Conspiratorial medievalism: History and hyperagency in the far-right Knights Templar security imaginary
| Published date | 01 November 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211010983 |
| Author | Katharine M Millar,Julia Costa Lopez |
| Date | 01 November 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Race and Security in World Politics |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211010983
Politics
2024, Vol. 44(4) 588 –604
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957211010983
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Conspiratorial medievalism:
History and hyperagency in
the far-right Knights Templar
security imaginary
Katharine M Millar
London School of Economics, UK
Julia Costa Lopez
University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Abstract
Imagery associated with the Knights Templar appears in the public discourse and symbolism of
many white supremacist and white nationalist groups. The 2011 Norwegian mass murderer cited
the Templars in his manifesto, as did the 2019 New Zealand shooter. Templar crosses were on
display at the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina. To understand
the security imaginary behind these racialised medievalisms and their contemporary animation
within right-wing extremism, this article develops the concept of ‘conspiratorial medievalism’. The
Knights Templar imaginary blends a specific, racialised, and romanticised vision of history with the
grammar of conspiracy theory. This is characterised by (a) a belief in the racialised decline and
victimisation of a ‘righteous’ White Christendom; (b) a sense of threat posed by racialised Others
and betrayal by insiders; and (c) an anachronistic view of near-omnipotent individual agency.
Significantly, conspiratorial medievalism demonstrates an aspiration to not merely combat ‘undue’
agency of racialised Others, but to reclaim and perform extreme agency themselves. Agency is
cast in the idiom of medieval chivalry and framed as the moral obligation of righteous White men.
Although Knights Templar imagery may appear superficial, this article finds it is an important
justificatory and enabling discourse for racist violence.
Keywords
conspiracy, Knights Templar, medievalism, race, security
Received: 23rd September 2020; Revised version received: 18th January 2021; Accepted: 15th March 2021
Corresponding author:
Julia Costa Lopez, University of Groningen, Oude Kijk in ‘t Jatstraat 26, 9712 EK Groningen, The
Netherlands.
Email: j.costa.lopez@rug.nl
1010983POL0010.1177/02633957211010983PoliticsMillar and Costa Lopez
research-article2021
Special Issue: Race and Security in World Politics
Millar and Costa Lopez 589
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 embla-
zoned 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 dress-
ing in ‘quasi-knightly garb’ (Koch, 2017: 16). Far-right groups in Brazil have also increas-
ingly 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 con-
temporary 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 per-
spective 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 struc-
tured 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 politi-
cal 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 imagi-
nary, which we term conspiratorial medievalism. The notion of a security imaginary calls
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