In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), an ardent Trump loyalist, recently got a taste of what it’s like to be a disfavored religion in the Christian nationalist world of MAGA. He was triggered by the news, broken by the defense news site Military.com, that the Pentagon had eliminated 180 recognized religious faiths in order to “streamline the DoW [sic] collection of religious preferences collection [sic] for service members to enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy.” The Pentagon’s new list of what it calls Religious Affiliation Codes classified a number of religions, like Methodists and Baptists, as Christian. But Lee’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was not listed among the “Christian” faiths. He demanded — on X, of course, because United States Senators have no other means of either commanding attention or acquiring information — “why The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was left out of the list of Christian churches.”
Lee and other LDS lawmakers spent several days futilely seeking answers to that question. By midday Monday, Lee had lodged his complaint with management — that is, he called President Donald Trump, who “loves Latter-day Saints,” Lee assured his followers on X. The Pentagon then released a new list, which did not classify any religion as Christian. Was it a win? A win would have been for the LDS Church to have been included among the Christian faiths. Convincing the public that, yes, a religion that has the words Church of Jesus Christ in its name was actually Christian had been at the top of the senator’s to-do list this weekend. That the Pentagon chose to excise the Christian label entirely rather than apply it to Lee’s church was quite telling. But Lee declared victory anyway, writing on X that he was “grateful” to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for “correcting the error.”
It’s hard to imagine why such a new classification system was even necessary, other than being another step in Hegseth’s march to his personal brand of Christian supremacy. Hegseth reportedly insisted on whittling the list down because the number of religions practiced by members of the military had “ballooned” to over 200 religions and needed to be reduced to an apparently very arbitrary 31. The new list omits, among others, atheists and Unitarian Universalists. In announcing the revised, Lee-approved list, the Pentagon wrote on X that “the Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks.”
But “adjudicating theological debates” is precisely what the Pentagon has done. Hegseth has made no secret of his religious agenda, as evidenced by his monthly prayer meetings on government property, at which his religious mentor, the Christian nationalist Doug Wilson, has preached. Wilson is not shy about his antipathy to the LDS Church. He has written that “Mormonism is not Christian” and is “a false gospel.” In April, responding to reader mail on his blog, Wilson thanked a correspondent, an Army chaplain, for the “heads up” about the “disturbing trend” of Mormon chaplains in the Corps. The reader prayed that Wilson could wield his “significant influence in certain spheres” to do something about this “heresy.”
The entire “reclassification” effort was sure to trigger complaints of both a constitutional and personal nature. But Lee, who has long shaped his political identity around his supposed expertise in the Constitution, had a deeply personal, not constitutional beef. Resolving it was also a personal matter: he expressed no concern that the list, or Hegseth’s hyper-sectarian prayer meetings, may run afoul of the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses. Instead, his campaign to have his own faith properly categorized as Christian was a cry for inclusion (oh, no! not that!) in the MAGA circle. As much as Lee prides himself on his MAGA bonafides, at its religious heart MAGA is an evangelical movement, and evangelicals have long considered Mormons weird outsiders, non-Christians, and even members of a cult. In the 1990s, former President Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist, received blowback for questioning his brethren’s insistence that Mormons are not Christians.
Years later, Republicans contentiously chose a Mormon as their nominee for president. That nominee, Mitt Romney, had to try for the nomination twice — first in 2008, when his rival, the former Arkansas governor and Southern Baptist pastor Mike Huckabee, was forced to apologize for wondering aloud in an interview with the New York Times whether Mormons believe Jesus and Satan were brothers. (They don’t, but it’s quite a common distortion promoted by those hostile to the LDS Church.) When Romney ran again in 2012, this time successfully securing the nomination, he had to endure attacks from another Southern Baptist minister, Robert Jeffress, who later went on to be one of Trump’s first evangelical endorsers and most loyal supporters. Jeffress called Mormonism a “cult,” with anti-LDS sentiment taking center stage at the 2011 Values Voter Summit, which at the time was otherwise a typically cohesive affair of religious conservatives with shared opposition to abortion and LGBTQ people and other demonized outsiders. Later, Trump would do something Romney couldn’t pull off — win over evangelicals.
Mike Lee did not get what he wanted from the Pentagon: for the LDS Church to be included on the list of Christian religions. He settled for being lumped in with the 31 recognized religions. In the grand scheme of Pete Hegseth-related things, that is perhaps a relief to Lee. He’s still in the MAGA circle. But it must hurt to know that the guy who still dreams of the Crusades might consider him a heretic.
