ENDING THE COSMIC WAR - WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BELIEVE IN THE COSMIC WAR
AND WHY IT AFFECTS US ALL
I have been asked what the problem is, as in “I don’t believe in any Cosmic War. I don’t believe there is an unending battle between good and evil or God and the Devil. It doesn’t affect me. I live in a secular world.” That is a good question, and most of the people I know are like that. They don’t get to discuss the Cosmic War at the Christmas barbecue. However, the Cosmic War does affect us all, and we don’t notice, for two reasons. One is because it is so backgrounded. It feeds into our media, and into how we feel about our moral choices. It also affects us because even if we don’t believe it, powerful people do.
Kia Ora Tatou, and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, with Karen Effie.
I want to be a bit topical, so I am going to talk about the lovely Pete Hegseth. Pete Hegseth is what happens when you believe in the Cosmic War.
I have no special information about Pete Hegseth, and everything that needs to be written about how dreadful he is, has probably been written. What I aim to do here is what I always do, to take a bunch of information and put it together in a new way. Hegseth is Donald Trump’s pick to run the Pentagon, to be Secretary of Defence. He is ex-military, and his back story seems to be that he went from a rather debauched life as a Fox News presenter who was forced out of his roles running military-related non-profits, to a thoroughgoing fundamentalist Christian who nevertheless retained his bellicosity and misogyny. His bid to run the Pentagon may fail because of his past indiscretions. However, he has had his influence through the Fox news platform and his books, and he is unlikely to fade from public view.
Much has been made of his tattoos, which are interesting if you know anything about the far right. He has a slightly modified Jerusalem Cross on his chest, and the words Deus Vult tattooed on his arm. “Deus Vult”, which means “God will it”, gives me particular chills, because the far right shooter of the Christchurch massacre in 2019 had this written on one of his weapons. I was in Christchurch at the time and I was the angriest libtard in the world on that awful day.
Both tattoos take us back to the Crusades. A conventional study of the Crusades attributes them to a number of causes, including the thorny issue of what to do with a whole class of under-occupied knights, violent young men with not enough to do and trained only in warfare. Crusaders sacked cities, pillaged, and engaged in the beginnings of widespread anti-Semitism. Many poorer Crusaders died on the way to Jerusalem. Some were plainly opportunistic, but many were caught up in the millennialism of the day; they possibly felt blessed and inspired and enraptured, and they were part of something holy and bigger than themselves. The enemy, which varied from the Muslims in the Holy Land to Jews in Iberia, were clearly evil and to be destroyed. They were fighting the Cosmic War.
When you fight the Cosmic War, you are so damn motivated. You are hard to stop. You are on the side of ultimate good. You are bound to win, in the end. Suffering is no deterrent; it is to be welcomed. You are part of a small band of exceptional warriors. You are on that Ewok planet trying to disable that whatever it was, can’t remember, doesn’t matter, so Luke Skywalker can blow up the Death Star. You are misunderstood, even persecuted, but that doesn’t matter, because you have righteousness and truth in your bones. You are blessed. You are inspired. You are enraptured. “Many Bothans died to bring us this information….” And so on.
The Crusades have a patina of spirituality even now. Remember how popular those Dan Brown novels were, twenty years ago. There is a cluster of tropes that goes: King Arthur/Holy Grail/Avalon/Knights Templars/Christendom, and it is alluring to those in the spiritual community, and also among the far right. Partly it feeds into the atavism I have mentioned earlier, that there was once a Golden Age and that we are diminished. It is also redolent of an illumined type of history, past where the Divine reaches down to humanity and guides events, sometimes in cryptic ways that only the wise or the chosen can discern. The Cosmic War is of course the overarching narrative of illumined history.
The far right loves the Crusades. What do I mean by the far right? Here is a description by Charlotte Gauthier in the introduction to “The Crusades and the Far-Right in the Twenty-First Century:
“When we use the term ‘far right’, we mean nothing more than a heterogenous collection of individuals professing a set of political beliefs that include ultra-nationalist, reactionary, illiberal, authoritarian, and often racist and/or nativist tendencies.”
I kinda like this description (you can’t really call it a definition) because it brings the whole thing down to size. It does not see the far right as systematic or even coherent. The Christian nationalists of which Pete Hegseth is one, fit here.
So, starting again, the far right loves the Crusades. The obvious reason is that they generally dislike Islam, and they have a heap of mainstream backing for that following 9/11. Immediately after the twin towers went down, George W Bush used the term “crusade” to describe the United States retaliation. What is disturbing is that this was the word that was on the tip of his tongue. Crusade maps onto redress or even revenge – against the Muslims for occupying the holy land, against Muslims in the 2000s who were accused of hating on our freedoms and taking over our cities. The far right uses tropes like the veneration of Frankish leader Charles Martel (The Hammer) who beat back the Arab army in the Battle of Tours in 732. They agree with nineteenth century British historians who saw this battle as the saving of Europe from Islam. Terrorists Brenton Tarrant and Anders Breivik both held this view and some of Tarrant’s manifesto is straight from that of Breivik. Thus, the Cosmic War is expressed in a thousand-year story of a battle with Islam, a battle which is spiritual and cultural as well as physical.
Pete Hegseth has stated that the tattoos are misunderstood as just expressions of his Christian faith. So, let’s have a look at his Christian faith. Again, all of this is well-known, and I am just trying to join it all up in a slightly different way. Hegseth has (I suspect) reverse-engineered his account of his military career to detect the hand of God, but his Christian faith took a turn two years ago when he joined a church associated with reformed reconstructionism, an ideology led by Doug Wilson. Wilson is an extreme dominionist. Dominionism is the name given to the group of Christians who believe the Lord should be present in everything. Everything – education, culture, politics, the home, the bedroom. This is linked to a particular type of apocalypticism called premillennialism. Premillennialism is the idea that Christ returns before the eschaton, the end of the world, like maybe a thousand years before, and so it is the job of good Christians to prepare the world and make it perfect for Christ. Christians are thus justified when they attempt to rule the world. I mean rule the world. This means ending the “woke left”, ending secularism and civil rights and the separation of church and state. For Doug Wilson, it means that slavery was not such a terrible thing. For Pete Hegseth, it means no women in the armed forces, ferocious border control, waging an ideological war against education (he wrote a book about this, talking about it as a war a lot), and the inevitability of a violent civil war in the USA in the near future.
Hegseth’s 2020 book “American Crusade” exhorts conservatives to undertake “an AMERICAN CRUSADE”, to “mock, humiliate, intimidate, and crush our leftist opponents”, to “attack first” in response to a left he identifies with “sedition”, and he writes that the book “lays out the strategy we must employ in order to defeat America’s internal enemies”. This is according to Jason Wilson, writing in the Guardian on 22 November 2024. Hegseth ends that book with “See you on the battlefield. Together, with God’s help, we will save America. Deus vult!”.
If you are not in the USA, and if you are a liberal trying to live a quiet life, all of this seems bonkers. This is Christian nationalism. This is dominionism. This is the far right happening in front of us. Also, and this is the whole point of this article, this is what you get when you believe you are fighting the Cosmic War.
If you got this far, thank you for being with me, and I hope you will read more, because there is a heap of this to go. Ma te wa!
Further exploration:
Gauthier, Charlotte, ed. The Crusades and the Far-Right in the Twenty-First Century. Engaging the Crusades : The Memory and Legacy of the Crusades, volume nine. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2025.
Lecaque, Thomas. “Pete Hegseth and What Christian Nationalism Looks Like.” Accessed December 22, 2024.
