62. Holy War

In March 2026, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stood before a Pentagon worship service and prayed for "overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy", calling for the eternal damnation of America's enemies. Military commanders across every branch have been reported, in over 200 formal complaints, telling troops the Iran war is "God's plan" and that Trump was "anointed by Jesus" to trigger Armageddon. Benjamin Netanyahu has quoted 1 Samuel 15:3, the command to destroy the Amalekites, sparing "neither man nor woman, infant nor ox" to justify Israeli military operations.

This is what happens when political leaders weaponize faith to sanctify violence. And it has been happening for 1,700 years.

From Constantine's battlefield vision in 312 CE and the subsequent murder of philosopher Hypatia by a Christian mob, through Augustine's just war doctrine that gave state violence a Christian vocabulary, to Charlemagne's massacre of 4,500 Saxon prisoners at Verden for refusing baptism. We cover the First Crusade's Rhineland pogroms, where Jewish mothers drowned their children rather than see them forcibly baptized, and the Jerusalem massacre of 1099, where chroniclers described blood reaching horses' knees. We examine the Albigensian Crusade's destruction of Béziers, where the papal legate reportedly said "Kill them all, God will know his own," and the witch trials that followed, killing up to 60,000 people (80% of them women) using Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum as theological cover.

We also cover what this history did specifically to women, a thread that runs unbroken from Tertullian calling women "the devil's gateway" in 200 CE, through the rape of nuns during the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople, to the sexual violence documented in California's Spanish mission system, to the girls in Native American boarding schools whose hair was cut, languages stolen, and bodies abused under church-run federal contracts.

The only thing more dangerous than a tyrant, is one who believes God gave them permission.

SOURCES

• Augustine, The City of God, c. 413–426 CE

• Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum, c. 200 CE

• Socrates Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica, c. 439 CE (murder of Hypatia)

• Annales Regni Francorum (Charlemagne / Verden massacre)

• Barbero, Alessandro — Charlemagne: Father of a Continent, UC Press, 2004

• Chazan, Robert — European Jewry and the First Crusade, UC Press, 1987

• Mainz Anonymous and Solomon bar Simson Chronicle (Rhineland massacres, 1096)

• Raymond of Aguilers, Historia Francorum (Jerusalem, 1099)

• Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, c. 1220 (Béziers)

• Nicetas Choniates, Historia, c. 1206 (Fourth Crusade / Constantinople)

• Brenon, Anne — Le vrai visage du catharisme, Loubatières, 1988

• Kramer, Heinrich — Malleus Maleficarum, 1487 (ed. Mackay, Cambridge UP, 2006)

• Levack, Brian — The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, Routledge, 4th ed., 2016

• Cuneo, Michele de — Letter of October 28, 1495, trans. Samuel Eliot Morison

• Díaz del Castillo, Bernal — True History of the Conquest of New Spain, c. 1568

• Hassig, Ross — Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, U of Oklahoma Press, 2006

• Pedro Pizarro — Relation of the Discovery and Conquest of Peru, c. 1571

• Stannard, David — American Holocaust, Oxford UP, 1992

• Kamen, Henry — The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, Yale UP, 1997

• Jouanna, Arlette — La Saint-Barthélemy, Gallimard, 2007

• Parker, Geoffrey — The Thirty Years' War, Routledge, 1997

• Regan, Donald — For the Record, Harcourt Brace, 1988

• Maurice, Jean-Claude — Si vous le répétez, je démentirai (Bush / Gog and Magog)

• NPR — "Netanyahu's references to violent biblical passages raise alarm," Nov. 7, 2023

• U.S. Dept. of the Interior — Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, 2022

• Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada — Final Report, 2015

• Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 543, U.S. Supreme Court, 1823

• Vatican Statement repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery, March 30, 2023