Military.com has learned that the Department of Defense, for the first time in almost 10 years, has dramatically reduced its number of recognized religious faiths and belief systems by approximately 180... decreasing the total number of faiths from 211 to its new number of 31. The changes were iterated in a May 20, 2026, memorandum issued by the Under Secretary of War and signed by Anthony Tata, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness[.]
Under Secretary Tata has a serious military service record, so I don't take him to be doing the usual political trolling here. He has some sort of serious purpose in mind. I haven't seen the memorandum, so I don't know how he justified this shift.
I find it noteworthy that of 31 recognized religions, 22 are Christian variations. Islam -- which has Sunni and Shia sects, for example -- gets only one; Judaism gets only one; rather astonishingly, Agnostic remains a recognized religion even though it isn't actually one, as does "No Religion." There is a catchall "Other Religions" code that presumably will be applied to everyone who has been registered as one of the 180 formerly-recognized religions, so just because their faith will no longer be recognized by the military doesn't mean that they'll be forced into one of the remaining categories.
My guess is what they are trying to cut down on is chaplain training hours, but that still makes it strange that you'd have 22 specific variations of one religion and one or none for the others, even faiths with large numbers of practitioners worldwide like Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism.
What will be of significance to me is if the VA follows up by removing the emblems of belief of the no-longer-recognized religions from eligibility for military headstones.
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