Lex Anteinternet: Sunday Morning Scene. Religion in the military.: The Department of Defense scaled back its list of recognized religions. There were 211, now there are 31. Here is the full list: Agnostic...
The big flap over the Pentagon's new list of religions, mostly focused on the LDS insisting it be recognized as a Christian religions which at least conventional Christianity holds that it is not, is obscuring the fact that frankly the list may not matter all that much.
All the list does is to provide some guidelines on anticipating the patrol needs of troops. T/he prior list was so large there was no way that it was useful. The original list, Protestant, Catholic and Hebrew, was probably too narrow, in the modern world, to be useful.
Arguably the current list is too big. It'd make more sense, actually, to have Mainline Protestant, Evangelical Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Judaism, Islam and Other. Every one of those categories, it might be noted, has various groups within it. Probably only Catholic expresses a singular religious group, but even there, there are a lot of Catholic rites. The Orthodox are a collection of Orthodox churches and have a major division between Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox.
Anyhow, that's probably more useful.
Of note, listing religions isn't an endorsement of them.
About 70% of all service members are some sort of Protestant. 20% are Catholic. I've given the figures already, but the number of LDS troops is very small, although in National Guard units from Utah the opposite would be true. At least one religion on the list discourages its members from joining the military and last had any presence in the military when there was conscription in place.
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