Conspiratorial medievalism: History and hyperagency in the far-right Knights Templar security imaginary

Introduction

In recent years, imagery associated with the Knights Templar (KT) – in their full name the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, a Christian military order active between 1119 and 1312 – has appeared in the public discourse and symbolism of white supremacist groups in a variety of democracies. Participants of the 4 June 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, for example, displayed numerous templar crosses (CBC Radio, 2017). In January 2020, Donald Trump Jr posed with an assault rifle emblazoned with a templar cross and an ammunition magazine depicting Hilary Clinton behind bars (Pullman Bailey, 2020). Both the English Defence League (EDL) and the Norwegian Defense League have displayed similar symbolism, with the EDL also occasionally dressing in ‘quasi-knightly garb’ (Koch, 2017: 16). Far-right groups in Brazil have also increasingly relied on European medieval imagery (Pacha, 2019). References to KT symbolism are frequent in white nationalist online chats and platforms from Reddit and YouTube to 4chan, 8chan, and the neo-Nazi site Stormfront (Perry, 2017). Medievalism, its imagined ‘European’ histories, and its peculiar aesthetics are being mobilised in the service of contemporary white supremacy.

This idea of the Knights Templar is also central to racialised security imaginaries linked to distinct violent acts. Knights Templar Order International, for example, a UK-based organisation, is suspected of having contributed material to Serbian armed militias in northern Kosovo (Cosic et al., 2018) and also claimed to collaborate with ‘migrant hunter’ groups in Bulgaria in 2016 (International Report Bigotry and Fascism (Irbf), 2016). Most infamously, the man who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011 displayed a Templar cross on the cover of his manifesto and also dedicated it to the Templars (AnonymousB, 2011). ¹ The 2019 New Zealand (NZ) shooter, who murdered 51 people in two different mosques, directly referenced the Norwegian shooter as a ‘Knight Justiciar’ in his own manifesto and claimed to have sought a blessing from the ‘reborn Knights Templar’ before the attack (AnonymousA, 2019: 13, 24).

Recent scholarship has sought to examine the international political theory of the New Right, showing both its standing as a distinctive international imaginary and its multiple historical lineages (Abrahamsen et al., 2020; De Orellana and Michelsen, 2019). However, while these scholars have emphasised the need to take it ‘seriously as a theoretical perspective and an ideological project’ (Drolet and Williams, 2018: 285–286), there have been selectivities at play in what elements of new-right discourses are examined, and therefore ‘taken seriously’. The aforementioned studies have focused mostly on structured political statements, campaign speeches, and works by intellectuals. This focus on formally political speech risks excluding not only other substantive parts of the discourse but also core aspects of its international circulation and mobilisation capacity (Bergmann, 2018; Simi et al., 2016). The KT images above are part of discourses that are frequently dismissed as pathological and marginal (Fenster, 2008: ix; Ortmann and Heathershaw, 2012: 54). Against this, we start from the premise that in order to fully capture the political projects of the far-right and their internationalisation, we also need to take into account these imaginaries and the violences impelled by them. We approach the KT as a form of discourse that, far from being ‘fringy’ or epiphenomenal to a somehow more serious far-right thought, operates socially and politically as a mode of interpreting history and expressing security claims (Ortmann and Heathershaw, 2012: 54).

We argue that KT discourses constitute a specific violent, racialised security imaginary, which we term conspiratorial medievalism. The notion of a security imaginary calls attention to the fact that securities and insecurities are discursively produced through ‘fixing of meanings to things, an identity to ‘the self’ and others, and the relationships that are thus instituted’ (Pretorius, 2008: 100), thus enabling specific patterns of action and violence. By bringing together the historical literature on medievalism and sociological scholarship on conspiracy theory, we unpack three core moves undertaken within the imaginary of conspiratorial medievalism.

First, this imaginary calls into being a cyclical understanding of history characterised by a transhistorical fight between White Christianity and a number of racialised and treacherous enemies, both external and internal. Second, KT imaginaries are characterised by a racialised understanding of agency – hyperagency – wherein elite individuals are constituted as causally driving and controlling history. Upon this reading of agency, and in contrast to other conspiratorial thought, KT imaginaries constitute the threat to racialised Christianity as not only ontological (in terms of the ‘survival’ of White Christianity) but also epistemic. By putting forward a different understanding of history and the social world, contemporary social movements such as feminism threaten the KT conception of hyperagency. Third, as a result, to ‘defend’ Christianity and the epistemology of hyperagency, conspiratorial medievalism mobilises the medievalist image of the Knight. Constituting members and conspiratorial adherents in these ‘righteous’ terms facilitates a displacement of hyperagency onto the KT themselves, thus enabling a supposed White ‘reclaiming’ of hyperagency in order to violently instantiate a specific racist worldview.

Empirically, conspiratorial imaginaries are difficult to study. Some conspiracies are ‘real’, in the sense that a good deal of investigative journalism resembles a conspiracy theory until empirically substantiated (Fenster, 2008: 7; Rosenblum and Muirhead, 2019: 8–10). Others, like the KT, fail to proffer a singular narrative – or even conspiratorial problematique (e.g. who shot John F Kennedy (JFK)) – through which to limn the phenomenon: the enduring cultural proliferation of KT imagery across extremist groups, online chat rooms, violent manifestos, and popular culture products offers a troublesome and ill-defined corpus. To address this, we make a number of methodological choices. Most importantly, we limit our focus to explicitly political mobilisations of KT imagery. Given the stakes of violent white supremacy, we examine the discourses of groups and actors explicitly engaged in the discussion and promotion of political violence. Under this broad rubric, we look at several actors to account for the breadth of the phenomenon and illustrate its internal variation. We first examine the manifestos of the Norwegian and NZ shooters. Published online shortly before the shootings in 2011 and 2019, both manifestos include over 1600 pages of text and image. Second, we examine the online environment of two self-proclaimed KT civil society organisations: the Knights Templar Order International (KNOI) and the Knights-Templar UK (KTUK). While both present themselves as heirs to the medieval Templars, the methods they advocate range from charity events to explicit support of political violence and paramilitary organisations. We examined their official websites, blogs, daily links, video channels, and comments sections to capture both institutional and informal dynamics. The vast majority of this material is in English, which has become a lingua franca for white supremacist claims. While this introduces limitations into the scope of the conclusions, the imaginaries we examine are not limited to English-speaking countries.

To unpack this racialised security imaginary, this article proceeds in three steps. First, we show how KT imagery constructs a transhistorical White Christianity as a constantly threatened group that must be, and deserves to be, rescued from decline. Second, we demonstrate the ways in which this romanticised, racialised medieval imaginary has converged with classical and contemporary modes of conspiratorial narrative to produce the security imaginary that we term conspiratorial medievalism. Finally, we demonstrate the ways in which ‘hyperagency’ is constituted as both a source of threat, when inappropriately exercised by racialised Others, and a source of ‘salvation’, when reclaimed by a ‘righteous’ White knight, who enacts white supremacist violence on behalf of the imagined group.

Knights Templar medievalisms

The Templars were a medieval Christian monastic order founded in approximately 1119. Originally created to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land, the order represented a particular combination of piety and military knighthood ideals in the aftermath of the First Crusade (Barber, 1994). It possessed castles and enclaves throughout Latin Christendom and over time broadened its mandate beyond faith-related activities into different areas, such as financing Popes and secular rulers. As a result of a changing religious climate after the 1291 fall of Acre and the struggle between the Pope and King Philip IV of France, the Order was dissolved in 1312 (Barber, 2002).

The Templars have not existed for over 700 years. And yet, their imagery – such as the characteristic Templar cross in red on a white background – and name are frequently invoked by white supremacists. These references are continuous with broader medievalisms, that is, social uses and mobilisations of a medieval past (D’Arcens, 2016; Utz, 2011), which range from popular culture to political rhetoric or tourism (D’Arcens and Lynch, 2014; Pugh and Weisl, 2012). Far from innocent historical accounts or banal romanticised fantasies, uses of the medieval constitute both past and present subjectivities and produce distinct political effects. The Bush administration’s repeated invocation of a ‘crusade’ after 9/11, for instance, helped facilitate the invasion of Iraq (Holsinger, 2007).

The Templars have made recurrent appearances in classic and contemporary literature, from Ivanhoe to the Da Vinci Code; they also feature repeatedly in film, such as Arn – The Knight Templar. Templars also figure prominently in tourism advertisements and experiences throughout Europe, from medieval fairs to thematic bicycle routes and castle visits. We can therefore identify a broad set of Knight Templar medievalisms, with various degrees of relation to the historical Templars, that discursively constitute heterogeneous images of the KT and within which current white supremacist mobilisations can be situated. For example, there are direct commonalities between Templar cosplay at a fair, the selling and use of a ‘sexy templar costume’ (Amazon, 2019), and KNOI (n.d.-c) offering a ‘Full Knight and Regalia Package’ that includes a cape, gloves, jewellery, and a beret. The imaginary behind white supremacist KT references, however, cannot be reduced to these more banal (Elliott, 2017), seemingly playful practices.

White supremacist invocations of the KT must also be contextualised by a long history of right-wing, racist medievalisms. Most infamously, Nazism mobilised a variety of medievalisms in art, architecture, propaganda, and overt ideological statements (Wistrich and Holland, 1995), while the Ku Klux Clan repeatedly appealed to the imagery of medieval chivalry (MacLean, 1995). This continuity between right-wing and broader societal medievalisms is not happenstance. On the one hand, however obvious, supremacist groups are part of society and thus draw from and reproduce broader social imaginaries. On the other, the way in which right-wing medievalisms are embedded into these broader social discourses is crucial for their promotion and dissemination, in some cases as a deliberate strategy. The concept of Selbstverharmlosung – ‘making oneself appear harmless’ – for instance, has gained increasing purchase among German-speaking right-wing milieus (Kubitschek, 2017). The idea is simple: by drawing on everyday, apparently harmless tropes, right-wing groups can present themselves as socially acceptable and mainstream, thus broadening their base. KT imagery conforms to this dynamic while at the same time putting forward a distinct, racialised security imaginary.

Conspiratorial narratives

This sense of transhistorical ‘double suffering’ (Hofstadter, 1964) points us towards the defining characteristic of the KT security imaginary vis-à-vis other medievalisms: its entanglement with logics of conspiracy. Following the resurgence of interest in conspiracy theory within Politics and International Relations as meaningfully political, rather than pathologically epiphenomenal (Aistrope, 2016; Aistrope and Bleiker, 2018; Greenhill and Oppenheim, 2017), we examine the way in which conspiratorial thought contributes to not only constitution of a particular, racialised historical imaginary, but also the conditions of possibility for exclusionary, often violent, action.

Conspiracy theory, briefly, is ‘an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who attempt to conceal their role’ (Sunstein and Vermeule, 2009: 205). This logic is immediately evident within KT discourse. KTUK (n.d.-a) exhibits a concern that contemporary society is manipulated by powerful elites, including the media, at the behest of governmental agencies. KNOI (n.d.-b) presents educating the public and lawmakers ‘in the nature and origins of the chief [. . .] scourges of the “modern” world: liberalism, globalisation, and the Satanic agenda of the New World Order, international finance, social Marxism and Islamism’ as one of the organisation’s key aims. Each presents a vision of contemporary events as determined – purposively – by a coordinated body of global elites (Keely in Rosenblum and Muirhead, 2019: 24) who, again, betray an idealised, White Christian Europe.

This narrative of secretive elites controlling global events is articulated via reference to a variety of other broadly-circulating conspiracy theories. The Hidden Templar, a political commentary YouTube series linked to KNOI (2019d: 1′19″), for example, taps into existing climate change conspiracies (Uscinski et al., 2017) by explaining that ‘the idea of a worldwide climate crisis was concocted by ideologically committed internationalists to provide the excuse for a radical shift away from national sovereignty to global governance through the United Nations’. Conventional right-wing conspiratorial tropes also appear: the ‘New World Order’ is attributed to everyone from the Freemasons to the Illuminati, underscored by enduring anti-Semitism (Rupert, 1997: 116 fnt.18). ‘Cultural Marxism’ operates as a shorthand for left-wing political values and actors (Mirrlees, 2018: 49). KT discourse thus reflects a classic conspiratorial grammar that is intent on ‘exposing’ the threat powerful elites pose to transhistorical Christianity. Crucially, here, despite the mythologising of the KT, they are not themselves the conspiracy, but its investigators – or, rather, its champions.

Conspiratorial medievalism: Hyperagency and the modern knight

In this section, we demonstrate that the conspiratorial medievalist imaginary involves a displacement of hyperagency from its traditional association with conspirators to, instead, the agent(s) revealing the conspiracy. As observed by Rosenblum and Muirhead (2019: 31), ‘the new conspiracists imagine that the plotters they expose have an effective organization and an indomitable capacity for action. But they evidence none of that themselves’. The KT security imaginary, however, is not passive, but consistently leveraged to communicate and justify white supremacist violence. It simultaneously expresses deep epistemic insecurity and a vanguardist view of the KT as nearly omnipotent agents of White security. In this way, the ‘Knights Templar’ attempt to performatively recapture the hyperagency they view as usurped from White men. To bring our argument full circle, medievalism is central to this political move. The image of the knight provides a ‘reformist’ project that can be enacted.

In the KT imaginary, the conspiracy of the elites is highlighted at the same time as the ‘theorist’ themselves is constituted into a conspiracy of their own. While history is a cyclical contest between transhistorical Christianity and its enemies, it evolves through specific hyperagential acts. These need not be limited to enemies, but can also be undertaken by the ‘theorists’: KTUK (n.d.-a), for example, explains that ‘We do know though, that as with most things in life that are done, they can also be undone’. In most conspiratorialism, uncovering the conspiracy is the way the theorist seeks to effect change. As Fenster (2008: 125) observes, ‘through the interpretive act of conceiving a “proper” history that constitutes an acceptable final outcome . . . the hero inserts himself into the real social and political order presented in the conspiracy narrative’. Extremist KT discourses go beyond this. KTUK (n.d.-a) describes itself in terms of a ‘Fifth Column . . . where any group of people, undermine a larger group, such as a nation . . . from within’. The idea of a ‘Fifth Column’ displaces hyperagency from elites to the ‘theorist’, constituting him as a (hyper)agent of change.

The image of the knight and the associated notion of chivalry are essential to this displacement. Chivalry and knighthood have an actual medieval history and are used in a variety of historical sources to describe social practices of the 11th–15th centuries (Kaeuper, 2016). Modern, lay interpretations of knights, however, originate in the 19th-century Romantic movement. In a context of broad social changes, Romantic nationalism looked back to the Middle Ages as a moment marking the strength of the different national characters, and thus providing the basis for reformist projects of society.

The historiographical reacquaintance with chivalry provided a template for constructing a new image of how individuals should conduct themselves in society. This vision, not unlike many KT discourses today, was individualist and violent, highlighting the importance of Victorian norms of moral conduct. In this reimagined chivalry, ‘fighting was deemed a necessary and indeed glorious activity, but its potential barbarity was softened by putting leadership into the hands of men committed to high standards of behaviour’ (Girouard, 1981: 179). This was articulated through a highly gendered image of the knight, who ‘distinguished by inherent virtue provide[d] muscular enforcement of proper morals and behaviour …. [and] present[ed] the ideal model toward which all male should at least strive’ (Kaeuper, 2016: 13).

This 19th-century image of the knight pervades conspiratorial medievalism. KNOI (n.d.-a), for example, explain that they ‘welcome into membership people who are natural leaders and . . . are prepared to make a stand to defend all they hold dear regardless of the cost’. They also offer a code of Chivalry to which members must adhere. Similarly, KTUK (n.d.-b) proclaims its mission as ‘helping to reclaim our once great nation and to help our most vulnerable’. At the same time, this is articulated in clearly agential language: ‘the world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them, without doing anything’ (KTUK, n.d.-b). The transhistorical knight is a masculine, agential, and violent individual attached to a strong moral code concerned with protecting society and the vulnerable.

The knight thus resonates closely with the epistemology of hyperagency. The specific meanings projected onto the knight, however, enable a more detailed differentiation of social positions within the security imaginary. Paralleling contemporary conspiratorial anxieties regarding capitalism and globalisation, 19th-century notions of the knight proffered an individual ideal through which ‘excessive and soulless materialism . . . might be purged’ (Kaeuper, 2016: 16). The knight therefore anchors a contrast between the ‘bad’ hyperagency that is usurped by ‘inappropriately’ White elites and racialised Others, and the ‘good’, ‘righteous’ hyperagency of the KT. This vision of agency, in contrast to the more implicit, universalised racialisation of the liberal political subject, is actively produced as explicitly exclusionary, particularistic, and White (Wynter, 2003). This collapse of particularistic White agency and morality within KT discourses both make self-interested and socially responsible hyperagency possible – while limiting its exercise to White Christian men.

This distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ racialised hyperagancy crosscuts the KT security imaginary. Critiques of modern individualism and self-interest are ubiquitous. KNOI (n.d.-a) claims that ‘Collectivism is a category opposite to the prevailing individualism of today. Individualism, as the legacy of bourgeois society, is nothing more than a hypertrophied egotism, which stems from pride’. The NZ shooter similarly denounces ‘a society of rampant nihilism, consumerism and individualism, where every individual is a competitor and the rights of the individual override all notions of responsibility. In this hell, the individual is all and the race is worthless . . .’. (AnonymousA, 2019: 44). Illegitimate individualist hyperagency is thus not only behind the threats to White Christianity, but more fundamentally is a threat to the epistemology of conspiratorial medievalism. It threatens not only the legitimacy of racist White violence on behalf of transhistorical Christendom, but also the ability to exercise hyperagency at all. The White knight, as a violent and ostensibly moral actor, is presented as the ‘righteous’, and historically necessary, solution to this problem.

Conclusion

Conspiratorial medievalism is frequently dismissed as pathological, epiphenomenal, delusional, or simply silly. From the perspective of a modern liberal political sphere, it is not hard to see why. Various KT actors make false claims not only about racialised Others and shadowy global elites, but also their own membership numbers, power, and control. The KNOI falsely claimed to have sent ‘migrant monitors’ to Hungary in 2015 (ASA, 2015). The Norwegian shooter’s manifesto contains multiple claims to working within KT organisations and secret societies in the United Kingdom (AnonymousB, 2011), but there is no evidence that this was the case (Gardell, 2013). What these liberal analyses of racist, historicised conspiracy miss, however, is that it is precisely the vernacular of conspiracy that makes them politically effective and dangerous.

To catch these politics, we have to pay attention to a security imaginary where not only White Christianity but also a particular, hyperagential epistemology is under threat. KT security concerns and political violence are ultimately a matter of (re)claiming the existence of hyperagency itself, and with it, the White capacity for action and worldly control. As a result, simply claiming that White hyperagency exists, claiming that agential acts are indeed possible and being undertaken, is enough. It is not the specific content of false assertions as to membership, threat, or heritage, but the making of the false assertions per se that should be read as a political intervention. In KT worldview, the appearance of racist violence and actual conduct of racist violence are empirically levelled and politically conflated in the service of substantiating White hyperagency.

The seemingly irrational, ‘fringy’, or silly nature of conspiratorial medievalism is precisely the point. This has two important political consequences. First, the fact that the point of the KT security imaginary is performatively instantiating a White Christian polity – and White capacity for agency and control – through illiberal insistence that it is already true suggests that simply attempting to ‘mythbust’ their claims, or sideline particular actors or groups, will not work. It may even play into their implied strategy of vanguardism and fundamental disavowal of structural accounts of social change. Second, there is a risk that the hyperbolic and extreme claims of the KT, conspiratorial medievalism, and other (re)imagined White European histories – such as the neo-Norse allusions seen at the January 2021 insurrection in Washington DC – come to define our contemporary understandings of white supremacy.

The KT’s conspiratorial imaginary simultaneously facilitates a denial of racism through appeals to culture, tradition, and cartoonish aesthetics and a reduction of white supremacy to these overtly racist and violent actors. Conspiratorial medievalism, and other far-right White histories, provide an alibi, via perceived irrationality and extremism, for the continuity of white supremacy across contemporary political institutions and much of right-wing politics. They both claim reasonableness and make the rest of the white supremacist political constellation look reasonable by comparison. Though we may have very real political and analytical concerns about indirectly legitimating white supremacist groups by interrogating their politics and worldviews, it also seems irresponsible to look away.