The Crusader's Shitpost

June 17, 20269 min read

From: The Fires of History, Lurk More

'Deus Vult' started as a war cry at the Council of Clermont in 1095. It became a gaming meme. Then it became a recruitment tool. Then it was in a mass shooter's manifesto. The phrase did not change. The context did. Religious symbolism in trolling is either sincere, ironic, or both -- and the ambiguity is the point.

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On November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II addressed the Council of Clermont and called for a military expedition to reclaim Jerusalem from Muslim rule. The assembled crowd reportedly responded with the cry “Deus Vult” – Latin for “God wills it.” The phrase became the rallying cry of the First Crusade. Nine hundred and thirty-one years later, it is an emoji reaction on a Discord server dedicated to a Paradox Interactive strategy game.

The trajectory from papal war cry to gaming meme to mass shooter’s manifesto is the essay. Not because the phrase is uniquely dangerous – it is three syllables of medieval Latin – but because the trajectory demonstrates how religious symbolism operates as a weapon in internet culture. The mechanism is ambiguity. The ambiguity is not a failure of communication. The ambiguity is the entire design.

The Meme

Around 2015, “Deus Vult” began appearing on 4chan, Reddit, and in gaming communities – particularly among players of Crusader Kings II, a medieval grand strategy game that lets you wage holy wars over pixelated territory. In this context, the usage was ironic. Nobody playing a strategy game on a Tuesday night was actually calling for a Crusade. The humor derived from the absurd disparity between the grandiosity of “God wills it” and the mundane reality of clicking on a map. It was performative anachronism. The same impulse that produces “Then the winged hussars arrived” memes and Roman Empire nostalgia posts.

Irony is an unstable isotope.

The same forums where gamers posted “Deus Vult” as a joke also hosted users who meant it. White nationalist and identitarian movements in Europe and the United States had been using Crusader imagery for years – not as memes, but as identity markers. The Jerusalem Cross appeared at rallies, on flags, in propaganda materials. Anders Breivik had already used Crusader imagery extensively in his 2083 manifesto in 2011, styling himself as a Knight Templar and framing his attacks in Oslo and on Utoya as a defense of Christian Europe. The symbols were loaded before the meme existed.

What the meme did was create plausible deniability. When a forum user posts a Jerusalem Cross, are they a Crusader Kings player, a medieval history enthusiast, a white nationalist, or all three? The meme made it impossible to distinguish. That was the point.

Schrodinger’s Sincerity

This is the mechanism that makes religious symbolism uniquely effective as a trolling weapon. A Crusader cross exists in a permanent state of superposition: simultaneously ironic and earnest, threatening and harmless, a joke and a manifesto. The meaning depends entirely on the viewer. The poster claims whichever interpretation is most convenient at the moment of accusation.

A swastika is unambiguous. It has been claimed so thoroughly by one ideology that its other historical meanings are functionally inaccessible in the West. But a Crusader cross retains legitimate connections to Christian tradition, medieval history, heraldry, and gaming culture. It cannot be classified as a hate symbol without also classifying a significant portion of European cultural heritage. The Anti-Defamation League has flagged “Deus Vult” as a phrase used by white supremacists, while acknowledging that its use is not exclusively hateful.

This is the exploit. The symbol works as a radicalization tool precisely because it also works as something innocent. The dual use is not a bug. It is the entire design.

Four layers operate simultaneously in every use:

Layer one: the joke. “Deus Vult” is funny because it is absurdly anachronistic. Nobody is actually launching a Crusade.

Layer two: the identity signal. It communicates membership in a community that values Western, Christian, or European identity – ranging from benign historical enthusiasm to active white nationalism.

Layer three: the threat. It communicates a willingness to use violence against perceived enemies of Christendom, real or imagined.

Layer four: the deniability. “It’s just a meme, bro.”

All four layers exist simultaneously. The poster may intend any combination. The viewer infers whatever their priors suggest. The impossibility of pinning down intent is the feature that makes the symbol useful – to gamers, to trolls, to propagandists, and to terrorists.

The Contamination Event

On March 15, 2019, a gunman attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people. His manifesto and online posts were saturated with Crusader imagery, “Remove Kebab” references, and the language of 4chan shitposting. He livestreamed the attack. He posted the manifesto on 8chan. He used the language of the forums. The attack was, among other things, content – designed for an audience that would understand the references.

Christchurch collapsed the superposition. Before Christchurch, a reasonable person could argue that “Deus Vult” was a gaming meme. After Christchurch, that argument required ignoring a mass shooting conducted under the explicit banner of Crusader rhetoric. The shooter had weaponized the ambiguity – and in doing so, destroyed it.

The meme did not cause the attack. But the meme ecosystem provided the aesthetic infrastructure – the symbols, phrases, and in-group references – that the attacker used to frame his violence as part of a larger cultural project. The ironic community built the vocabulary. The sincere actor used it. The pipeline from one to the other runs through the same forums, the same threads, the same Discord servers where the four layers coexist and nobody checks which layer you are on.

The Selective Accusation

Here is where the analysis moves from internet culture to comparative religion, and where it gets uncomfortable for everyone equally.

Every Abrahamic tradition has a doctrine that can be – and has been – misrepresented as sanctioned deception. The selectivity of which tradition gets accused is the tell.

Taqiyya is an Islamic doctrine, primarily Shia, permitting the concealment of one’s faith under conditions of persecution or mortal danger. Quranic basis: Surah 3:28 and 16:106. The historical context is specific – Shia Muslims, as a persecuted minority, developed a theological framework for survival when openly professing their faith meant death. In anti-Islamic discourse, taqiyya has been radically misrepresented as a blanket permission for Muslims to lie to non-Muslims. The actual doctrine: you may conceal your faith to avoid being killed. The propaganda version: Muslims are theologically authorized liars.

Kol Nidre is a Jewish prayer recited on the eve of Yom Kippur. It annuls personal vows and obligations made to God. In antisemitic discourse, it has been misrepresented as proof that Jews cannot be trusted to keep their word. The actual prayer addresses vows made to God relating to personal religious obligations. It does not address promises made to other people. The Talmud explicitly states that vows involving other parties are not affected. The misrepresentation was used in medieval Europe to argue that Jewish testimony should be inadmissible in court. It persists in modern antisemitic propaganda.

Mental reservation is a doctrine in Catholic moral theology addressing situations where telling the complete truth would cause unjust harm. It was developed by Spanish theologians in the 16th century and used by English and Irish Catholics during periods of persecution – the same survival context as taqiyya. Opponents of Catholicism seized on it as evidence that the Church sanctioned lying, an accusation that runs through anti-Catholic polemic from the Reformation onward.

Three traditions. Three narrow doctrines developed under specific conditions of persecution. Three instances of those doctrines being stripped of context and presented as blanket endorsements of dishonesty.

The pattern is identical in every case. And in every case, the accuser presents only the target’s doctrine as uniquely sinister while ignoring the same pattern in their own tradition. When anti-Islamic commentators cite taqiyya, they do not mention Kol Nidre or mental reservation. When antisemites cite Kol Nidre, they do not mention the others. The selectivity is the tell. The accusation is never about theology. It is about which group the accuser wants to delegitimize. The doctrine is the pretext. The prejudice is the engine.

The Weaponization Loop

This is where it connects back to “Deus Vult” and the broader pattern of religious symbolism in trolling culture.

The Crusader aesthetic operates in the same information space as the selective-accusation pattern. A user who posts “Deus Vult” alongside claims about taqiyya is performing two operations simultaneously: adopting the symbols of one tradition’s militant past while misrepresenting another tradition’s survival doctrine as proof of civilizational threat. The Crusader imagery provides the identity. The taqiyya misrepresentation provides the enemy. Both are stripped of historical context. Both are assembled into a narrative that has nothing to do with history and everything to do with present-day recruitment.

The Templar cross, the Jerusalem Cross, the “Deus Vult” slogan – these are not medieval artifacts in internet culture. They are brand assets. They function the way corporate logos function: as markers of affiliation, condensed to a visual that communicates membership without requiring explanation. The explanation is optional. The symbol is sufficient. And the symbol’s connection to legitimate Christian tradition provides the deniability that a swastika cannot.

This is not speculation. The symbology appears in Breivik’s manifesto. It appears in the Christchurch shooter’s posts. It appears on flags at rallies documented by the ADL, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and European law enforcement agencies. The same symbols appear on gaming forums, in meme compilations, and on merchandise sold by people who will tell you it is just a joke. Both uses are real. Both uses are simultaneous. The ambiguity is the weapon.

The Unreadable Symbol

Religious symbols are the original dual-use technology. A cross is devotion and a burning cross on a lawn. A crescent is faith and a territorial flag. A Star of David is identity and a political claim. No symbol carries a single meaning, and the attempt to police symbols inevitably founders on the question of intent – which is, as every troll knows, unknowable from the outside and deniable from the inside.

“Deus Vult” is now permanently unreadable without a decoder ring. You cannot see it and know what it means. You can only see it and know what it might mean, which is everything from “I enjoy strategy games” to “I endorse holy war.” The phrase has not changed since 1095. The context has changed so many times that the phrase no longer carries a stable meaning. It is a vessel. It holds whatever the user pours into it, and the viewer sees whatever they brought with them.

This is not a failure of language. This is what happens when historical symbols enter the internet’s irony engine. The engine strips context, adds layers, creates deniability, and produces an object that means everything and nothing simultaneously. The symbol becomes a weapon not because of what it says but because of what it cannot be proven to say.

The Crusader’s shitpost is indistinguishable from the Crusader’s manifesto. That is not an accident. That is the design.

This essay draws from The Fires of History and Lurk More, coming fall 2026.

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