a clerk settled it with a spreadsheet column. Whether Latter-day Saints are Christian is the last question a War Department should presume to answer.
Look at the arithmetic of the surviving 31. Roughly 21 are Christian denominations, sliced finely into Evangelical, Catholic, Methodist, Pentecostal, and the rest. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, and the Baha’i faith get a single line apiece. A billion Hindus share one code. American Christianity gets a wardrobe; every other tradition gets a hook. Christianity becomes the default. Everything else becomes the shrinking exception.
Neutrality Guards Freedom
Using Christianity as the baseline religion should trouble Christians most—and I say so as one. A faith confident in its own truth has no use for a federal flowchart to validate it. The early church did its finest work as an unlisted and frequently illegal sect. The instinct to see Christianity crowned as the official standard is a worldly impulse dressed in church clothes, and it ends badly for the freedom that has allowed faith to flourish in America. A state strong enough to promote your church today is strong enough to define it tomorrow, and a state strong enough to define it can edit it off the page.
Apply the simplest test in civil liberties. Imagine the same list maintained by an administration that regards your church as the disfavored sect, the one that belongs in the residual box. Believers who welcome the roster while their tradition sits near the top should picture it in the hands of officials who place their tradition near the bottom. The power to rank is the power to demote. You do not get to keep the machine and choose forever who operates it.
The law has understood this for generations. In United States v. Ballard the Supreme Court held that a jury could weigh neither the truth nor the falsity of a person’s religious claims, however strange they sounded, because the state owns no instrument for measuring revelation. A year earlier, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Court called it a fixed star in our constitutional order that no official, high or petty, may prescribe what shall be orthodox in matters of faith. The restraint is a matter of competence as much as humility. Nothing in a commission or a security clearance equips an official to weigh a creed. A government strong enough to certify your faith is strong enough to decertify it.
The new list is a quieter version of the same forbidden act. It jails no one. It teaches. Recruits who scan the codes learn whether their tradition made the cut or has been consigned to irrelevance, and they learn it from the institution that holds their oath, their promotion, and their deployment orders.
There is a cleaner way, and it costs the department nothing. Build the list from the bottom up and let service members name themselves. Soldiers who call themselves Wiccan are Wiccans for the purpose of finding a chaplain or a holy day. Those who write Seventh-day Adventist earn an Adventist’s accommodations, whether or not a board in Washington has blessed the label. Self-identification keeps the government in its proper lane, which is logistics, and clear of the lane it was built to avoid, which is doctrine. The free exercise clause protects believers’ accounts of their own faith. It was never a license for a bureaucratic audit of it.
How It Starts
Here is the stake, and it dwarfs the paperwork: The American experiment made a wager no other republic had dared to make, that a government could defend a people’s faiths without ever presuming to define them. The wager held because the state kept its hands off the one thing it could not touch without breaking. A roster that ranks the faiths is the first quiet withdrawal of that promise. It is small. It is administrative. It will be defended as housekeeping. That is how these things begin.
The early Christian church grew up inside an empire that honored official gods and demanded a pinch of incense for the emperor’s altar. Christians who refused the pinch suffered because they believed that allegiance belongs to God before Caesar, and that no magistrate may certify the conscience. Their spiritual descendants now hold the pen that writes the list. So we should ask, while the question is still ours to ask: Whose name do we expect to find missing from it when the trimming reaches us?
Article Author: Michael D. Peabody
Michael D. Peabody is an attorney in Los Angeles, California. He has practiced in the fields of workers compensation and employment law, including workplace discrimination and wrongful termination. He is a frequent contributor to Liberty magazine and editsReligiousLiberty.TV, an independent website dedicated to celebrating liberty of conscience. Mr. Peabody is a favorite guest on Liberty’s weekly radio show, “Lifequest Liberty.”