Here’s What Pete Hegseth’s Religion Believes About Mormons

Last week, the Pentagon released a new list of 31 religions officially recognized by the US Department of Defense, edited down from more than 200 that had previously been accepted. The purpose of streamlining, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement, was not to delegitimize any one religion, but rather “to allow chaplains to quickly look at the religious composition of their units and determine how they structure resources to best provide for warfighters of all faith groups.”

But to some religious groups, the new list looked biased. Of the 31 groups listed, 22 were Christian. Atheists, pagans, and humanists, which had all been on the original list, were excluded. But the loudest complaints were about its structure. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints noted that while their faith was included, it had been sequestered from other Christian faiths—which they saw as part of a pattern of some denominations refusing to recognize LDS members as fellow Christians.

Indeed, Samuel Perry, a professor of rhetoric at Baylor University who studies Christian nationalism, noted that it wasn’t until evangelicals rallied around LDS politician Mitt Romney during his run for president in 2008 that mainline Christians accepted LDS as a Christian faith. That was, said Perry, “completely a political change in order to be able to move centrally around one candidate.”

Last week, after the Pentagon released its list, Utah’s two Mormon senators made their objections known on social media. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) tweeted, “Can anyone tell me why The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was left out of the list of Christian churches?” Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) was more pointed in his tweet:

Latter-day Saints are among the most patriotic, service-oriented individuals in our country. They are also unequivocally Christian—just look at who is in the name of the Church.

It is unacceptable for a government entity to characterize a faith in a manner that contradicts the… https://t.co/ywqk59ZtRz

— Senator John Curtis (@SenJohnCurtis) June 6, 2026

On Monday, the Department of Defense released a new list—and that version did list LDS as a “Christian” faith. But the Pentagon’s perceived slight is still roiling Christian social media, with some accounts rushing to defend the LDS church, and others, like firebrand pastor Joel Webbon, declaring to his 111,000 followers**,** “Mormons will go to hell.”

So was the original listing of Mormons apart from other Christian faiths simply an oversight, or a snub? In a tweet about the newest version of the list, the DOD claimed the former. “The Pentagon list included redundant and unnecessary labeling,” the agency said in a tweet on Monday, “and the mistake has been fixed.”

But in the past few days, some accounts on social media have pointed out that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth belongs to a Christian nationalist denomination—called Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC)—that holds that Mormons aren’t Christians.

Which wouldn’t be terribly significant in the grand sweep of religious beliefs—except that CREC explicitly advocates for Christians to exert their faith’s influence over the government. Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho, pastor who founded CREC, has described his vision of “a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ and the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed.” He has long argued in favor of Christian nationalism, and he has likened his fiefdom in Idaho—which includes a church, school, college, and publishing house—to a “working prototype” of what Christian nationalism could look like.

One theological point of distinction between LDS and other Christian denominations is that LDS members don’t accept the Apostles’ Creed because it states that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are all one entity. In contrast, Perry, the Christian nationalism scholar, noted the LDS church teaches that they are three distinct beings. From Wilson’s description of his ideal version of America, it appears that everyone would have to live by the Apostles’ Creed—whether they believed in it or not. In Wilson’s Christian America, said Perry, “Anything that falls outside of the doctrinal vision that Wilson or CREC have would fall outside of what they consider to be kind of a true belief in Christianity, so there’s kind of an exclusivity that’s being cultivated.”

Over the last few years, Wilson has begun to move in influential political circles, speaking at the National Conservatism conference with Vice President JD Vance and appearing at an event about Christian political strategy with Project 2025 architect Russell Vought. Last year, he planted a new CREC church in Washington, DC, where Hegseth often attends services. Most significantly, in February, Wilson delivered a sermon at the Pentagon, at the behest of Hegseth.

In an email, Wilson confirmed that CREC’s version of Christianity doesn’t include Mormons. “We would consider the Mormons to be a non-Christian faith with Christian terminology,” he wrote, and added that his church would consider LDS people to be “polytheists.”

The LDS Church did not respond to a request for comment for this story, and the US Department of Defense directed me to its tweet about the most recent revision of the list.