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As of June 2026, the United States is actively at war with Iran. America aircraft have struck Iranian military sites. Iran has struck back. Drones hit Kuwait's main airport this week, killing a person and shutting down the terminal. The ceasefire that was supposed to hold is fraying. Every other day it's we almost have an agreement. Well, we're not, but now we're ready to fight, but we're almost set in agreement. Negotiations restart and collapse, sometimes within the same 24 hour news cycle. And running underneath all of it like a bass note you can feel more than hear is a lot of religious language. And in addition to sky high gas prices, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, has been quoting the Hebrew Bible publicly and directly to justify military operations in 2023 during during the attacks on Gaza. He quoted 1 Samuel 15:3 the passage where God commands Saul to destroy the Amalekites utterly says to kill both man and woman, infant ox and sheep. He said explicitly, quote, you must remember what Amalec has done to you. In 2026, as Israeli forces move deeper into Lebanon than at any point in a generation, he has continued to reach for scripture to sanctify his Strategy. According to NPR's reporting and multiple Israeli media outlets, his public statements have repeatedly framed the conflict in the language of a holy mandate. And in Washington, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth stood before a worship service at the Pentagon in March of 2026 and prayed for what he called a, quote, overwhelming violence, violence of action against those who deserve no mercy, end quote. He prayed again that the wicked would be delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them. This is a cabinet secretary in the Pentagon during an act of war, praying for the enemy's eternal damnation. Meanwhile, according to Military Religious freedom Foundation, over 200 complaints have been filed by service members across every branch of the military reporting that their commanders are invoking Christian prophecy to justify the war in Iran, telling troops that this conflict is, quote, God's plan and that Trump was anointed by Jesus to trigger the end times. Members of Congress have formally asked the Department of Defense Inspector General to investigate as of today. This morning, Pete Hegseth has removed over 180 recognized religions from the military forces, dropping the list of recognized religions from 200 to 31, most of them Christian based. I want to be clear about something before I go further. This episode is not an argument about whether God exists or whether any particular faith tradition is right or wrong. I hope that you've listened to enough of my information by now that I really want to provide data and to teach and to help you ask questions. But your faith ultimately is your own. It is your own decision. Your brain is not broken. Questions are not sinful. The truth will always hold up to scrutiny. But what this episode specifically is about is the documented 1700 year history of what happens when political leaders and military commanders drape their violence in the language of a divine mandate. What happens to civilians, what happens to women especially what happens to people who happen to be standing in the way when an empire decides God told them it's time to conquer. Because here's the thing. What we are watching in 2026 is not new. All of the things that we are seeing, as chaotic and crazy as it seems, as unbelievable as it seems, has all happened before. This is even a little bit original. It is the latest iteration of a pattern so thoroughly documented, so catastrophically repeatable, that at this point, the only real question is whether enough people will recognize the pattern. This time we're going to go all the way back to the moment when the concept of holy war started. Today on Flipping Table Foreign. Welcome or welcome back to flipping tables. I'm your host, Monte Mater. You might recognize me from your supercomputer that you carry in your pocket. I live on Instagram. I'm a former far right Christian nationalist who now talks a lot about deconstruction, American history and American politics, hoping that we can create a better world where everyone gets to have the freedom of religion, the freedom to choose who they want to be, who they want to love. Because ultimately I believe that small government has no business telling you how to live your life as long as you're not destroying someone else's property or attacking, say, I don't know, children like in the Epstein files that we still have not arrested anyone for. I'm very excited for this episode. I worked very hard on it. This is a, a concept that was a big part of my deconstruction when I, when I studied theology in Israel. I took an intensive there when I was at liberty and being there. And I recognized for the first time that I had been programmed with Islamophobia. And I also recognized for the first time that I didn't really know a lot about church history and the concept of holy sanctified war. The Crusades is where I started, in fact, the Christian nationalist boarding school I went to in high school. Our mascot was the Crusaders. So this one's a little, little personal outside of just a couple announcements. Then we'll dive in. For Patreon users, you probably saw some surprise merch pop up. There is some for Pride Month, Love thy neighbor T shirt that I'm very thankful for. A big shout out to Dave the Viking for designing. As well as you are seeing some hellion merch, I just wanted to extend the highway to Hell merchandise also to my Patreon supporters on my regular page, because, quite frankly, Havarti the Cheese Goblin is very, very cute. And we are actually turning him into a bunch of different horoscopes. We're gonna do like Gemini, and it's Havarti the Cheese Goblin is a Gemini. It's gonna be fun. But I just wanted to extend that to you as well. And also gift boxes for the top tiers in Patreon, we have expanded those tiers. Remember that you have to pay for three months before you are for a gift box. But those gift boxes are being packed right now. They will get to you by the end of the month. And so let's jump in. All of this is going to be a really cool history lesson. This is actually one of, I think, the most important lessons to learn about church history because of the churches often interlap with government, with militaries, and the havoc that it wreaks. And I hope that there's a little bit of comfort in knowing that all of the things we're seeing have happened before, whether it's the racism, the. The rise of white supremacy, the pushback on women's rights. All of these things have happened, different iterations, over and over and over. Whenever there's a big step in progress, there is a pendulum swing backward that pushes back towards, you know, ultimately fascism, supremacy, colonialism, whatever brand it takes, it just usually redresses itself for the moment and for the year. So I hope there's a little bit of hope in that. These movements have. Have existed, they have grown strong, they have pushed back, and we have always pushed them back down where they belong. So let's dive in. I said in the intro that in March, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stood before a worship service at the Pentagon and prayed for what he called an overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. And I find myself wondering who gets to decide who deserves no mercy and why. He prayed loudly that the wicked would be delivered to eternal damnation prepared for them. For Pete, defying the separation of church and state is not new, nor is the idea of holy war. We are talking about a man who has deos voltage tattooed on his arm. We'll get to that here in a second. In his 2020 book American Crusade the Fight to Stay Free. He called for a 360 degree holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom. It's always about freedom. It never seems to be about money or oil or when there is a situation where, say, women are being oppressed or children are being married off. We don't intervene, right, for those people, typically in countries that we have no financial gain by interfering. He, he made the claim that America was facing a crusade moment. Sounds a lot like 11th century invasion of the Holy Land. When asked by reporters about Iranian leadership, he said that the US is fighting religious fanatics who seek nuclear capabilities in order for some religious Armageddon. It's a bold statement coming from a Christian nationalist who is part of a movement to deny rights to Americans who do not believe their version of Christianity and who openly speaks of stripping women of their right to vote and has now started to strip women in the military of promotions and access. He denies immigrants due process and claimed last year that Iran's nuclear capability was obliterated before patting themselves on the back. So this whole administration has been aligning themselves with Christian nationalism now claiming that it's other religious fanatics that they're defending us from. And I was corrected on an Instagram video the other day. And it's, it is a bad habit. I know it's nuclear. I want to put nuclear in there. And I don't know why I want to default to that. But if I mess up, just know I'm acknowledging it now. We're practicing, we're working on it. That's one of those words that when you're taught wrong as a kid, and that's just how it's said, and your brain just says no, that's how you, that's how you pronounce it. It was like an argument I had with someone about whether it's oregano or oregano. Anyways, you can argue about that later. So Pete's not alone here. Again. We had more than 200 complaints from service members across installments saying that their leadership was saying that the war in Iran was part of God's plan. Trump was anointed by Jesus to trigger Armageddon, which is a hilarious statement to me because I'm. I think it' interesting and odd that Almighty God would need so much assistance from the American military and leadership. It really seems like God and Jesus are quite paralyzed without our help. And unsurprisingly, of course, the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been using the same language due to years of church History and American evangelicalism. Millions of Americans on both sides either believe that the conflict is a holy war or they see that history is in fact repeating itself. But if you grew up, especially in American evangelicalism, you are poised to really buy into language, to buy into this thought, to align yourself with the military. In fact, if you don't support a war, you'll get called unpatriotic. Or that you don't support the service members. I absolutely support the service members and understand their sacrifice. My brother's about to be deployed in September. But I can also say I don't think we should be in these conflicts. I don't think we should be engaging in regime change. But if you grew up in evangelicalism, if you grew up in Christian nationalism, often the Christian religion is now intrinsically married to the. To the destiny of the United States, to the calling of the United States. The United States is key in Armageddon. So you've been groomed to accept this language and therefore accept the war as an act of God instead of an act of man. This isn't new. From the moment Christianity became the imperial religion of Rome, kings, emperors, generals and presidents have reached for the cross to justify what their swords were already doing. How can you deny a king conquest when he claims God is on his side? How can a nation be greedy or act with impunity when their movement is of course blessed by God? Or so they claim. Pete Hegseth and other nationalists are not being original. This is the latest verse in a song that has been sung by churches and empires for 1700 years. And we're going to go all the way back to when Christianity, instead of being the religion of the outcast and the impoverished, a religion of selling your wealth and distributing it to those who had need of feeding each other, worshiping together, welcoming everyone when. When that religion then became the religion of empire. On a battlefield outside Rome in Milvian Bridge in 312 CE, the Roman Emperor Constantine was fighting a rival for the control of the empire. He claimed afterward that he saw a vision in the sky across with the words in Hoxigno Vinces in this sign you shall conquer. When he claimed his victory, he attributed it to the Christian God and began a relationship that would transform both Christianity and political power forever. I want to be very clear. Constantine did not convert. He understood religious consolidation would give him power. A year later, in 313, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan which legalized Christianity and ended state persecution of Christians. Christians truly had been the victims of brutal persecution under Roman leadership. The Book of Revelation was written as a coded letter of protest in the midst of a widespread myth called Nero Redivivus. The myth claimed that the brutal Christian killing emperor Nero didn't actually die in 68 CE or he would resurrect, but that he would rise again to take over the empire and destro the Christians forever. Revelation was written to tell them stay strong, resist the allure of empire. But they didn't. Within a generation, the religion that had been the faith of slaves and dispossessed people, that elevated women to leadership roles such as church planners and deacons that gave to all as they had need, abandoned wealth, whose founder had said the meek would inherit the earth and that those who lived by the sword would die by it was being absorbed into the machinery of the same empire that crucified the founder. By 380, the emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official state religion of Rome. Within another decade, religious freedom was stripped entirely and it became illegal to practice the older Roman religions. Pagan temples were destroyed, pagan priests were exiled and killed. This theme of stripping other people of religious freedom when Christianity becomes a religion of empire will carry its way all the way through our entire story. And it's also starting to carry sway in the United States today. And this is not just the silencing of other religions. It's the beginning of the systematic destruction of people who represented competing knowledge systems. In 415 CE in Alexandria, Egypt, a Christian mob dragged the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia from her carriage, stripped her naked and murdered her in the street. Hypatia was one of the most brilliant scholars of the ancient world, a woman who publicly lectured on mathematics, astronomy and Neoplatonic philosophy. The Christian historian Socrates Scholasticus, writing within decades of the event, recorded that the mob tore her body apart with broken and pottery shards. Her crime was being a woman who thought publicly and wielded intellectual authority in a city where the Christian Bishop Cyril was consolidating his power. She had been honored for 16 centuries as a martyr to knowledge. Her murder marked the effective end of the classical Alexandrian intellectual tradition. This is the original sin from where everything else flows. This moment where Christianity stopped being persecuted and started doing the persecuting. It inherited the logic of empire. It inherited the question every empire eventually has to answer. How do we make our violence holy? How do we get away with what we want? How do we bend God's will to our own ambition? The faith of the Catacombs had become the faith of the palaces and most importantly, its armies. Before we go any further into the history of holy war abroad, we need to talk about the war that was waged simultaneously at home. Because the same theological infrastructure that gave emperors permission to kill also gave men permission to control, silence and punish women. The original Christian church Phoebe was a church deacon. The the translations that you read where it says Phoebe, our servant. Diaconos does not mean servant, it means deacon. It is translated as deacon every other place it appears. If Paul had wanted to say servant, he had a word for that. She was a deacon. Later, in Romans 16, Junia, which is a female name, was mistranslated to Junius on purpose for centuries because they didn't want to believe that a woman could be an apostle. Mary Magdalene was the most loved of the disciples. In many of the writing surrounding Christ's ministry, Christ had female discip the early church allowed women in places of leadership. But when Christianity became the religion of empire, all of that was subject to change. Not only did the empire get permission to conquer and subjugate, but men were given permission to conquer and subjugate women. There were two expressions of the same core idea that some people's bodies, their labor, their land, their choices, their freedom were subject to divine authority as interpreted and enforced by men with power. In the early church, again pre Constantine, women held significant roles. The apostle Paul's letter to Romans names Phoebe as a Diaconus deacon, which I just mentioned. He greets Junia as prominent among the apostles. And again, Mary Magdalene is consistently described in the Gospels as a primary witness to the resurrection. The person Jesus chose to first announce the most important event in the entire Christian narrative. In Galatians 3:28, Paul writes that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek slave, nor free, male, nor female. The early movement had a genuine and radical egalitarianism baked in. This was the like a transformative moment, just like Christ's ministry was then the church became part of empire. And empire historically does not run well on egalitarianism. You have to have free labor. Someone has to be less than Tertullian. The the theologian from Carthage, writing in the late second and early third century, addressed women directly in his work Deo Feminarum on the Apparel of Women. His opening is worth reading. Do you not know that you are each and Eve the sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age. The guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil's gateway. You are the unsealer of the forbidden tree. You are the first deserter of divine law. You are she who persuaded him Whom the devil was not valiant enough to. To attack. Yikes. On a bike. Ew. So clearly there was a lot of pushback. Tertullian is a very famous theologian in early Christianity and many of these early theologians were pushing back against egalitarianism of Christianity. And once it was merged with the Roman Empire and its patriarchal standards, they had an excuse. Which is why there are specific deliberate mistranslations in the Bible in order to justify women not being in leadership. It's why they included first and second Timothy and Titus when they knew Paul didn't write it, because they had to be able to justify the system they were building. We see the, I think the, the grossest version of this is in Genesis 2 where they say that Eve was formed from a rib. The word salah does not mean rib. And the other 42 times, 40 plus times it's used in the Bible. It is never translated as rib. It means side and not like my side, my side hurts. It means the side of a mountain. This side of the temple, it is the lateral half of a geographical or architectural location. It means half. And in the Talmud tradition, Adama, the first being, because that's not a gendered name, it means being or earthling. The earthling was split in half. Eve came from one side of Adama and the one became two. But it's much more convenient to say rib, isn't it? To then say that men were made in the image of God and women were made in the image of man. It's a bad translation, but it was done on purpose. So Tertullian publishes this horrific thing about women. And then came Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin. The Vulgate, the version used by the Catholic Church for over a thousand years, wrote extensively about the spiritual danger of women's bodies, the superiority of virginity over marriage, the idea that a woman's holiness was directly proportional to how thoroughly she denied her physical nature. Do you feel like you're hearing the manosphere right now? It's not new, it's a rebrand. It's not new. John Chrysostom, the Archbishop of Constantinople from 397 to 407 CE, and one of the most influential preachers in Christian history, wrote, amongst all savage beasts, none is found so harmful as woman. I'm just gonna let you take that in for a second. Augustine of Hippo himself, who by the way had same sex relationships while he was getting his education. The same Augustine who built the Just war doctrine, argued that women bore the image of God only partially and derivatively, and that their rational capacity was subordinate to men' and that Eve's sin made women perpetually suspect as moral agents. For those of you who grew up in the church and for those of you who, like, use Instagram ever, does this all sound familiar? This doesn't come from Jesus. This comes from men who wanted to create any justification to control women's bodies, their pleasure, their labor, their service. And so they molded theology around what they wanted to do and made it God's will. These were not fringe voices, right? Augustine of Hippo, John Chrysostom, Jerome, Tertullian. These were architects of Western Christian theology. Their texts were copied, taught in monasteries, cited in church councils. Women were removed from leadership. The systematic marginalization of women from that leadership also reduced women to a binary of wife or virgin. Anything else was shameful and against God. Because this is. This core belief is founded on the idea that female sexuality is a spiritual danger, female autonomy is dangerous, women are gateways to sin, but also that a woman's reproductive capability is a commodity to be bought, sold and used by men. This was done deliberately. The same theology that we're going to dive into today that made war holy made women dangerous. Both required submission or destruction. You will either obey or we will destroy you. Whether that means actually killing you or it means stripping you of all your rights, throwing you out in shame to die in abject poverty. We see this carry all the way through the witch trials. We see it in, in the early Victorian era, where a woman could get assaulted and impregnated by, if she was like a maid servant by that man of the house, he would face no consequences, owe her no child support, but she would be thrown into the street to essentially only survive either by sex work or starve to death. That is why there has no never been accountability for the men. Because it was men who built it. It was men who molded the theology, changed the translations. Arc built this architecture to control and dominate women, claiming it was God when it was really their own selfish desires. But that's why there's never been account accountability for men, because men built it. Why would they want accountability for themselves? So keep this in your mind as we go forward, because this will run through every single era we cover. When the Crusaders sacked cities, who was raped. When the Inquisition interrogated heretics, who was burned in disproportionate numbers. When colonial missionaries, quote, unquote, civilized indigenous people whose bodies were conquered first. When the witch trials swept through Europe, who died? The answer across 15 centuries is the Same, and it's women. The theological permission slip was written by men like Tertullian, Jerome and Chrysostom in the third and fourth centuries. Augustine, or of Hippo, you might know him as Augustine. St. Augustine, a North African bishop writing in the late three hundreds and early four hundreds as the Roman Empire began to crumble, gave Western Christianity its first theological answer to the question of how to make violence holy. In his book the City of God and in scattered letters, Augustine sketched out what would become the foundational Christian theory of justified violence. It would later be called the Just War doctrine. Augustine argued that war could be moral if it was waged by a legitimate authority, fought for a just cause, or motivated by love rather than hatred. Well, that's an easy loophole. I'm doing this because I love you. You. He drew on the Hebrew Bible where Yahweh repeatedly commands the Israelites to conquer and slaughter and reason that if God could command war, then war itself could not be inherently evil. He argued that a Christian soldier could kill in the name of love. Love for the victim being protected, love for the order that's being preserved because they. We know they love hierarchy and order. We can see how easily now one can claim good intentions while lining their pockets and expanding their power. This is where this comes from, this just work. But at the same time, we, we can now see how the Bible that we contain, doctrines we believe in were built by men who selfishly wanted power for themselves and wanted to exclude women. So who's to say the men writing the Old Testament maybe didn't do some of the same? Jesus was a radical pacifist. His entire ministry was built on love. Your enemies turn the other cheek. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword. Augustine effectively added a footnote, saying aster, unless the state has authorized it. This was a profoundly dangerous theological move that would cost people their freedom, their homelands and their lives. I think of the beginning of the Fellowship of the Ring where Galadriel, as she's telling the story, and this is just in the movies, she said, quote, but the hearts of men are easily corrupted. Power is just too appealing. Money is too alluring. Passivity, humility, mercy, are too inconvenient and so unglamorous. And I love how in all of these particular types of doctrines within patriarchal religions, they always end up with virgins. Right? I get a virgin in exchange for my troubles. That's what I'm owed as a man. It's always a virgin, which typically means a girl who's far too young to be with an adult man. Augustine gave state violence a Christian vocabulary and God's justification. Christians for the next 1600 years would reach back to Augustine's teachings to justify their wars. And there's something else that he did that gets less attention. His theology of original sin, deeply tied to Eve's transgression and the transmission of sin through sexual reproduction, cemented the idea that women's bodies were not just spiritually dangerous, they were the literal mechanism by which human corruption entered the world and kept being passed down. In Augustine's framework, the very act of birth was tainted by sin and the woman's womb was where that sin was transmitted. And this, this is why you'll, you'll hear especially Christian nationalists, they'll say things like, women shouldn't use painkillers during birth, women should suffer during childbirth. It comes from this doctrine. They believe that because pain in childbirth is a punishment for Eve's sin, then all women should be suffering through childbirth. It's also part of the reason they resent child free women. Not just because they're harder to control and they make more money and they have more resources, but because a childless woman does not go through this physical suffering they think she deserves because of the sin of Eve, which is a creation myth based on the Enuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh and other Mesopotamian creation myths of its era. But because of Eve and because of what they believe about her. They believe that all women should suffer pain, physical, emotional, and that all women should be subjugated, that female bodily autonomy is dangerous and that it is the gateway to sin itself. We hear this rhetoric now in white liberal women are destroying America because of how we vote. Take away the women's right to vote. Look how women vote. Everything's gone downhill since women voted. This is just a repackaging of what Augustine taught, what Tertullian taught, what Jerome taught, that women are somehow the gateway to sin and that their autonomy is dangerous. Augustine was not a simple misogynist. He had complicated views and genuine relationships with women and men. But theological structure he built placed women's sexuality at the center of human fallenness. And that structure has lasted because his philosophy also came at the tail end of Greek philosophy that treated sex as a whole, as a base urge. That's why we get so much from Paul about saying, you know, be celibate if you can, don't do it, don't get married. All of this was influenced by this Greek philosophy around sex being a base, disgusting urge that was just unfortunately necessary for reproduction. Moving on. In the year 800, the Frankish king Charlemagne, Charles the Great, became the first Holy Roman Emperor. Crowned by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, Charlemagne extended his kingdom across what is now France, Germany, northern Italy and beyond. And he did it under the name of Christ, as one does does. He waged war from 772 to 804 against a people in northern Germany called the Saxons, Germanic pagans who worshiped the old gods, Wotan, Thor, Freya. Charlemagne decided they would convert to Christianity or they would die. Christian nationalism, anytime. Christian nationalism just means Christianity as the religion of empire, and you can insert any empire because it's been for many, Christian nationalism does not allow for freedom of religion. He felled their sacred tree, the Irminsul, the pillar that they believed held up the heavens. He destroyed their shrines. And in 1782, he issued the Capitulatio de Partibus Saxone, the capitulary on the Saxons, which made it a capital crime to refuse baptism, to eat meat during Lent, or to cremate the dead in the pagan fashion. This is documented in the Annales Regni Francorium, the Royal Frankish Annals, the primary source for the Colignian history. When the Saxons revolted against this forced conversion, Charlemagne responded at the Massacre of Verdan in October of 1782 by executing 4, 4, 500 Saxon prisoners in a single day. The Frankish annals record it plainly. Modern historians, including Alessandro Barbero in his biography Charlemagne, Father of a Continent, confirmed the event as one of the largest single day massacres in early medieval European history. The victims were not soldiers, right? These are not. This is not a military. They were prisoners. They were civilians and they were killed. They were murdered for refusing to be baptized. Charlemagne was the first great Christian colonizer. The lesson of Verdin was unmistakable. The cross and the sword are now one. Conquest is no longer greed or for power or territory. It's a missionary work. It's a. It's a salvation. It's bringing light to the darkness, saving the savages. But we're giving them Christianity. Do you hear Prageru's clip on slavery in the back of your head? It wasn't that bad. We brought them Christianity. Anyone who resisted was not a political enemy anymore, but an enemy of God. Holy violence was now divinely ordained. The template was complete, and every subsequent European empire would use it again. The Saxon women during this campaign. The historical record is, as usual for women in medieval history, a little thinner than it should be because they weren't important. They were barely above livestock. But the forced conversion decrees applied to everyone. The social destruction of the Irminsul cult, which included female religious roles, there were female priestesses, effectively erased an entire spiritual framework again in which women held authority. Women have always held religious authority. This idea that women can't lead spiritually is very, very new in human history and really arises with patriarchal religions. Prior to that, there were always goddesses, priestesses, Mother Earth, the divine goddess, the divine mother. The divine feminine has always existed. It is a very new thing in our history that women can't hold religious spiritual power. The priests like Volva Viserys, the woman who held the community spiritual roles in the Germanic tradition, all of it was criminalized under those decree. It didn't just kill them as people, it killed roles, it killed their history, it killed possibilities and it killed their freedom. And before we start getting into the Crusades, I'm going to take our first of two mid show sponsor breaks. If you would like these episodes early and ad free, you can subscribe@patreon.com montymade In 1095, Pope Urban II gave a speech at Claremont in southern France and changed the world. The Seljuk Turks had conquered much of Anatolia and were threatening the Christian Byzantine Empire. When the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I reached out to the Pope for help, Pope Urban saw an opportunity to assert papal authority over Christian kings and to challenge the violent energy of European nobles outward rather than against each other. He called on Christian Europe to take up arms and march on the Holy Land in the name of God. He told the assembled crowd that any Christian who died on the journey would have all their sins forgiven and would immediately go straight to heaven. There's no better way to bend a person to your will than to convince them that you have the answer to what happens when they die and can guarantee their eternal salvation. He told them that Muslims were defiling the holy places and the crowd carried his chants Deus Volt, Deus Volt, Deus Volt. God wills it. Same tattoo that Pete Hegseth has on his inner arm. In the spring of 1096, as crusading forces move through the Rhineland, mobs sometimes organized by minor nobles like Count Emiko of Flenheim, massacred Jewish communities in Spire Worms, Mains, Cologne and Trier. They are now known as the Rhineland Massacres and they are documented in the Hebrew chronicles of extraordinary emotional power. The Mains Anonymous and Solomon Barr Simpson's account, both written within living memory of the events, record in precise detail what happened at Mains approximately a thousand Jews were killed. Many Jewish community members chose mass suicide rather than forced baptism. Parents killed their own children to spare them from what they believed was a greater spiritual death of apostasy under duress. The chronicles describe mothers carrying their children to the Rhine to drown them rather than see them baptized at the point of the sword. The historian Robert Chazan, the European Jewelry and the First Crusade calls these events the first large scale persecution of the Jews in European history. And it happened at the hands of so called Christians. Christians. The Crusaders hadn't even reached Jerusalem yet. They hadn't even left Europe and they had already conducted one of history's first recognized ethnic religious massacres. Deus fold, God wills it. When the Crusader armies finally breached Jerusalem Walls on July 15 of 1099, what followed was a massacre that shocked even medieval observers. The chronicler Raymond of de Aguileras wrote in the temple area, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridal rank reigns. Folker of Chartres estimated that 10,000 people were killed in the Temple alone. Modern historians place the total death toll lower, but confirm the systematic killing of the city's Muslim and Jewish populations and Eastern Christians indiscriminately. The Arabic chronicler Ibn Alothir, writing in the early 12th century, described the scenes of mass killing throughout the city. Women were killed alongside men. The city's population had no meaningful way to distinguish crusading soldiers from each other and the killing was indiscriminate. The night after the massacre, the Crusaders who waited through the blood to the Temple Church of the Holy Sepulcher sang hymns of praise and danced in that blood. The Holy war now had its holy city and the blood was sanctified because God willed it. The Crusades created a specific theology of gendered violence that operated on multiple levels and would be carried into other worldwide conflicts. Muslim women taken in conquest were classified in crusading theology and Islamic law law alike, as legitimate captives. They were the spoils of war. The Crusading chronicles described the distribution of captive women as a matter of military logistics. The quote protection of Christian women from Muslim men was one of Urban II's most effective emotional arguments at Claremont to get this war to happen in the first place. But then they rode in and kidnapped and distributed Muslim women like snacks, like cigarettes, like a meal, like livestock. It was a rhetorical move that simultaneously inflamed this. I'm going to protect the Christian women from the Muslims and erase the reality that the Crusaders violence against Muslim women was occurring in exactly the inverse direction. We See this. Now, Islamophobia that is so rampant in the United States. There's all this, you know, they're going to impose Sharia law. They're going to. Meanwhile, I don't know of a single Sharia law, Muslim law, Islamic nationalist law that has ever been brought to the floor of a legislature anywhere in this country. There's about anywhere from a hundred to a thousand being brought to the floor for Christian nationalism every single day. Our whole administration's functioning off of it. It's all projection. But Pope Urban weaponized Islamophobia, weaponized the protect your weaker women. The same. It is the same language used during segregation of protecting white women from black men. It's exact same thing. Meanwhile, Pope Urban knows that the Crusaders are raping and murdering and distributing Muslim women as sex slaves. What the Crusades did to European women at home is less often told. When men left on Crusade, sometimes for years, sometimes forever, their wives were placed under what amounted to ecclesiastical guardianship. The Church had authority over their conduct and their property. How convenient for Pope Urban and the leaders of the Catholic Church that when you send these men off to war, many of them will die. You get control of their woman and their wealth. Crusading culture elevated two archetypes above all others, the warrior male and the cloistered female. The widow who owned land, the healer, the woman who exercised authority in her husband's absence, the woman who ran a business or held community trust became threatening figures because the cultural framework had no sanctioned role for an autonomous woman. Historian Helen Nicholson, in Women in the Crusades, which is a great book, documents how Crusade era legal and ecclesiastical structures consistently move to restrict women's independence in the name of protecting them. We've heard it through history, oh, you don't need to go to school. We're protecting you from all that busyness. You don't need to vote. Politics is. Is so dirty. It's too dirty for when we're protecting you. We're protecting you. You. You don't need to have access to your medical records. Let your husband make those icky decisions so that we can protect. You know, it's always an excuse to subjugate, but make it sound better. The sack of Constantinople in 1204, the Fourth Crusade's catastrophic pivot from Holy Land to Christian city, produced documented mass rape. Mass rape of orthodox Christian women, including the nuns. Christian Crusaders, I'll say it again. Documented mass rape of orthodox Christian women, including nuns. The Byzantine historian Nicetas Choniates, who was present, wrote in his Historia that Crusaders installed a prostitute on the Patriarch's throne in Hagia Sophia. And they violated women who had taken refuge in the churches. They broke into churches and they raped all the women. And these were Christians. This was a holy war. These were Western Christian men raping Eastern Christian women in the greatest Christian church in the world. The cross was flying Deusvold. God wills it. The First Crusade was a launch of a 200 year machine because it was very profitable for the Church. Again they get control of all the women and all the wealth. When the men are gone or die, the men get to unleash unbridled violence and sexual assault. What a win. And you get to say that God told you to. The second crusade in 1147, called by Bernard of Clairvaux, ended in failure. Richard the Lionheart and saladin ended the third crusade of 1189 in a stalemate. And the fourth crusade of 1204 was perhaps, of course, course, the most morally bankrupt. Instead of attacking Muslims, which is what, you know, allegedly this was always about again, they can. They sacked Constantinople and pillaged Eastern Orthodox Christians for three days. The relics they see still sit in churches across Europe to this day. The Children's Crusade of 1212 sent thousands of European children toward the Holy Land, where most of them died of starvation or were sold into slavery. History is frustrating, but especially when you don't pay attention to it. The Crusades expanded inward as much as outward. The Albigesian Crusade against the Cathars of southern France, launched in 1209 by Pope Innocent III. Not so. Innocent deserves particular attention because of what it reveals about the relationship between religious violence and gender. The Cathars were a Christian sect. They believed in Christ, but their theology diverged from Rome in several significant ways. Among the most threatening of these these, from the institutional Church's perspective, was that the Cathars gave women full spiritual authority and autonomy. Oh, no. Whatever shall we do? Women could become Perfect Day, meaning the highest spiritual rank in Cathar practice. They could preach, lead communities and administer sacraments. This was a central feature of Catharism. Historian Anne Brennan, in her scholarship documents that female Perfect Day were widely respected community leaders among the Catholic regions of southern France. In 1209, the Crusader army reached the city of Beziers, which contained both Cathars and Catholics. When the soldiers asked the papal legate Arnod Amari how to distinguish the heretics from the faithful, Caesarius of Heisterbach would record in his Dialogus Miracleorum, Amory's reply was, kill them all. God will know his Own. So if you've ever heard the phrase kill them all, let God sort them out, it's based on this phrase where. Where the papal leader, the, the bishop of the region, if you will. I'm not sure he was a bishop, but he was essentially the papal authority. When asked, how do we, how do we tell the difference between Cathars and Catholics? So we don't kill our brethren, he just says, just murder them all. Whether Armory said those exact words, of course, is debated, but that is what was recorded. The city of Beziers was burned. Contemporary accounts and papal correspondence confirmed the mass killing of the population between 7,000 and 20,000 people. Men, women and children, Catholic and Catherine Al including those who fled into the churches. Arnod Amari himself wrote to Pope Innocent III that quote, our men spared neither rank nor sex nor age. He wrote it as a report of success. And these would be the same people that would claim that they're Christian and they support Christ and they're so pro life and they want to protect the family and they want to protect women. Not when it's not convenient. Huh. Sound familiar? Does it all sound familiar? It sounds familiar to me. Cathar women who survived the military campaigns were given a specific choice by the Inquisition to recant and submit to male Catholic authority or be burned. And to these incredible women's credit, many chose burning. They would rather burn in their faith than submit to a violent, evil male authority under the guise of religious action. The historical record of Catherine women walking into flames rather than submitting to a church that refused to see them as full spiritual agents is one of the most extraordinary stories in medieval history. It's one of the few. Again, there's not a lot of history about women from the medieval period, but it's one of the most powerful ones. And before we get into the witch trials, we're going to take our second of two mid show sponsor breaks again. If you would like all the replay Bible studies ad free episodes, some of my personal writings, poetry, live pop ups with me. You can sign up to support me and my work@patreon.com montemater the Hammer of Witches in 1487 a Dominican inquisitor named Heinrich Kramer published the Malleus Maleficarum quote the Hammer of Witches. It was quite literally a manual for identifying, torturing and executing women that were accused of witchcraft. It would become one of the most deadly books in European history and would affect United States history. The Malleus was theologically explicit that women were more susceptible to demonic influence because of their weaker Intellect, their greater credulity, and crucially, their sexuality, which Kramer described as insatiable and therefore a permanent gateway for diabolical influence. So he flips the script here. Like, now we're kind of under this theological framework of, like, men have all these physical urges and they're raging hormones all the time, and you got to make sure you don't make a man stumble because they can't control it and they're just animals. Kramer. Kramer said women were that way, that women had insatiable sex drives, and that women were completely open to diabolical influence because of their insatiable lust. I think he was projecting his lust on women. I can't prove that. That would be my guess. The text states directly that, quote, all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is, in women, insatiable. The witch was the ultimate eternal internal enemy. Not a foreign Muslim or a distant pagan, but the woman next door, the woman whose body would not be fully brought under your control. The women who don't submit are always the enemy of a patriarchal church and a patriarchal religious structure. The Malleus was initially rejected at the University of Cologne's theological faculty, who found it methodologically unsound. Kramer forged their endorsement because nothing says a man of God like being a liar. He published the Forgery anyway. The book spread throughout Europe via the newly invented printing press, one of the first truly mass media instruments of terror. The historian Brian Levac in the Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe, estimates that European witch trials that followed over the next two centuries would result in approximately 40, 60,000 executions, with up to 80% of the victims being women. Not random targets, though, and you probably know this now, widows with property, those were a big target. A woman who owned land because her husband had died. Midwives and healers. Women who held knowledge of the body that the church and the emerging all male medical establishment wanted to control. Women who had no male guardian. Women who had lived longer than their husbands and therefore controlled their own resources. Women who were, gasp, outspoken, eccentric, or simply unloved by powerful neighbors. Women who refused marriage. In the bishopric of Wurtzburg between 1626 and 1631, records document the execution of at least 160 people in five years, including children as young as seven. And in the town of Quindlinburg in 133 people were burned. Sorry. And in the town of Quindlinburg, 133 people were burned in a single day in 1589. The Thirty Years War, 1618-1648 itself a holy war of Protestant versus Catholic Christians at actually accelerated witch trials in its regions. Soldiers, displaced populations sought to blame someone for the chaos, right? The crop failures, the disease. Who's the scapegoat? Women are the scapegoat. And, and always pay attention just in general, when people scapegoat a particular group of people. If it's like trans people are the source of all your problems, or it's the immigrants, or it's the, the nose ring, liberal ladies, chances are it's probably the person in charge who has the most force that's actually causing the problem and wanting you to be mad at someone else who has just about as much power as you do, or less. Women, particularly women who fell outside of sanctioned categories of obedient wife or cloistered nun were the easiest answer. So if you weren't in one of those two categories, you, you know, disobey your husband, you get burned at the stake, holy war abroad, holy war at home. The enemy always who was what was basically whoever couldn't defend themselves. And there was this idea that if you win, well, that means God wanted you to. So therefore all of it's justified. See, God is on our side. The reconquista began in 711 when Muslim forces conquered most of the Iberian peninsula and northern Christian kingdoms began a slow rollback that would complete in 1492. You know, that year the kings of Castile and Aragon received papal blessing and framed their wars as explicitly holy. In 1478, they created the Spanish Inquisition to root out Jews and Muslims who had converted, often by force, but were suspected of insurance sincere conversion. The conversos or moriscos, who had been baptized at sword point and were now being interrogated about whether whether they actually truly believe. Like, did you actually get baptized because you believe our version of Christianity? Or did you do it because we told you we would kill you if you didn't? Also just want to point out the first systematic execution of Jews, always done by Christians. Very important in today's conversation. The Inquisition's methods are documented in its own records. So these are the records of the people who did it. The relationes de causas, or the case records preserved in the Archivo Historical National y Madrid and studied by historians including Henry Charles, Leah and more recently Henry Cayman, remains the standard scholarly work. Torture was used systematically. The garucha, where the prisoner's hands were tied behind their back and they were hoisted by a pulley and dropped stopped. The toka, which was a form of waterbowl, waterboarding, and the potro, which was the rack. The goal was confession and recantation, not simply punishment, which is why the records are in great detail, because, again, they believe God's giving them permission to do this. They're doing this all in Jesus name. The Inquisition was bureaucratically meticulous about its atrocities. They were so proud of it. When granada fell in 1492, the last Muslim ruler surrendered. The model was complete and entirely repeatable. Its religious conquest followed by forced conversion, then ethnic cleansing and religious language to justify every step you take. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella also signed the Amabra Decree, expelling all Jews from Spain who refused baptism. An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Jews were expelled. Those who converted and stayed lived under permanent suspicion. Forced baptism was not liberation. It was a different form of captivity. This is another thing when you use faith to get rid of other, other faith to get rid of the immigrant. Or I see all these videos on TikTok now, where they're like, there's just Muslims and brown people all over my neighborhood. Karen, you're gonna be fine. But this language of anyone who's other is suspicious. Anyone who's other can't be a real Christian. Anyone who looks like me or doesn't look like me or doesn't talk like me can't possibly, you know, be like me or believe my faith. And I like. I always think of the parable of the Samaritan when all of this comes up, because when Jesus was explicitly asked because he says, love your neighbor as you love yourself, he then gets asked, well, who is my neighbor? Which is code for, okay, but who do I have to love, really? He tells the story of a man of a different race, different religion, hated by the Jews and the Samaritans, hated them back, who was a neighbor to the man who needed help, who helped him not because they believed the same or because they were the same race or nationality, but because the help was needed. I always think of that, and I really wish that people would reread that parable. In 1490, three months after Columbus returned from his first voyage, Pope Alexander II, 6th, issued a papal bull called the Intercitera. In this document, he granted Spain, and subsequently Portugal, the right to claim and quote, christianize any land not already under the rule of a Christian monarch. Any land, anywhere, any people. You may have heard this by its formal name, the Doctrine of Discovery, a legal theological license for European colonization of the entire planet. Colonization in the name of Christ, who ordered compassion, mercy, and the refusal of violence. It was now gold stamped by the Pope you can take over any country as long as there's not a Christian ruler. And convert the savages and steal all their resources and take all their money for yourself. Michelle de Cuneo was an Italian nobleman who sailed with Christopher Columbus. He wrote the following letter, dated October 28, 1495. And this pisses me off. While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me, and with whom, having taken her into my cabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution, but she did not want it and treated me with her fingernails in such a manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that, to tell you the end of it all, I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams that you would not have believed your ears. Finally, we came to an agreement in such a manner that I can tell you that she seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots. That's a journal entry. So he captures this indigenous woman who is undressed, or partially undressed, as indigenous culture is, tries to rape her. She won't let him, she fights back. So he beats her with a rope and rapes her, considers himself a gentleman, and has the audacity to say we came to an agreement in such a manner. I can tell you that she seemed to have been brought up in a school, school of harlots. Because men like Michelle de Cuneo saw indigenous women exactly the way they saw the new land. Their bodies, like the land, were resources to be conquered and dominated by men in the name of God. They were, after all, Christian men, God's chosen men. When Hernan Cortez arrived on the coast of what is Now Mexico in 1519, he received as a diplomatic gift from the Tabaskans, 20 enslaved women. One of them was a young Nahua woman the Spanish called La Malinche. Her Nahotal name was Malincin, and she was baptized Marina. She became Cortez, interpreter, his essential strategic advisor, and his sexual partner. Not by choice, but by captivity. Because of course, they make them all into sexual slaves and then pretend that they care at all about women. That's how I feel about the Christian manosphere right now. About. They're like, take the women's right to vote away. Women need to be back in the home. We need to be. And it's all just to subjugate women. They're doing the exact same here because they don't believe in marital Rape. And either they think your husband doesn't have to have your permission or your consent that he can take and do what he wants. The. The belief system has not changed. It has rebranded. And it, as you can hear in my voice, makes me very upset. But she was given to him as property, an object of the spiritual economy of conquest. Her story has been told primarily through Spanish eyes. For five centuries, she has been blamed for the fall of the Aztec Empire, called a traitor to her people. The theological framework that made her captivity possible, the doctrine of discovery, the idea that indigenous people's bodies were subject to Christian authority, also made her victimhood invisible to the historical record. In October of 1519, Cortez conducted what is known as the Cholula Massacre. He ordered the killing of an estimated 3 to 6,000 Cholula nobles and their retinues gathered unarmed in the city central plaza. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a soldier who was present, later wrote the True History of the Conquest of New Spain, records the event directly. Cortez justified it as preemptive. He claimed that there was a plot against the Spanish. We have to get them before they get us. But historians note that the evidence for such a plot is doesn't exist. And the killing was conducted before any investigation was completed. The church was subsequently built on the site of the massacre. And this was a pattern that actually was repeated multiple times in the conquest of the Americas. They would massacre a group of people and then they would build a church on top of the massacre site. Francisco Pizarro's conquest of the Inca empire in Peru from 1532 to 1572 followed the same template, with one particular detail that's interesting. The Incan emperor Atahuallpa was captured in 1532 and offered his freedom in exchange for filling a room with gold and two rooms with silver. The famous ransom of Cajamarca. He delivered it, and he was killed anyway. Before his execution, Pizarro offered him what was framed as a mercy, that if Atahuallpa agreed to be baptized as a Christian, he would be strengthened, strangled by garrote rather than burned alive. Atahalpa accepted the baptism. He was strangled. And this was called a mercy, by the way. This is documented in multiple Spanish chronicles, including eyewitness accounts. The theology was, of course, baptism saves your soul, but your body still belongs to me to do what I choose, because I'm the Christian colonizer here. What followed across the Americas is the longest, deadliest, and most thoroughly Christianized conquest in human history. The Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and Incas The Portuguese conquest of Brazil, the French conquest of North America, the English conquest of New England, Virginia and beyond. The historian David Stannard in American Holocaust estimates that total indigenous population of the Americas declined from roughly 75 million in 1492, 75 million people to less than 10 million by 1650. Christian colonizers came in and murdered, eliminated 90% of these warfare, enslavement, destroying their food systems and topping it off with disease. All of it conducted under the legal religious framework established by the doctrine of discovery. The inter cetera Deus voice, God wills it. The Valladola debate of 1550 is a moment I want to talk about though, because I know that sometimes when you listen to these histories, it can be easy to say, oh well, you know, it was a different time and this was just the era and. But there were always people that knew better. There were always people fighting for what was right. There were always people that were saying, this is evil, this is wrong, I don't care if you kill me. There have always, always, always, always been those people. The theologian Juan Guinness de Seulveda argued that the indigenous people of the Americas were natural slaves. Get to that in a moment. So he's citing Aristotle's concept from politics of a person who inherently lacked the rational capacity for self governance and was therefore by nature the property of another. This natural slaves was used by American slavers as well to argue that black people lacked the rational capacity for self governance. Not true. Aristotle was a dick and he was wrong. But that's how it's been rebranded. But in response to this, the Dominican friar Bartolomeo de la Casas argued the opposite. He argued in a public debate that the indigenous were fully human, that the conquest was a sin, and that the forced conversion and massacres would damn the souls of the conquistadors. He knew like, and he knew this could get him killed. But this friar, this spiritual man, knew this is wrong and he called it out publicly. The debate ended without clear resolution, but the conquest would continue. But I include that story because I want to be very explicit that people in those times always knew better. Because when we allow for this idea of, well, you know, that was just the time and it was a different era, is really easy to let that become now. Well, it's just the way things are. It's just the way things are. It gives us an excuse to not stay, stand up. And whatever it is you think you would do during this, during the Conquistadors or the Inquisition or World War II or slavery or civil rights, you're Doing it now, whatever it is that you're doing now, that's what you would do during those times. The doctrine of discovery in various legal forms would be cited by the United States Supreme Court as recently as 1823 and Johnson versus McIntosh to justify the seizure of Native American land. The Vatican formally repudiated this only in 2023. 3. The Doctrine of Discovery was not repudiated until three years ago. In California. The Spanish mission mission system established by Franciscan Friar junipero Sarah from 1769 onward created what historians, and including Stephen Hackle, describe as a carceral system for indigenous women. Native women and girls were confined in Montereyas locked dormitories inside the missions, of course, to protect their virtue, protect their virginity. Sarah's own correspondence with Spanish Governor Felipe de Neve persuaded the mission archives to preserve the mission archives and studied by historians, reveals his awareness that soldiers stationed at the missions were sexually assaulting the indigenous women that were locked there to protect their virtue because they were prisoners and they were just. They were just offered to the soldiers. That was the missions, the Christian Missions operating system, them. And quite frankly, it's exactly what's happening in ICE right now. We have teen girls being illegally detained or detained without a parent or separated from their parents who are turning up pregnant long after they've been detained. They are being impregnated by ICE officers and then they're being shipped to the Dilly center in Texas because they don't have to pay for an abortion there. The girls are being sectioned off. The teen girls are being sectioned away from everyone else in what's called blue butterfly zones. No one can talk to them. No one knows where they are. No one knows what's happening. We know what's being happening. They're being raped. They're being impregnated, and we have no idea where the children being born in captivity are going. It's happening right now. This is not some foreign 1492, 1600. It is happening right now, now. And people still act like protesters outside an ICE detention facility are the problem. Those teen girls are being raped by grown men, grown law enforcement officers who have unlimited exposure to them, unlimited access to them, and will never face consequences. The man who shot Renee Good in the face is a millionaire now because of support for what he did. You think they're going to. They're going to pin an ICE agent for rape? Give me a break. It's happening right now. A 2020 report by the California State University documented the widespread sexual violence in the mission system as part of the larger pattern of colonial violence against native Californian women. Not new. And it never ended. The reformation began in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door in witness. The act of doctrinal defiance would cause Europe to rip itself apart. The wars of religion would last from 1524 to 1648 years, full of Christians slaughtering each other to prove their version of Faith was right. St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of August 24, 1572 in Paris was one of the most documented and most disturbing events of this period. At approximately three in the morning, the bells of St. Germain Al Sarah rang and signal to begin what would have been planned as a targeted assassination of the Huguenot leaders. The Protestant leaders gathered in Paris for a royal wedding. What followed went far beyond that plan. Catholic mobs, initially organized by the Dwees family of royal with royal authorization, spread through the city and then across France in the days that followed, killing Protestants by the thousands. The historian Arlette Joana in La Saint de Bartolme places the death toll between 5,000 and 30,000 across France. Pregnant Protestant women were specifically targeted for mutilation and their bodies were thrown into the Seine. The violence continued in the province for week, for weeks. Pope Gregory VII's response was to celebrate. He ordered that the Teum sung in thanksgiving throughout Rome. He commissioned Georgio Vasari to paint a series of frescoes depicting the massacre, frescoes that are still hanging in the Vatican. He struck a commemorative medal with the inscription Hugnatorum stus Slaughter of the Huguenots. He wrote to King Charles IX of France with congratulations got had been served. Deus volt. God wills it. The most devastating of all religious wars, however, was the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648, killing roughly 8 million people across Central Europe, 15 to 20% of the entire population of the affected regions. According to the demographic work of historians, Mercenary army stripped the land bare. Entire villages were exterminated. Theologians on both sides of scripture said only their side was right and that killing the other person was the right thing to do. Protestant pastors called Catholics idolaters. Catholic priests preached that Protestants heretics deserving damnation. Kings and princes used religious passion of their populations to fight political wars over land, trade routes, dynastic succession. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended it, but only by establishing the modern nation state system that gave Holy War a new address. Oliver Cromwell's campaign in Ireland, 1649-1650 belongs in this section. At the siege of Dreda In September of 1649, Cromwell's forces killed about 3,500 people, soldiers and civilians, including Catholic priests who were specifically hunted. Wanted Cromwell wrote to Parliament afterwards saying, I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of gone God upon these barbarous wretches who have imbrued into their hands so much innocent blood. The barbarous wretches in question were Irish Catholics. The innocent blood was Protestant. The framework again of Augustine's righteous authority. Just cause. God's sanction means that I can do it and God gives me permission. Mission by the time the United States was founded in 1776, the Holy War framework, of course, has been thoroughly rebranded. It became the ideology of an entire nation. That an entire nation, not a king or a pope, could be on a divine mission. The Puritans framed themselves as a city on a hill, a chosen people in a covenant with God. John Winthrop preached that the New World was the new Israel and that Native Americans were the new Canaanites. And what did Israel do to the Canaanites in the Old Testament Testament? And that the killing of the Picot Indians and colonial militias in 1637 by colonial militias was the Lord delivering his enemies into his chosen people's hands. By the 1840s, this was national doctrine. A journalist named John O' Sullivan coined the phrase manifest destiny in 1845 to describe the divine right of the United States to spread across the continent. It was used to justify the Mexican American War, the genocide that forced removal of Native American nations, the conquest of California and the Southwest, the seizure of the Black Hills from the la, and eventually imperial expansion into Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba. In every conflict, preachers and politicians wrapped American conquest in biblical language. Frontier expansion was providence. Indigenous resistance was satanic, it was demonic, and the killing was holy. And by the way, a lot of these preachers were paid to teach this stuff. They were paid by corporations, in some cases, other little, little kickbacks. The Indian boarding school system, running from the 1870s through the mid 20th century, was one of the most sustained examples of religiously sanctioned cultural genocide in American history. And its violence against children, and again specifically against girls, has been documented. Well, the founding philosophy credited to Richard Henry Pratt was, quote, kill the Indians, save the man, end quote. The schools were largely run by Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist and Episcopalian missionary organizations under federal government contracts. Religious organizations should not have federal contracts. This is why I think that the adoption system in the US needs to be taken out of control of Christian organizations because of their history, because of what they continue to do. It should be run by a Group of neutral people who are audited like hell to make sure we're protecting these kids. The 2022 Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report. Report commissioned by Secretary of the Interior Deb Hayland was published by the U.S. department of Interior. Identified over 400 federal Indian boarding schools operating between 1819 and 1969, with over 50 burial sites found at or near the school grounds. Girls at these schools were subject to a specific form of violence. Their hair was cut upon arrival, a profound and deliberate act of cultural desecration in many native traditions. They were assigned to domestic service training, cooking, cleaning, sewing, preparing them for lives of labor in white households. The report documents physical abuse, sexual abuse and the use of solitary confinement on children. Survivor testimonies describe girls as young as five being beaten for speaking their native language. Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Committee Commission with its landmark 2015 report documented the same pattern in Canadian residential schools by Catholic, Anglican, United and Presbyterian churches under government authority. Authority. The commission received testimony from survivors describing systemic sexual abuse of the girls. It called what happened a cultural genocide because it was. Because it is. In 2021, the discovery of 215 unmarked grave graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, a Catholic school, prompted an international reckoning. Subsequent searches at residential school sites across Canada. Identity. Identity. Identify thousands more unmarked graves of children. They'd been taken from their families under laws passed by, quote, Christian governments. Christian men acting on a framework that had been set in motion in 1493, the doctrine of discovery. We're bringing Christianity to the savages. Therefore this land is mine. God's will. After two world wars and the moral horror of the Holocaust, you would have hope that people would learn to abandon holy war theology. The Nazis themselves use the Aryan Bible to appeal to the church and to God. They demonized and murdered the Jews under the premise of preserving their God given right. They said it was God ordained. You would think that would give people pause to justify things with God moving forward. Forward. But this is why history often rhymes in every generation. In 1909, the American minister named Cyrus Scofield published the Scofield Reference Bible, which embedded a new theological framework. Dispensational premillennialism. You've heard me talk about this directly into the margins of the King James text. Dispensationalism taught that history was divided into divine dispensations or eras and that we were living in the last one. It taught that Jesus would return imminently, that the end would be preceded by a great war. War centered on the nation state of Israel. Oh, there's oh so much. After World War II, when Israel was founded in 1948, dispensationalists across America saw it as literal fulfillment of biblical prophecy. The final era had begun. And this final era was believed in because of John Nelson Darby in the 1800s, but specifically because the minister, Cyrus Scofield put it in his Bible. Even though it was not based on the Bible at all, it was not built from church doctrine doctrine. It was built out of convenience and the idea of empire, colonialization and control. During the Cold War, this doctrine was married with American anti communism. The Soviet Union was often identified as Gog and Magog from Ezekiel. Communism was the system of the Antichrist. Billy Graham preached crusades using that exact word across America, framing the global struggle as a fight between Christian freedom and atheistic TV tyranny. The irony is that unbridled capitalism and communism are essentially basically the same. They sound like they should work on paper, but they typically lead to a select few men having all the wealth and all the power. And while everyone else struggles and starves, they say to you but this is the best that things have ever been. The Dow's up 50,000. President Eisenhower would add under God to the Pledge of allegiance in 1954, and in God we Trust became the national motto in 1956. Are you surprised? The fusion of God and flag, faith and patriotism. The righteous soldier fighting the enemies of God had been reborn into our era. In 1983, Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the evil empire. Reagan was personally fascinated with biblical End times theology. He had spoken about Armageddon in private conversations and public interviews and drew on dispensational imagery throughout his present presidency. While he embraced the religious right and surrounded himself with evangelical advisors, he and Nancy also consulted the astrologer Joan Quigley, who you heard about in our Ronald Reagan episodes. She was paid $3,000 a month to advise on the timing of Air Force One takeoffs and landings, press conferences, summits, treaty signings, the 1984 debate with Walter Mondale, and the precise minute of Reagan's second term oath of office administered privately at exactly 11:57am a.m. on January 20, 1985. Donald Regan, Reagan's Chief of Staff, would later write that virtually every major move and decision the Reagan's made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes On September 11, 2001, of course, two planes crashed into the World Trade center and the same ideology exploded again. President George W. Bush, the evangelical born again Christian, initially called the War on Terror a crusader crusade. He walked that word back, but he got it right the first time. He spoke of the axis of evil that included Iran, Iraq and North Korea. He used Gog and Magog language in private conversations with French President Jacques Chirac, telling him that biblical prophecies were being fulfilled. A conversation later confirmed by multiple sources, including French journalists. The Iraq War of 2003 was sold to Americans as a moral crusade against evil. It was built on weapons of mass destruction that never existed. Two decades and trillions of dollars later, it is now recognized as one of the great and most expensive strategic disasters in American history. And it led to the rise of terror groups because we destabilized the region again. The theology that justified it was never addressed or abandoned. It was set aside to be used now and then we circle back. We're all the way back to the beginning. March 2026. We now have a Secretary of War instead of defense, praying for overwhelming violence of action. Same man as the author of a book titled American Crucial Crusade. Military commanders are telling their troops the war is part of God's plan. A president is described as anointed by Jesus to trigger the end times. The Prime Minister of Israel quotes First Samuel as he orders airstrikes. The Secretary of Defense war asserts that the enemy deserves eternal damnation. It's not an aberration, it's a continuation. The doctrine of discovery, manifest destiny, the Cold War crusade, the War on Terror are all the same line that connect all the way back through Constantine, Charlemagne, Charlemagne and Pope Urban ii. The language and geography have changed. The enemy is whoever happens to be in your way at the moment. But at the core the belief is the same. Our violence is holy. Their resistance is demonic. Therefore the killing is sanctioned by God and the dead will burn in eternal damnation while we sit at the right hand of Christ. The only thing that has actually changed in recent years is how openly Christian nationalists and holy war rhetoric is being deployed. Before those beliefs would at minimum be thinly veiled. That veil no longer exists. Pete Hegseth is publicly praying in the language of Christian nationalism, in the language of holy war, the language of the doctrine of discovery. Generals are telling their soldiers they are fighting in Armageddon, the literal end times. The Prime Minister of America's closest military ally is quoting Samuel to the point where they're thinking about merging our two military series with their new budget section 224. If that passes the history of Holy war has taught us that it never stays holy for very long. Once you sanctify violence in the name of God, you lose the ability to limit it because you just sanctified it by God. Once you tell soldiers they're fighting demons, ravaging and raping those enemies becomes part of God's reward for doing good work. Those demons, those harlots, those savages, become your spoils of war. War documented from the ryland massacres of 1096 to the mission rapes of the 18th century California to the atrocities of the 20th century's religious wars and our ICE detention facilities right now. Once you tell an entire nation they are the emissary of God, no matter what they do, you lose the ability and humility to admit fallibility, to admit you can up. Even if that fallibility resulted in the death of 168 Iranian schoolgirls. Quarrels. As long as a war is called holy, there's no resolution. Holy wars end in exhaustion and death. And then the victor writes the history with themselves as just and righteous and their victims as demonic and evil. And then the ideology just rebrands for the next war. The Crusades didn't save Jerusalem. They left it more contested, more unstable. The Reconquista did not produce a Christian utopia. It produced the Inquisition and the murder and expulsion of innocent people and centuries of Spanish decline. Also know these doctrines. This type of nationalism always leads to decline because it is that enmity with education, knowledge, freedom and autonomy. We put ourselves in the Dark Ages with religion. The manifest destiny had nothing to do with God's kingdom. They didn't care. It produced the Trail of Tears, the plains, genocide and the boarding schools that stole children, stole their languages and culture and killed them and buried them in mass graves. Graves. The war on terror, instead of ending Islamic extremism, birthed isis because we stormed in there and made it unstable again and it bankrupted us. We now are in more debt than our entire GDP because of these decisions. And again, running through all of this, and it seems so relevant in this conversation about holy war and women's rights, because these, these two things always happen around each other. Women get pushed down, subjugated. Further, as holy war comes up, as nationalism, especially in the name of religion, comes up throughout all of this. Every era is the body of a woman, Hyp. Murdered in Alexandria for the crime of thinking and teaching publicly. One of the greatest scholars and philosophers of her era, the Jewish mothers of the ryland who drowned their children rather than force them to be baptized at it. At the End of a sword from a cloth Christian. The Cather Perfecti, who literally. I get goosebumps. Physically walked into the flames rather than submit to a church that would deny their spiritual authority. The unnamed women in the pages of Crusading Chronicles, the conquistador letters. The indigenous women who were raped and beaten and then called a harlot. The indigenous women locked in mission dormitories in California to be dispensed to soldiers. Soldiers. The girls in boarding school whose hair which was spiritually tied to their culture was cut and whose languages were stolen. The women in Belzers who died in churches while they hid, while soldiers who murdered them said it was God's will. All part of this history. And it repeats and it repeats and it repeats until we say enough. And the reason these stories are so important and this history is so important is because until we have had culturally and and in mass enough, it will continue. The Holy War and the war on Women have never been separate objects. They have always run on the same theology from the same teachers, issued from the same pulpits. The war in Iran is not a holy war. The men selling it are not chosen by God. Interesting how we've had boots on the ground in all the major oil producers this year here. Not a coincidence. They. They've just inherited a 1700 year old tradition that every generation has modified. Constantine, it was the Milvian Bridge, Charlemagne at Verdan, Urban at Clermont Cortez, Cromwell, Andrew Jackson in the Trail of Tears, Bush in Baghdad, and now Hegseth with Iran at the Pentagon. A historian's true power is to notice patterns. That's where we learn. That's what history gives us. The active citizen, and we should all be active citizens, can then refuse to be enlisted in a tradition simply because it's. Just because it's the way it's always been or because it's tradition doesn't mean it's a good tradition. Bad traditions should change. A believer's job, if that includes you, because many of you are true Christ followers, is to remember that the founder of the faith at the center of all of this story said turn the other cheek when asked who is my neighbor? He told the story of the Good Samaritan, a man of a different race and religion who helped a cultural enemy simply because that man needed his help. The same Jesus who fed freely without saying well, how many hours did you work this week? Who gave water, who healed because people needed it? Who they were and whether they deserved it or not was never part of the question. But as a Christian, if you've been indoctrinated into many of these beliefs. You've got to start to break them. Jesus said, those who try to gain the world will lose their soul. That the meek, not the armed, will inherit the earth. The holy war is and has always been a lie. For far too long, the cross has been used to bless empire, ambition, wealth, rape, conquest, but rarely ever to bless peace. We just saw how angry people were at Pope Leo for calling for peace, which is what spiritual leaders should be doing, especially if they claim to be followers of Christ. Christian nationalists were frothing at the mouth when he said that the only way this pattern ends is when ordinary people, whether believer or skeptic, refuse to let grief, fear, misplaced loyalty, and most importantly your faith be used as another generation's permission to murder people to conquer mass. Refusal to sanctify war as the will of God has never been been tried. An entire nation rising up to their leaders saying, we will not sanctify this war has been tried in small doses, but not in mass. And maybe it's time we did, because 1700 years of failure and violence is quite long enough. Don't buy into the belief that you are too small to affect what matters. And you know, I'm going to quote Lord of the Rings things again. Even the smallest person can change the course of the future because it's not one big powerful no that ends a pattern like this. It's a million no's. And I'm standing with you. There are a lot of people standing with you. I challenge you to evaluate what you have been taught about this history, especially if you are someone who loves your faith and loves your country. I love this country, which is why I want it to be better, which is why I'm critical of the corruption. Because I want America to stand for the things I was raised to believe it stood for. That it never has actually stood for, but it can in the future. And I'll see you next week on Flipping Tables.