Tag: religion

Dept. of War removes Wicca, about 180 other belief systems as recognized religions

The Department of War recently dropped approximately 180 belief systems from its list of recognized religions for U.S. military personnel, including Wicca and other neo-pagan faiths.

A May 20 memo issued by the Undersecretary of War Elbridge A. Colby and signed by Anthony Tata, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, trimmed the list from 211 faiths to 31, according to Military.com.

The move intends to “streamline the DoW collection of religious preferences for service members to enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy,” said the memo, which ordered the revision of the “religious affiliation codes” to go into effect within 60 days.

“The new list will provide chaplains with clear, readily available information that will better enable them to anticipate the religious support needs of service members and to provide religious support activities that align with service members’ personal faith and practices,” the memo added.

Some of the belief systems that have been removed from the list include atheism, which was replaced by a general “no religion” or “agnostic” designation; pagan or Earth-based faiths such as Wicca, Druidism, Heathenism and members of The Troth; New Age beliefs such as Eckankar, Rosicrucianism, shamanism and spiritualism; as well as other alternative belief systems, including Deism, Unitarian Universalism and practitioners of “magick.”

The religions that remain are various denominations of Christianity, Buddhism, Mormonism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism and the Baha’i faith.

The directive ultimately came from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who pledged last year to overhaul the military’s Chaplain Corps by refocusing it on religious ministry and eliminating what he called secular influences.

Hegseth announced the initiative in a video message on Dec. 16, 2025, that promised to “make the Chaplain Corps great again” and condemned New Age notions in the “Army Spiritual Fitness Guide” that he ordered eliminated.

Hegseth, an Evangelical whose church is affiliated with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), has repeatedly promised to root out diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and other “woke garbage” from the Pentagon. He has drawn scrutiny during his tenure as Secretary of War for his use of Christian rhetoric, such as invoking imprecatory psalms against the enemies of the United States, weeks after the U.S.-Israeli attack against Iran.

An anonymous U.S. Army veteran who is ordained as a priest in Wicca and the neo-pagan faiths of Ásatrú and Druidism expressed anger to Military.com about the new list. The individual, who served three tours in Iraq, claimed it “rekindled that anger” they felt upon allegedly being discriminated against by military chaplains 20 years ago for being a self-described pagan.

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UK Cop Fired For Questioning Islam In ‘Safe Space’

A Christian police community support officer lost his career after asking a Muslim colleague about jihad and Hamas atrocities during a diversity session that promised open discussion. At the same time, training drilled “white privilege” into police ranks.

Luke Salmons, a 46-year-old Christian father of two and respected PCSO with North Yorkshire Police, relates how he attended a mandatory training day on race, religion and culture. Trainers spent several minutes marching up and down the room chanting “Islam is a religion of peace” repeatedly. A Muslim sergeant then spoke about his faith and invited questions in what was presented as a “safe space” where “there was no such thing as a bad question.”

Salmons asked what the sergeant, as a peaceful Muslim, thought about the situation in Gaza and atrocities carried out by Hamas and other groups in the name of Islam. He also asked what jihad meant to him. The discussion was civil. The sergeant later invited Salmons for coffee to continue the conversation privately.

Salmons brought a book on the topic to work. Colleagues photographed it in his locker and reported him as a risk. An inspector then suspended him, declaring “I don’t like your beliefs.” Salmons noted the obvious double standard: no inspector would ever say that to a Muslim officer.

He was suspended on full pay for months, resigned under pressure in April 2025, and faced gross misconduct proceedings. Supported by the Christian Legal Centre, he appealed. Chief Constable Tim Forber overturned the dismissal before Salmons had even finished presenting his case. There was no apology and the episode devastated his family.

“I loved my job and I was good at it. I was well respected as a PCSO and my colleagues said they loved working with me and couldn’t understand what was happening. But an overzealous inspector took against me and that was the end of my career, even though I had done nothing wrong,” he related.

“It devastated me and my family. For months we lived in total uncertainty, with my reputation being shredded in secret. I resigned not because I had done anything wrong, but because the silence, the delay and the pressure became unbearable for my wife and daughters,” Salmons added.

This is the new reality inside parts of British policing: open discussion of uncomfortable facts about Islamist ideology is treated as career-ending wrongthink, while entire days are devoted to chanting slogans and centring one faith above others.

The same ideological pressures are visible in operational failures. In the Henry Nowak case, an 18-year-old white British student was stabbed five times. He told responding officers he had been stabbed and could not breathe. Instead of treating him as a medical emergency, officers handcuffed him after his attacker falsely claimed racism. The attacker was allowed to walk away. An inquest is examining whether the handcuffing contributed to Nowak’s death.

The police watchdog investigated itself and declared no wrongdoing.

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Who is Funding Fulani Militants Killing Christians in Nigeria?

The Fulani militant campaign is the deadliest source of violence against Christians in the world. Of 36,056 civilian killings across Nigeria between 2019 and 2024, 47 percent were directly linked to Fulani militias, according to the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa. In states where attacks occur, Christians were murdered at a rate 5.2 times higher than Muslims relative to population size, with three Christians killed for every Muslim. Fulani militants were responsible for 55 percent of recorded Christian deaths between 2019 and 2023, nearly seven times the number killed by Boko Haram and ISWAP combined.

Kidnapping is also a primary funding mechanism. ORFA documented 29,180 civilians abducted between 2019 and 2024, with individual raids regularly exceeding 100 victims, including 287 students seized in a single attack in Kuriga, Kaduna State in March 2024 and more than 300 taken from St. Mary’s Catholic School in November 2025, the largest school kidnapping on record.

Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics found that Nigerians paid $1.42 billion in ransoms from May 2023 to April 2024 alone. Those payments helped finance the next round of attacks while forcing Christian families to liquidate farmland and other assets to secure the release of relatives. Victims and community leaders report that after attacks drove Christians from their villages, Fulani groups often occupied the abandoned land, reinforcing claims that territorial expansion is a key objective of the violence.

The kidnapping-for-ransom economy that now partly sustains Fulani militant operations is a later development, not the original funding source. Three streams capitalized the campaign before kidnapping became viable: wealthy Fulani cattle owners, northern political and military patronage, and cross-border jihadist networks.

Since the 1980s, wealthy Fulani cattle owners have supplied fellow tribesmen with AK-47 assault rifles. Cattle profits are converted directly into weapons, while Christian communities surviving at a subsistence level often cannot afford firearms. Even when they can afford them, assault rifles are prohibited under Nigerian law, which is rigorously enforced against sedentary Christian farming communities while being largely ignored in the case of nomadic Fulani herders.

A 2025 peer-reviewed study by Texas Southern University researchers states directly that Fulani militants’ access to sophisticated weapons “is not surprising because they are financially supported by cattle owners through Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN),” the organization the study identifies as financing the transformation of fighters who once carried knives and bows into units deploying assault rifles and AK-47s.

MACBAN’s institutional reach extends to the highest levels of northern Nigeria’s Islamic establishment. Founded in 1979 with the support of the Sultan of Sokoto, the Emir of Zazzau, the Emir of Katsina, and the late Emir of Kano, the organization counts former President Buhari, the son of a Fulani chieftain and a retired army major general, as its life patron.

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Christians Are Being Hunted Like Sport

There is nothing covert about what is happening to Christians in Nigeria. The men carrying out these attacks are not hiding their intentions. They are broadcasting them.

Survivors report that Islamist Fulani militants tell them directly, as they burn their homes and cut down their neighbors: “We will destroy all Christians.”

That is not the language of a land dispute or a tribal conflict, no matter how many times the Nigerian government has tried to frame it that way. That is a religious extermination campaign, and it is being carried out in the open, with near-total impunity, while most of the Western world looks the other way.

Of the 4,849 Christians killed for their faith worldwide in the past year, 3,490 of them, 72 percent of the global total, were killed in Nigeria. No other country on earth comes close to those numbers, and yet Nigeria rarely trends on social media.

It rarely leads the evening news. The massacres come and go, and the world moves on.

According to a report by the Society for International Human Rights, an average of 30 Christians were murdered every single day in Nigeria throughout 2025. Going back further, since 2009, an estimated 125,000 Christians have been killed. More than 19,100 churches have been burned to the ground, and over 1,100 Christian communities have been seized and occupied by jihadist forces.

To understand what those numbers look like on the ground, consider what happened in Benue State on the night of June 13, 2025.

Fulani militants surrounded the village of Yelwata after dark. Julius Joor, the village head, described what he witnessed — attackers shooting and killing people, forcing families out of their homes, pouring fuel, and setting houses on fire. When it was over, approximately 150 Christians were dead.

That was a single night, in a single village, in a country where this happens constantly.

These attacks do not even stop for the holiest days of the Christian calendar. On Palm Sunday 2026, militants entered the predominantly Christian community of Angwan Rukuba in Plateau State and opened fire on residents, killing at least 30 people.

Reports from nearby communities indicated that at least 10 more were killed the same day in separate attacks.

Palm Sunday. The day Christians around the world celebrate Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and Nigerian believers were being shot in the streets.

Sen. Josh Hawley has publicly labeled what is happening as genocide. Sen. Ted Cruz introduced the Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act. The Trump administration officially designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern for religious freedom violations.

These are meaningful steps, and they deserve recognition. But designations do not bury the dead, and accountability has so far remained largely on paper.

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USDA Secretary Faces Lawsuit for Explicitly Christian Messages to Employees

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has been speaking openly about the Christian faith — and some secularists do not like it.

A lawsuit filed on May 13 by groups like Americans United for Separation of Church and State on behalf of multiple USDA employees claimed that Rollins’ pattern of “proselytizing Christian messaging” violates the First Amendment.

The complaint whined about messages like an email sent to all USDA employees on April 5 — which was Easter Sunday.

“He is risen indeed!” the message said, per a report from The Christian Post.

“From the foot of the Cross on Good Friday to the stone rolled away from the now empty tomb, sin has been destroyed. Jesus has been raised from the dead,” Rollins wrote.

“And so like the very first disciples to encounter our risen Lord in the Upper Room almost two thousand years ago, this Easter let us too be alive with hope, full of Paschal joy, and confident in the mission each of us has been called for,” it added.

The email made no demands of USDA employees to become Christians or otherwise tried to link the Easter holiday to their roles and responsibilities.

Rollins reacted to the lawsuit on social media, indicating that she does not regret sending the communications.

“It’s just another opportunity to remind everyone: He is Risen,” she wrote.

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Girl Kept from Church, Bible, and Christian Friends by Portland Judge Awaits Appeals Court Ruling

Despite her love of Christianity, a young Maine girl has been prevented since 2024 from going to church, attending religious holidays, being “exposed” to the Bible or other scriptural literature, and even having Christian friends — all because of a judge’s order in a parental rights case.

The draconian restrictions have been in place for some 18 months as Emily Bickford and her daughter Ava, 13, wait for a decision on an appeal to the state’s Supreme Court eight months ago after Portland District Judge Jennifer Nofsinger issued the shocking ruling in late 2024 as part of a dispute between the girl’s parents.

Not only has the ruling impacted the lifestyle and pursuit of happiness by both mother and daughter, on its face it appears incompatible with the founding principles of the United States.

The right to worship granted by the First Amendment is not in the grip of any judge to grant or abolish, the Portland mother told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview this week.

“That is not theirs to take away,” Bickford said. “It’s in our Declaration of Independence. Our forefathers knew we had inalienable rights given by God. God gave us the freedom to worship him, and there’s no government that can take that away from us.”

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Massachusetts Public School District Permits Sikh Students to Carry Knives While Banning Weapons for All Other Students

Hopkinton Public Schools in Massachusetts has a policy that carves out a specific religious exception to its strict no-weapons rule, allowing initiated Sikh students to carry a ceremonial knife known as a kirpan on school grounds, while prohibiting knives, guns, replicas, and other weapons for every other student.

The policy, formally created in 2024, makes Hopkinton the first school district in the state to explicitly accommodate the kirpan for Sikh students.

These policies have received new scrutiny following the sentencing of Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old Sikh man convicted of murdering 18-year-old British university student Henry Nowak in Southampton, England, on December 3.

Digwa stabbed Nowak five times with an 8-inch dagger he carried in addition to a kirpan.

Under the district’s general weapons policy, possession of any “dangerous weapon” is banned on school premises, at school-sponsored events, or on school transport. This includes guns, knives, pocket knives, slingshots, brass knuckles, explosives, ammunition, and even replicas or toys that resemble weapons.

Violations can lead to suspension, expulsion, police referral, and possible exclusion by the School Committee.

However, the policy includes a dedicated section titled “Considerations for Recognized Religious Artifacts Resembling Weapons.”

It directs that sacred religious articles must be approved annually before the start of each school year or before the student begins carrying the item. The district evaluates exceptions based on school safety and reserves the right to suspend permission during specific events.

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ATIP records show Edmonton mayor deferred to NCCM during campaign against police chief’s Israel trip

As antisemitic hate crimes continue to surge across Canada, newly released access-to-information records reveal Edmonton Mayor Andrew Knack was actively coordinating with and relaying the concerns of the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) and affiliated activist groups during the controversy surrounding Edmonton Police Chief Warren Driechel’s trip to Israel.

The records raise an uncomfortable question: Why was city hall treating the NCCM coalition as its primary stakeholder while appearing to give far less weight to Edmonton’s Jewish community?

The controversy began after Driechel participated in a professional development trip to Israel alongside other North American police leaders. The trip focused on public safety, emergency management, cybersecurity and counter-terrorism.

Almost immediately, the NCCM, the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities and more than two dozen affiliated organizations launched a campaign against the chief, demanding answers and ultimately suggesting that, absent satisfactory responses, Driechel should resign.

Behind the scenes, the newly released records show Mayor Knack repeatedly directing police leadership toward NCCM.

“The best starting point for organizations to engage with is the letter sent by NCCM which lists out many organizations,” Knack wrote to the police chief and police commission chair.

Knack did not merely pass along the coalition’s concerns. He endorsed them.

“I think the three questions that community have raised are reasonable questions to be answers,” he wrote, referring directly to the demands contained in the NCCM-led coalition letter.

The mayor also offered city hall’s assistance in arranging a meeting between the activists, the chief and police leadership.

“Finally, NCCM would like to meet with Council and both of you all together. Our office is more than willing to help coordinate,” Knack wrote, adding that “this would be hosted by NCCM” and that “they would be leading the meeting.”

Knack went even further, recommending NCCM-connected figures as advisors to police leadership.

“Both were formally involved with the Edmonton and/or National parts of NCCM and have been taking calls and meetings non-stop since Tuesday and would have some excellent insight if there is interest,” he wrote.

The contrast with the treatment of Edmonton’s Jewish community is striking.

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The Left’s New Favorite Christian Politician Has a Theology Problem

There’s been a ton of talk about James Talarico, the Democrats’ nominee for the Senate seat in Texas, and how he claims that Christianity is a left-wing faith. The left so desperately wants it to be true, even as so many leftists reject Christianity.

A couple of mainstream media outlets are hyping up Talarico as a new kind of Christian politician. What they’re inadvertently doing is revealing how out of touch with true Christianity Talarico actually is.

If you want an idea of how far out of the mainstream Talarico’s theology is, check out the first few paragraphs of a profile of the candidate’s pastor in the New York Times:

On a recent Sunday morning at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, Jim Rigby asked his congregation to share what came to mind when he mentioned the Apostle Paul, the major Christian figure to whom 13 books in the Bible are attributed. They cheerfully complied:

“Villain!”

“Homophobic!”

“He’s a jerk.”

Paul’s attributed writings include passages seen as encouraging wives to submit to their husbands and instructing them to be quiet in church, and others condemning same-sex sexual behavior as sinful.

Mr. Rigby acknowledged the trouble. But in a sermon that also cited the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddha, he nudged his congregation to reconsider the apostle, one of the most important in the early Christian church. “Aristotle and Plato, they were creeps, too, in modern times,” Mr. Rigby said. “But do we want to learn from our ancestors or not?”

That fourth paragraph gives a lot away. We expect the Times to approach everything from the left, so of course, it would judge the Apostle Paul to be on the “wrong side of history,” to use that phrase the left loves so much.

But the article tells us much more about the faith environment Talarico grew up in. His pastor:

…does not use male pronouns for God, for example, because it is a kind of “violence” to imply to a girl that her brother is more like God than she is, he said in an interview after the service. He does not use the word “Lord,” because it conjures a wealthy, European, male God, he said. For that matter, he added, he does not much care for the word “God.” He uses it on occasion, he said, but he tries to use synonyms, because “it’s going to mean something different to everybody.”

In his sermon that morning, he had referred to “the creative impulse of the universe,” which “can be called God, but it doesn’t have to be called God.”

This is the environment that shaped Talarico’s views on faith, scripture, and theology. No wonder he doesn’t sound like any mainstream Christian.

The Atlantic gives the game away with a ballsy headline: “Texans Will Decide if Jesus Was a Lefty.” In this piece, Elizabeth Bruenig repeats the lie that podcasters Joshua Haymes and Brooks Potteiger called for Talarico’s death, when, as I wrote in March (see the link below), the two men were using the biblical language of killing Talarico’s sin nature and arguing that he should be, in Paul’s words, “crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20).

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Pentagon Cuts the Faith-Code Maze From 200-Plus to 31

The Pentagon just cut its list of religious affiliation codes for service members from over 200 down to 31. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the reform in March as part of a broader effort to refocus the Chaplain Corps.

Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Anthony Tata later released the memo making the change official. The old system had sprawled into a giant administrative junk drawer, stuffed with codes many troops never used and chaplains didn’t need to serve the force. From Just the News:

Undersecretary of Defense Anthony Tata released the memo, stating the change will “streamline the DoW collection of religious preferences for service members to enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy,” according to Military.com.

“The new list will provide chaplains with clear, readily available information that will better enable them to anticipate the religious support needs of service members and to provide religious support activities that align with service members’ personal faith and practices,” Tata said. 

Hegseth said the previous system had grown to “well over 200 faith codes,” called it “impractical and unusable,” and noted many codes were never used at all. He also said 82% of religious service members use only six of the codes. From Religion News Service:

Hegseth has been explicit about his Christian faith. He worships at a church run by a self-described Christian nationalist and has held Christian worship services at the Pentagon. He has pushed social media messages that mix war preparations with Bible verses as well as official statements that champion a disputed, faith-focused version of U.S. history.

In 2017, during the first Trump administration, when the military expanded the number of recognized religious faiths it said it was doing so to provide “more accurate demographic data for religious groups,” to enable “better planning for religious support to the force” and to provide “a better assessment of the capabilities and requirements of each Military Service’s Chaplain Corps.”

The reform renames the old “faith and belief coding system” as “religious affiliation codes” and returns the list to a simpler purpose: providing chaplains clear information so they can support troops in line with their stated faith background and practice.

The new list keeps broad religious categories that cover the faith service members report most often. The list includes Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, agnostics, and major Christian groups such as Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, and others.

The dropped codes include atheism, Asatru, Eckankar, New Age churches, paganism, spiritualism, Troth, Unitarian Universalism, and several Wiccan groups.

It’s time to cue the usual panic choir, warming up somewhere between “theocracy” and “how dare the database stop flattering my boutique label.”

There’s an argument that the change could make smaller faith groups less visible in the military system, where Hegseth’s chaplain reforms are part of a wider Christian emphasis at the Pentagon.

Those concerns deserve a hearing, but the policy doesn’t ban any service member from worshipping, seeking accommodation, speaking with a chaplain, or holding any belief.

A code list isn’t the First Amendment.

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