The Department of Defense has reduced its list of recognized religious affiliation codes from more than 200 down to 31. A memo signed by Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Anthony Tata, directing the change within 60 days, eliminates roughly 180 categories. Atheists, Pagans, Wiccans, Humanists, Druids, Deists, Unitarian Universalists, and dozens of smaller traditions are gone. What remains skews heavily Christian, with Baptist, Catholic, Lutheran, and Methodist denominations alongside Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Agnostics.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the revision. His stated rationale is administrative. The previous system had ballooned past 200 codes, he said in March, calling it impractical and unusable, with many codes never used at all. About 82 percent of religiously affiliated service members used only six of them. On its face this is a tidying operation, the kind of bureaucratic pruning that happens in every large institution.
Faith codes are not theology. They are logistics. The military uses them to plan chaplain coverage, track demographics, and anticipate the religious needs of more than a million people who cannot simply leave the base and find their own house of worship. A Wiccan soldier in a forward posting does not stop being a Wiccan because the database no longer carries the label. The need persists. What changes is whether the institution acknowledges it.
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