cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47886949
Mormon leaders, military veterans and elected officials reacted with anger to a new Department of Defense policy that does not consider The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be a Christian religion as part of a wider effort to cut down the U.S. military’s list of recognized faiths.
“The Pentagon’s decision to list The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints apart from other Christian faiths is wrong and needs to be corrected,” Republican Rep. Mike Kennedy, of heavily Mormon Utah, wrote on X on Sunday.
Can Jehovah’s Witnesses and Scientologists count?
I follow this Mormon mommy blogger, for years now, simply for the hell of it, and the family normally vote for Republicans, but they held their nose and voted for the Democrats the last three elections simply because of Trump. It would not surprise me if several Mormons did that, he’s kind of extreme for a lot of them.
Why the fuck is the military of a country, especially one with supposedly separated church and state, maintaining an official list of religions??? Why is the defense secretary choosing religions???
Normally it’s so the armed forces can provide access to religious services as needed, and accommodate funeral rites if necessary. But just as with most other things this administration uses it for discrimination.
very specifically regarding the funerary rites: associated with the official list of religions is the official list of religious symbols. if you’ve never been to a US veteran’s cemetery, well based off the two i’ve been in they are beautiful. peaceful. every headstone is the same: name, branch, highest rank, birth and death dates, and some religious symbol (chosen from the official list). might be more, we haven’t actually looked at the graves in a while we just go to visit.
i don’t know how many symbols there were before, but if there were 30 to choose from among the 200 various “official” religions, the move would be at least a little plausible. but it’s really just easier to have a list of religions and a list of symbols to choose from and let folk choose whatever they want. having never enlisted, i would hope that’s already the process but i don’t know and i mean this is government we’re talking about. even when they’re acting in good faith they don’t always make any rational sense.
also, that sounds like a perfect bikeride out to visit Grandpas E and G (not related) tomorrow, maybe today. i could go get some scones.
Chaplains. The original chaplains were added to Roman military and were the official state religion. They’re been a staple of warfare since. Their official role is to serve as spiritual and moral support, like a therapist or counselor (particularly before those professions existed). It serves the soldier to have council in difficult times, it serves the state as a proper pep talk helps keeps desertion rates down (with a whole fun new layer of soft power to make the soldier more dedicated to the craft), and it gives the chaplain a fulfilling job.
In America, we have at times pretended that religious diversity is a virtue. Chaplains are less effective if the soldier cannot believe the chaplain shares their values. Thus to keep the tool effective, chaplains and soldiers register their faith beliefs, so that when crisis comes the leaders can pair chaplains in the most effective ways. Add a touch of bureaucracy and you get a list of codes and their associated faiths.
My understanding is that for a long time the list had six options, but in … 2016(?) they decided to get comprehensive and basically tried to document any spiritual/belief structure that a soldier could have. They got ~211. Even at peak usage, there were a good dozen options on the books that didn’t have any active practitioners in the military.
Of course, with the current MAGA in charge, all that diversity and inclusion is treated as a waste of taxpayer dollars and thus has to go. Personally, I think chaplain programs should be sunset in favor of said therapists and counselors, but I get why having a lever to shift soldier morality (not constrained by the science underpinning counseling) is simply too useful to let go.
Have the day you voted for
On the one hand, as an Ex-Mormon, LOL.
On the other, maybe it helps depress gop voter turnout and makes sure the Democrat wins their new district in central Salt Lake City. And maybe MAGA finds Utah is a lot less inclined to run through walls for them in 2028. Nobody does “stoically endure oppression, real or perceived” quite like Mormons.
The way DoD did this is also classic Bible thumper Protestant shit, right out of a Chick tract. Mormons are absolutely not Nicene Christians, but they profess to follow Jesus of Nazareth, so if they want the gummint to lump them in with the Christians, it takes a special kind of stupid and short-sighted religious pedant not to humor them.
ooo, you think this is enough to get Dallas to add the Oath of Vengeance back into their worship?
Have a little faith in Whiskey Pete. He’s exactly the kind of stupid and short-sighted religious pedant you’re looking for.
Mormons are absolutely not Nicene Christians, but they profess to follow Jesus of Nazareth,
Is a bit like
Naturopaths are absolutely not germ-theory doctors, but they profess to practice wellness and healing,
as a way to shoehorn Brenda with the essential oils into the category of “doctor”. At the point where you’ve denied one of the few definitional traits of the category, you have to admit you don’t fit into it anymore, you can’t just pretend the definition doesn’t actually exist. It’s like being a lawyer who doesn’t deal with legal matters, but they have a bunch of ideas their college roommate came up with about how to run a country while he was high before dropping out of the first semester of law school.
I guess, but that’s some pretty unnecessary gatekeeping when one is dealing with the definitions assigned by a secular government who, in your analogy, is not in the business of evaluating wellness and healing practitioners’ truth claims at all. All the various outgroups that became heretics when a very political conference wrapped up in Asia Minor didn’t suddenly stop identifying as a Christians, and the fact that some provincial American conman steeped in Great Awakening Protestantism inadvertently reinvigorated some of their ideas 1500 years later doesn’t make it nonsensical for his marks and their descendants to self-identify as Christians. The state has a very good reason (and no bar) to evaluate whether a given “healthcare provider” is going to harm the public by claiming certain titles, but the situation with religion is very different, particularly for a bit of minor military bureaucracy (historical contextisn’t even really relevant here). Unforced error by the MAGAs.
Now, IMHO Mormonism is a pretty toxic, high pressure religion, and it believes some shit that strikes the modern mind as particularly goofy, but it’s a religion with a creed that’s very clearly arising out of the Christian tradition. If you want to take different magic sky-daddy theology at face value, then sure, within that framework you can reasonably draw a line and declare anyone on the Arianism line of it as “not Christian,” but that’s not the US government’s job. Absolutely not the hill for the Department of Defense to pick at all, much less to die on, but if it makes some Mormons disillusioned with one oppressive cult of personality, then that could be a good thing.
Yeah, I dunno why this is the DoD’s job to hash out, I’m with you there. That part is the Christian Nationalism nasty bullying around.
I get you need chaplains, but IMO just use the official endonyms of each group without trying to categorize or subcategorize, and call it a day and let the chaplains match themselves up.
If I were a Catholic in the military and I got an LDS chaplain (or vice versa) for my religious rites, I’d be upset. So just treat all the little groups as their own little things if you must change something.
yeah, i hear you. chaplains usually are trained to provide religious services to religions outside their own spiritual niche. that explicitly requires ecumenism and that concept is anathema to Salt Lake City.
Yeah, that’s the main gist. DoD is straying from their lane because Hegseth is a raving Christian Nationalist, and not even one of their better advocates, and that is a LOOOOOOW bar. This all stems from a published list, screenshot in the article, that still includes Mormons but doesn’t preface them with “Christianity” like it did for the others.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he personally redlined a Word doc to delete “Christianity” from the Mormons’ line before approving it for release, and maybe without any particular emotional animus, just parroting what he remembered from Sunday School that one time he wasn’t hungover. The fact that the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Adventists made the cut might also argue for there not being a ton of theological rigor to the decision.
I think Mormons get too defensive about wanting to be included in other Christians’ theological definitions of Christianity (literally can’t happen… The Mormon Trinity is polytheistic by almost any standard, to say nothing of extra books and other heterodox beliefs), but those invested in one group or another’s theology can overlook that there are other contexts (shared history, cultural practice, self-iidentification, etc. etc.) that can generate just as much passion and be internally reasonable. It’s almost like the separation of church and state is a pretty good fuckin’ idea, especially in a pluralistic republic…
nope the wall between church and state fell. vote for me and i’ll make everyone worship Llama God. I’m sure there’s a llama god somewhere.
“a secular government” in theory only.
And then they came for the mormons.
I ain’t saying shit. Fuck them cultists. I’ll see em in the camps.
😂
I’m just surprised they let insurrectionists into the military.
But are you really?
deleted by creator
