“Why Is the Far Right So Obsessed With Knights?”
That is the title of an op-ed published by the Financial Times on August 23, 2026.
Even more intriguing is its opening quotation, attributed to novelist Umberto Eco:
A sure sign of a lunatic is that sooner or later, he brings up the Templars.
Now, as someone who has not merely “brought up” the Templars—but written a 500-page book about them—I read this op-ed with great interest, lest I, too, be found a frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic.
Unfortunately, the author, Elise Morrison, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge—the questionable quality of education of which was recently exposed, perhaps explaining Ms. Morrison’s approach—never answers the question posed in her title. Instead, she treats growing interest in the Templars as another opportunity to condemn the amorphous category known as “the far right.”
“If Eco is right” she writes concerning the novelist’s charge that only lunatics mention the Templars, “you don’t need to look hard to find examples [of lunacy] in Britain today, among the crowds at football games, political rallies and marches.”
She points to demonstrators wearing red crosses, white tunics, plastic chainmail, and other Templar imagery that has been “increasingly co-opted by the contemporary far right.”
She similarly condemns social-media accounts that wrap “white supremacist and anti-Muslim politics in the romanticised imagery of holy war, medieval chivalry and Christian martyrdom.”
According to Morrison, those who invoke crusader or Templar imagery often present it as harmless historical pageantry. But this, she argues, merely provides “plausible deniability,” allowing “extremists” to disguise “an aggressive, racialised ideology” beneath an apparently innocuous medieval costume.
Finally, she equates the current interest in the Templars and crusades with other “Twentieth-century fascist movements, including the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.”
In the second half of her op-ed, where one hoped Morrison would address her question—why growing numbers of Western people are so “obsessed” with the Templars—she offers a few sentences summarizing the military order’s history before returning to her main point:
Parts of rightwing discourse offer a picture of a Christian society under siege again, echoing the myth of warrior monks who went to battle for a Europe supposedly under attack by Islam.
That sentence contains the key to her entire argument—and its central weakness.
Morrison treats the connection between the medieval conflict and present conditions as a modern political construction: the idea that the Templars were “warrior monks” fighting Islam, and that Christendom was “under attack by Islam,” are both “myths,” she claims.
The “far right” made it all up to justify its otherwise unjustified and, in fact, racist attitude towards Islam.
So much for Morrison’s hackneyed explanation.
The real answer to her question—why men in general and youth in particular are “so obsessed” with the Templars—is much more instructive and telling.
Continue reading below.
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