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...
And a happy ending, or at least an ending, occurred to this story when the Pentagon redid its classifications to read as follows:
It's actually not a bad reclassification, although a person does hae to wonder why, in order to make a non Christian religion happy, the Christian identification was taken away from actual Christian religions.
One of the major newspapers ran statistics for the various religions in terms of the what percentage of the military is comprised of them. While there are Mormons in the military, the percentage is infanticidally small. As noted earlier, however, there would be units in the military that would be heavily made up of Mormons, principally Guard and Reserve units in Utah. Their spiritual needs would be different than those of Christian religions, however, which would gain importance in a large scale war.
According to exit polls form the last general election, 64% of Mormons voted for Trump in the last election. 20% voted for Harris. 56% of Catholics did, with 41% voting for Harris. Catholics are a much larger demographic than Mormons and Trump has interestingly shown little concern about enormously offending them. 68% of Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant religion in the country, went for Trump. Southern Baptist, I suspect, are probably the largest Christian denomination to be upset by the reclassification, if they are.
I don't know that I have a strong opinion on the list being reworked to address Mormon concerns, but I would note a couple of oddities about it. One is that that the U.S. Government didn't define them as Christian, although they seem happy with the result. The second is that what Trump may say aside, he doesn't love Mormons anymore than he loves anyone else.
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