The Defense Department cut its recognized religious faith and belief codes from roughly 211 to 31 in a May 20, 2026 memorandum, stripping about 180 entries from the military’s official list and immediately changing how service members can be recorded for religious support.
The revised list keeps broad categories such as Agnostics, Buddhists, Hindus, Islam, Judaism, Sikh and a range of Christian groups including Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans and Methodists. But it removes many minority faith and worldview groups, including Atheists, Asatru, Deists, Druids, Eckankar, Heathens, Humanists, Magick, New Age churches, Pagan, Rosicrucianism, Shaman, Spiritualists, Troth, Unitarian Universalists and various Wiccans.
The memorandum, signed by Anthony Tata, the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, says the change is meant to streamline the Defense Department’s collection of religious preferences for service members and improve targeted support from the Chaplaincy. Tata wrote that the new list will give chaplains clear, readily available information to better anticipate religious support needs and provide activities that align with service members’ personal faith and practices.
The move lands after Pete Hegseth argued in March that the previous system had ballooned to well over 200 faith codes, was impractical and unusable, and that most service members fit under just six of the codes. In the same month, the Pentagon also told serving chaplains to replace rank insignia with religious insignia, underscoring a broader effort to reframe the role.
That overhaul comes with a gap the Pentagon did not address in the memo: how service members whose faiths or worldviews disappeared from the list will be handled in practice. The first official revision in almost 10 years was based on a March 27, 2017 memo that had expanded the codes to better standardize and identify religious preferences across the services, but this latest change moves in the opposite direction and leaves excluded groups without a clear path back into the system.
The next step is a 60-day revision period laid out in the memo. What happens after that will determine whether the new list becomes a cleaner administrative tool for chaplains or a lasting narrowing of which beliefs the military officially recognizes.
