How Many Points Does It Take To See The Line?
The federal government just officially de-recognized my faith
Editor's note: This post was updated shortly after publication to correct errors in the section identifying faith traditions that were removed from the military's recognized codes list. Specifically, the Quakers and the Church of the Brethren were incorrectly listed as removed — both retain codes on the new 31-item list. The analysis has been corrected. The audio recording reflects the original version and has not been updated.
That’s me. The short one on the right. In the center is another UU minister, and our colleague on the left is Presbyterian. We were standing in a line of clergy, forming a barrier between the people gathered in grief in Injustice Square during the Breonna Taylor protests in Louisville, KY in 2020. At this same time, the Three Percenters and Proud Boys (right wing extremist groups) assembled across Jefferson Street. The police had their backs to the armed right-wingers and their eyes on the peaceful protesters. That day I was scared shitless, but at least we all could see what was coming at us. What I’m writing about today is harder to see, but the threat is just as real.
I’m writing this fast. I almost didn’t write it today because I’ve a lot going on. Less than a month until I wrap up in Indianapolis and move into my van full time. So I saw this news last night but didn’t have a chance to process it. Too many tabs open, literally and figuratively. Too many planes to land.
But then I woke up to texts, facebook tags and messages. Many from Christian friends who sent apologies, declarations of solidarity, and strings of hearts. One just wrote: I’m so sorry.
That’s when my brain finally clicked in.
Here is what happened. On June 4 (yesterday, as I write this), the Department of Defense, under the direction of War Secretary Pete Hegseth, reduced the number of officially recognized military faith codes from more than 200 to 31. The change was formalized in a May 20 memorandum signed by Anthony Tata, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness. Among the approximately 180 designations removed: Atheists. Humanists. Deists. Pagans. Wiccans. Druids. Shamans. New Age practitioners.
Unitarian Universalists.
The remaining 31 codes include Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, and a range of Christian denominations.
A UU colleague who serves as a Reserve Chaplain — who has known this was coming since December — put it plainly today: this doesn’t currently affect chaplain endorsements or active service. But it does mean that a Unitarian Universalist service member cannot have a code in their official military personnel record indicating their faith. My colleague also noted something important: being officially de-recognized by the U.S. government, even within one branch, is a traumatic experience — not just for those in uniform, but for all of us. We should recognize this as a moment of pastoral need for all of us, they wrote, not just those in uniform.
We have been officially de-recognized.
The administration’s explanation is administrative efficiency. Hegseth said the previous system “had ballooned to well over 200 faith codes” and was “impractical and unusable.” Fine. Hold that framing while I show you what else has happened — in sequence, in order, because the sequence is the point.
January 20, 2025. Day one. DHS rescinds the longstanding policy restricting immigration enforcement at houses of worship. Sanctuaries are no longer protected. The UUA joins more than two dozen denominations in a federal lawsuit the same month.
February 2025. Trump creates a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” across all federal departments, baselessly accusing the previous administration of targeting Christians. The White House Faith Office is reconstituted under a prosperity gospel pastor. The frame is established: one faith is under siege, all others are the threat.
May 2025. Trump establishes the Religious Liberty Commission by executive order, claiming it will “defend religious liberty for all Americans.” Its membership is exclusively Christian except for one Orthodox Jewish rabbi. No Muslims. No Hindus. No Buddhists. No Sikhs. No UUs. No nonreligious Americans who represent 30% of the country. One commission member, Eric Metaxas, posts publicly that “Islam is a death cult.” This is the body now tasked with defining religious freedom in America.
September 22, 2025. Trump signs an executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. I still don’t get this. Aren’t most of us against (anti-) fascism? But I digress…
September 25, 2025. Three days later, a national security memorandum directs federal agencies to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt nonprofits the administration claims support terrorism. The language covers views the administration describes as “anti-Christianity, extremism on migration, race and gender, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American beliefs.” That is not a legal definition. It is a political one. Any of the faiths now removed from the military list could meet it.
December 2025. Legislation is introduced in Congress giving the Secretary of the Treasury power to label nonprofits as terrorist-supporting organizations and strip their tax-exempt status. One bill. That’s all it takes to end most congregations.
February 2026. A multifaith coalition sues to block the Religious Liberty Commission as unconstitutional. A Muslim American leader testifying says: “We have seen firsthand how elevating a singular religion above others leads to the oppression and possible persecution of minority faiths.”
April 2026. The Department of Justice indicts the Southern Poverty Law Center — the organization that tracks hate groups — on criminal charges.
May 20, 2026. The faith code memo is signed.
June 4, 2026. It becomes public.
I’ve been watching for this particular step since last September. I knew something like it was coming.
How many points does it take to see the line?
Now. Who is actually on this list because UUs are not the main story, IMHO.
I’ve seen a list circulating online of what appears to be the actual 31-code list from the memo. Take a gander:
What’s Gone: Unitarian Universalists. Pagans. Wiccans. Humanists. Atheists. Deists. That part you’ve heard. But the following faiths have also been removed
United Church of Christ, a mainline Protestant denomination with over 800,000 members, whose General Synod formally voted to call ICE’s unmasked enforcement actions “domestic terrorism” in an official denominational resolution.
African Methodist Episcopal Church — 2.5 million members, 7,100 congregations, founded in 1816 as a protest against racial discrimination, whose Council of Bishops issued an official statement of "very strong opposition to the leadership and policies of this president and administration." Also gone.
Mennonite Church USA — the named plaintiff in the federal lawsuit against this administration over immigration raids at houses of worship. The case is literally called Mennonite Church USA et al. v. United States Department of Homeland Security. They sued the federal government over religious freedom.
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) — also a plaintiff in that lawsuit, with more than 3,000 congregations.
The list does include a “Christian - Other” category and an “Other Religions” catch-all. The administration will point to those and say nobody is excluded. But “Other” is not recognition. It is erasure. Ask any Mennonite service member whose denomination sued the federal government over religious freedom and is now erased from military records whether “Christian - Other” feels like their faith is recognized.
Interestingly, the Church of the Brethren (a lawsuit plaintiff ) kept their code. The Quakers (who actually filed the first lawsuit) kept their code, too. The Episcopal Church (another lawsuit plaintiff) kept their code. So this is not simply “everyone who sued got erased.” Someone made specific choices about who stays and who goes. Those choices don’t follow any neutral administrative logic I can identify at this moment.
Of the organizations removed that I could verify, every single one had formally opposed this administration. And the ones who also sued but kept their codes? That’s something to keep your eyes on.
This is not a coincidence. It’s not streamlining.
This is a list.
So let me name where this list leads. Because this pattern has a history, and the history is absolutely not ambiguous.
Scholars of authoritarianism describe religious persecution as a process, not an event. It doesn’t arrive as a single dramatic moment. It arrives as paperwork. As memos. As administrative reclassifications that can easily be explained as something else. Here is what the process looks like, step by step. Here is where we currently stand on that map.
Step one: Establish the official religion. Define who is legitimate. Whose faith the state recognizes and protects. This administration has been explicit: the Religious Liberty Commission is composed almost entirely of Christian nationalists, and its meetings have “expressly promoted the view that the United States was founded as a Judeo-Christian nation.” Everything else is, by implication, outside the circle of protection.
Where we are: This step is complete.
Step two: Remove official recognition from minority faiths. But don’t ban them! Not yet! Just stop counting them. Stop naming them. Make them invisible in official records. Make it harder to serve them and advocate for them because they don’t officially exist in the data. This is exactly what the May 20 memo does for the military. But what’s next? More than half of the 2,800 members of the Church of the Larger Fellowship — our UU congregation without walls — are incarcerated. Over 1,700 people behind bars identify as Unitarian Universalist. When your faith doesn’t exist on the official list, you depend on the goodwill of individual administrators for a chaplain, a study group, a religious text. Goodwill is not a right. People behind bars cannot fight for themselves. That is exactly why this matters right now.
Where we are: This step happened yesterday.
Step three: Define minority faiths as threats. The September 2025 terrorism memo already does this in broad strokes — any organization seen as “anti-Christian” or holding views hostile to “traditional American beliefs” is now potentially a domestic terrorism concern. The Religious Liberty Commission is building the theological and legal framework to formalize that designation. When a faith community organizes, protests, or sues the government — all things the removed denominations have done — it becomes easier to argue they are not merely different but dangerous.
Where we are: The framework is being built.
Step four: Strip financial and legal protections. This looks like tax-exempt status revoked, clergy housing allowances challenged, nonprofit designations removed. The bill to give the Treasury Secretary power to strip tax-exempt status from “terrorist-supporting” organizations is already written. It passed the House once. It did not clear the Senate last time but it will come up again. Without tax-exempt status, most congregations cannot survive. Without clergy housing allowances, most ministers cannot afford to serve. This is not hypothetical. This is a bill with a sponsor and a vote count.
Where we are: The legislation exists. The votes are being whipped.
Step five: Remove physical protections. Sanctuaries are no longer protected from ICE. That happened on day one of this term. Police can now enter religious institutions. Enforcement can interrupt worship. The Mennonites sued over exactly this and are now erased from military records. The Church of the Brethren sued. The Quakers sued. They are all gone from the list. The sequence is not coincidental.
Where we are: This step is complete.
Step six: Harassment, surveillance, and prosecution of religious leaders and organizations. The SPLC was indicted in April 2026. Progressive nonprofits are under investigation. The terrorism memo explicitly authorizes the FBI and IRS to “follow the money” into religious organizations. Clergy who lead sanctuary churches, who organize protests, who sign open letters opposing administration policy, who write posts like this one — we are not outside this frame. We are exactly what this frame was built for.
Where we are: This step has begun.
Step seven: Arrest. I know how that sounds. I know how it reads. But history is not ambiguous on this point. We can see this sequence play out in Germany in the 1930s. The Jehovah's Witnesses were not a political threat. They were a small, pacifist religious minority who refused to swear loyalty oaths. In 1933, they lost official recognition. By 1935, they were banned from civil service and their organizations criminalized. Their tax status was stripped, their property seized, their publications banned. By 1937, thousands were being arrested. By 1938, they were in concentration camps. Five years. From paperwork to camps in five years. I’m not saying we are Nazi Germany. I’m saying this sequence is known, scholars have documented it, and we are in it. We do not get to say we didn't know what it was.
Where we are: We are not at step seven as far as I know. Yet. We are at step six. The distance between them is not as large as we would like to believe.
So, what can we do? There is a 60-day revision window in the May 20 memo. It closes around July 19. This is what I’m recommending:
Right now, today: Contact the DoD. State your faith tradition. State that you or someone you love has served. Tell them that removing a faith from official recognition is not streamlining. It is erasure, and erasure has a history.
This week: Contact your Congressional representatives. Reps. Huffman and Raskin have already demanded answers from the DoD about how service members from minority faiths will access chaplain support. Your representative should be on record too.
Reach beyond your bubble: Share this with your Pagan friends, your atheist neighbors, your humanist relatives, your Wiccan colleagues, your UCC and Mennonite and Quaker friends who may not know yet they’re on this list. This is not a UU story. This is a story about which Americans the federal government has decided count and what happens, historically, when governments start making that list.
Sign on: The UUA’s action network and the Interfaith Alliance are organizing. Coalition is the only answer here.
My Christian friends sent sympathy this morning, and I receive it. The line of clergy in that photo were standing between the vulnerable and people who wanted to harm them. Some were Christian. Some were UU. Some were neither. They were there because religious freedom is not divisible. We defend it for everyone, or we lose it for everyone.
Seen on a protest sign: "We are 3 lines into the 'first they came for...' poem. It's not a very long poem folks."
Quaker is on your list of the remaining 31, which is ironic since we're one of the peace churches.