Bruce Holsinger's Neomedievalism Neoconservatism and the War on Terror from Prickly Paradigm Press (2007) is newly relevant – indeed, it reads like a prophecy.  Writing in the shadow of the post-9/11 "War on Terror," Holsinger warned how medieval imagery — once the rhetorical preserve of think-tank strategists describing failed states and non-state actors — could become a tool to deny enemies their legal personhood and justify unbounded warfare. With Trump’s “excursion” to Iran, now in its seventh week with no end in sight, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s call for a Holy War, Holsinger’s insights have a fresh and urgent relevance.

Hegseth has a long-documented history of defending the Crusades. He sports "Deus Vult" and Jerusalem Cross tattoos, and titled his own book American Crusade.  His version of “Christian Reconstructionism” is in synch with leaders of his sect, the Communion of Reformed Churches (CREC), who call for the implementation of biblical law and a theocratic state structured on Christian patriarchy. Now, his Christian rhetoric, which drew scrutiny long before the war, has been pressed into service of a religious war against an Islamic theocracy. At a Pentagon prayer service in March 2026, he asked God to give troops "overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy."

Almost twenty years ago, Bruce Holsinger anatomized a similar slippage, where medieval rhetoric slipped from metaphor into military doctrine.  Holsinger's most unsettling insight was his self-critical conclusion — that neomedievalism's vocabulary of "overlapping, competing power structures" and ungovernable non-state actors was simply a conservative mirror image of poststructuralist theory. Today that logic can be extended further: Hegseth’s “Divine War” calls for a "360-degree holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom."  No longer a rhetorical abstraction deployed by lawyers to circumvent the Geneva Convention, as in Holsinger's account, Hegseth’s rhetoric is now the stated frame for an active war. Holsinger ended his pamphlet grimly: "But we are all medievalists now." In 2026, that reads less like a warning than a headline.

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