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Senator Mike Lee, the konztitooshunal skolar from Utah, has a problem with the Department of Defense that he felt obligated to share, at length, on social media all weekend. It seems that, for reasons that surpasseth understanding, Pete Hegseth’s little pop stand decided to cut 180 denominations from the list of DOD-recognized religions. (Why there even is a list of DOD-recognized religions is not for small minds to ponder, but out at James Madison’s house, there was a pronounced underground tremor.) Among the 180 religions dropped from the list were Atheists, Asatru, Deists, Druids, Eckankar, Heathens, Humanists, Magick, New Age churches, Pagan, Rosicrucianism, Shaman, Spiritualists, Troth, Unitarian Universalists, and various Wiccans.

Were there actually Rosicrucian chaplains prior to this past week? If there really were Druid chaplains, maybe we wouldn’t have used all those defoliants that are still killing people in Southeast Asia.

Anyway, the real issue that has gotten up Lee’s nose is the notion that Mormons are not Christians. Which is now another means by which we have devolved back to the 19th century again. Anti-Mormonism has a bloody history in this country. And the Mormons gave as good as they got. Things got so bad that President James Buchanan actually got off his duff and did something about it, sending a third of the Army to Utah in 1857 to reassert federal authority.

This business about who is “really” a Christian also has a long and sorry history in this country and around the world. For example, Hegseth’s list dropped Unitarian Universalists completely, right along with the pagans. The UU’s are not trinitarians, which is a serious dealbreaker as regards Christianity. There also are considerable theological reasons why Mormons are not Christians. Their concept of the natures of God and Jesus are radically different from Catholicism and all forms of mainstream Protestantism, to say nothing of many of the other major monotheisms. However, there seems to be little doubt that this is all a part of Hegseth’s weird evangelization of the military engaged in what he seems to believe is literally a crusade. From Military.com:

In December 2025, Hegseth announced his intention “to make the Chaplain Corps great again,” prioritizing religious liberty and practice in the military by executing a “top-down cultural shift, putting spiritual well-being on the same footing as physical and mental health.” This latest action comes on the heels of Hegseth announcing chaplain reforms in March 2026. He said his department would be significantly streamlining the number of faith code affiliations for service members, including a separate but related change to replace rank insignia military chaplains wear on their work uniforms with religious insignia.The faith and belief coding system, renamed to “religious affiliation codes,” was simply due to a system that had become too big, according to the secretary. “The previous system had ballooned to well over 200 faith codes. … It was impractical and unusable, and many codes were never used at all,” Hegseth said in March, adding that 82 percent of members who identify as religious use only six of the codes. The secretary added that chaplains “are first and foremost called and ordained by God.”I rarely agree with Senator Lee, but he’s got a point here. Millions of people adhere to the Mormon religion. All due respect to Wiccan and Druid soldiers and sailors— who, by the way, deserve to have their spiritual needs taken care of according to their own faiths—but Mormonism is as close to a mainstream Christian religion as at least half-a-dozen acceptable “Christian” religions on Hegseth’s list, a list which ought not to exist anyway. Do we really want a tinhorn Fox News theocrat determining the validity of religious belief in any context whatsoever? Are we that far fcking gone?Lee has to watch as so many of the fundamentalist Protestants, for whom he has carried so much water in his political career, eagerly try to read him and his co-religionists out of Christianity—just the way the mobs and the state militias tried to do almost 200 years ago. In John 14:2, Jesus tells his disciples, “In my father’s house there are many mansions.” Don’t worry, senator. You can sleep in the yard out back.