The Rev. Dr. David G. Latimore stood at a podium at Brigham Young University on Tuesday and unleashed a full-throated defense of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
You’ll remember that the Department of War initially left Latter-day Saints off its list of Christian churches when it released a reduced number of codes for the religious affiliations of America’s fighting men and women.
That was an act of deliberate misrepresentation, said the Rev. Dr. Latimore, director of the Betsey Stockton Center for Black Church Studies at the Princeton Theological Seminary.
“For some in this room, I suspect that this moment felt immediate and intimate and injurious, even,” he said at the 2026 Religious Freedom Annual Review at BYU, which is sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ.
“The entirety of the history of this community of faith is far broader than this moment,” he said, “but this moment certainly captures a portion of the church’s long struggle in being visible but also contested, committed to service but also caricatured, and present in the community but not always properly received.”
The Pentagon adjusted the new coding after Latter-day Saints and others protested. But instead of adding “Christian” to the church’s designation, it altered “the labeling architecture itself” to remove the term Christian from every denomination on the list, the Rev. Dr. Latimore said.
A supposed bureaucratic adjustment to simplify the codes for military chaplains who minister to soldiers was instead a revealing episode in the politics of public recognition, he said.
“This episode is instructive for us because a list of recognized religious communities, or the determination of which traditions are considered Christian or which ones are more consistent with the nation’s vision of itself is not mere record keeping,” he said.
“It operates as a kind of civic poetics where recognition can also reorder moral imagination in the public life.”
Identity is partly shaped by the recognition and mis-recognition of others, the Rev. Dr. Latimore said.
“Understanding that helps us to realize that the deliberate misrepresentation of the LDS faith tradition and the removal of other faith traditions (from the list) is important,” he said.
Latter-day Saints weren’t the only ones hurt when the Pentagon reduced its former list of 211 recognized religious affiliations to a list of 31 faith communities.
The Pentagon previously recognized the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Church of God in Christ, and the national and progressive Baptist conventions, among others.
Now they are all folded together under “Methodist” or “Baptist,” where he argued “the particularity of those faith traditions was thinned and flattened and absorbed.”
“To be misnamed, unnamed, or folded into or removed from large categories of public religious recognition is to encounter a confining public grammar,” the Rev. Dr. Latimore said.
Misrepresentation or removal can in the future affect whether a people’s particular witness is granted dignity and public legitimacy, he said.
“In that sense, the Pentagon’s list offers us a script or liturgy of inclusion and exclusion and a taxonomy of toleration,” he said.
“What does it mean for the state to misunderstand the theological identity by which a community knows itself?” he asked. “What does it mean to discover that one’s traditions, while contributing to the public good, are yet publicly misrecognized?”
The Rev. Dr. Latimore asked people to consider the effect on Black churches.
“They are culturally and doctrinally indispensable as interpretive tools to the very story of the Christian faith within America over the last 250 years,” he said.
President Dallin H. Oaks, like his predecessors as president of the Church of Jesus Christ, has said that the U.S. Constitution is an inspired document. However, he has said the original Constitution was “stained with concessions to slavery.”
The Rev. Dr. Latimore expressed concern that absorbing the Black church under a simplified label could erase the benefits it brings the country.
The Black church, he said, “embodies a theological, ecclesiological, historical and communal witness forged in the furnace of slavery, segregation, exclusion and the Black struggle for recognition of its divinely ordained dignity. ...
“These traditions are not reducible to generic phrases and categories, such as Methodist and Baptist, because they carry a particular memory, a particular music, a particular ecclesial imagination, a particular moral labor and a particular grammar of hope.”
He said the issue is important to religious freedom because that freedom “has always been most clearly understood by those forced to struggle for access to it.”
Finally, the Rev Dr. Latimore shared hope at America’s 250th birthday.
Black churches have unflinchingly called out the lived experiences of first slaves and then those who have suffered from racism, he said.
At the same time, they have continued to believe in what America can become.
“This is one of the greatest gifts of the African American church to this nation,” he said.
“The way forward requires more courage to believe that the nation can yet become more faithful to the promises that have so often been proclaimed and yet so unevenly practiced,” the Rev. Dr. Latimore said. “Maybe at this mark of 250 years, the most faithful way to honor the American experience is neither to romanticize it nor to reject it, but to recommit ourselves to completing it.”
My recent stories
Don’t be a jerk about religion, Latter-day Saint leader says (June 16)
About the church
You can now apply to volunteer at the historic Salt Lake Temple open house and celebration.
President D. Todd Christofferson visited the Liberty Bell and called religious freedom "the cornerstone of peace."
The church released a guide for the new Sunday meeting schedule.
For America 250, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints delivered semitrucks of food to all 50 states.
Take a look inside the doors of the recently renovated San Diego California Temple.
Open house and dedication dates announced for the Modesto California Temple.
Once ravaged by fire, Samoa’s first Latter-day Saint temple to close for extensive renovations.
I was a guest on the Church News Podcast to discuss my experiences and what I learned while covering Elder Gerrit W. Gong’s visit to Greece for a conference on AI and ethics.
What I’m reading
Here’s a must-read that includes BYU football: "A baby. An adoption. A plane crash. And a man’s search for his birth parents."
Behind the scenes
