Glenn Beck got a phone call from the president at 12:30 in the morning. He used it to raise a point that every conservative should sit with for a moment.
The Pentagon had just reduced its official list of military religious affiliation codes from more than 200 down to 31. Reasonable enough on its face. But buried in that new list was a classification scheme that placed certain faiths under a “Christian” label and left others off it entirely. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of the largest faith communities in the country and one with deep roots in the American military, was not included among the religions the federal government had designated as Christian.
Beck brought it up. Trump fixed it by 5:20 in the morning.
But Beck said something that deserves more attention than the midnight phone call. He posted on X: “I don’t want the GOVERNMENT classifying religions.”
That is the right instinct. And it points to a problem that goes beyond the LDS controversy. Because when the Pentagon published a list that sorted faith traditions into “Christian” and “not Christian,” it was not just making an administrative error. It was doing something the American Founders specifically designed the First Amendment to prevent.
The separation of church and state was never meant to keep religion out of public life. That is the left’s version, the one deployed to strip crosses from public squares and ban coaches from bowing their heads on football fields. The original version was the opposite. It was designed to keep the state out of the church.
Thomas Jefferson wrote his famous “wall of separation” letter in 1802 in response to the Danbury Baptists of Connecticut, who wrote to him not because they feared religion in government, but because they feared government deciding their religion. Connecticut had an established state church, the Congregationalists, who received taxpayer support and wielded state power. The Baptists were dissenters. They were second-class believers by government decree. Jefferson’s wall was their protection from exactly that.
Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island and planted the first Baptist church in America, used the wall metaphor even earlier. His argument was simple: government interference corrupts the church. The garden of faith must be separated from the wilderness of worldly power, or the garden will be consumed by it. Williams was not trying to protect the state from religion. He was trying to protect religion from the state.
James Madison understood this. In 1785 he wrote his “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” to defeat Patrick Henry’s proposal that all Virginians be taxed to support “teachers of the Christian religion.” Madison did not object because he disliked Christianity. He objected because government had no business deciding who counted as a teacher of it, or using public power to fund and thereby define it.
The moment you let the government classify what is and is not Christian, you have handed the state the power to determine the terms of faith. That is not a small thing. History is littered with the wreckage of that bargain.
Now, to be fair to Pete Hegseth: the intent behind the chaplain reform is not sinister. The argument for streamlining the codes is real and worth hearing. The old system had ballooned to more than 200 faith designations, many of which were never used by a single service member. Hegseth has stated that 82 percent of religious service members use just six of the existing codes. Chaplains are trying to serve men and women in combat, in field hospitals, in moments of crisis and grief. A laundry list of 200 religious classifications does not help a chaplain do his job. It buries him in bureaucracy when he should be ministering.
That is a legitimate concern. A chaplain assigned to a forward operating base cannot be expected to provide spiritually meaningful care across the full spectrum of 200 categories. Streamlining to give chaplains clearer, more actionable information about the soldiers they serve is a defensible administrative goal, and you can hold that view without being hostile to religious freedom.
But the line was crossed the moment a government document began sorting faiths into “Christian” and “other.” That is not administration. That is theology. And no federal employee, no matter how well-meaning, has the standing to perform it.
Here is the deeper truth, and it matters regardless of where you sit in a pew on Sunday.
You do not have to believe that Latter-day Saints are Christians. You do not have to agree with Catholic doctrine, or with the theology of a Baptist congregation three towns over. Americans have been arguing about those questions since before the republic existed, and they will be arguing about them long after we are gone. That is their right. It is your right. It is everyone’s right.
That is precisely the point.
The First Amendment does not protect only the religions you find theologically sound. It protects the free exercise of religion, full stop, for every American. The Catholic and the Quaker. The evangelical and the LDS member. The Sikh soldier serving in uniform. The Jewish chaplain. Every one of them. You do not have to share their convictions to defend their equal standing under the law. In fact, defending it for people you disagree with is the only meaningful test of whether you believe in it at all.
This is what separates America from a theocracy. We do not have a state religion. We do not have a government office empowered to issue rulings on which doctrines are correct and which believers are legitimate. That is not an accident of constitutional drafting. It is the whole design. The men who built this republic had just escaped a crown that used the Church of England as an instrument of political control, that punished dissenters, drove Baptists from their pulpits, and treated conscience as a matter of state authority. They were not building that again. They were building the opposite.
Look around the world at what the alternative produces. In nations where the government decides which religion is official and which believers are tolerated, the result is not order. It is persecution. It is minorities jailed for blasphemy. It is women executed under religious law administered by state courts. It is the machinery of government deployed to enforce orthodoxy at gunpoint. We look at those cultures and recoil. We should. And we should be honest about why we are different: not because Americans are more naturally righteous, but because our Founders built a wall that kept government’s hands off the question entirely.
The moment a Pentagon form starts adjudicating who is Christian enough to earn the label, a small brick comes out of that wall.
The Pentagon ultimately understood this. After the backlash erupted, the revised list removed the “Christian” label from all faiths and returned to simply listing the code and the name of the tradition. The agency released a statement, saying: “The Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks.” That is exactly right. It took a midnight phone call to get there, but the principle was ultimately affirmed.
Hegseth’s goal of strengthening the chaplaincy is worth pursuing. The men and women who serve this country deserve spiritual care that is real, informed, and responsive to who they actually are. That goal is best served by a system that names traditions accurately and equips chaplains to serve them, not one that forces the Pentagon to rule on which beliefs clear the bar for the label “Christian.”
Beck was right. The government should not be classifying religions. Not to favor them. Not to fund them. Not to rank them. Not to define them.
The wall Jefferson described runs in one direction. The government stays out. That was the deal from the beginning. And it still is.
Hannah Nelson is the Vice President of American Faith Media. While all facts presented in this article are accurate and supported by credible sources, any opinions or independent views expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any affiliated organizations or publishers.
