type: timeline_event
On March 20, 2026, CounterPunch published an analysis by scholar Henry Giroux examining how crusade imagery had re-entered American public life through the Iran war and the rhetorical practices of the Trump administration. The piece situated Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's religious framing of the conflict within a longer history of Christian nationalism's relationship to American military power.
Giroux drew particular attention to Hegseth's Jerusalem Cross chest tattoo — the coat of arms of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, adopted after the siege of 1099 — arguing that its prominent display by the nation's defense secretary was not an incidental biographical detail but a deliberate signifier. The tattoo, which Hegseth had discussed publicly and which was visible in widely circulated photographs, linked the current military campaign to the medieval Crusades in ways that Giroux argued went beyond mere symbolism, functioning as a visual assertion of civilizational continuity between Christian holy war and contemporary American military operations.
The analysis examined the broader framework of what Giroux termed "public pedagogy" — the ways in which militarized spectacle, religious rhetoric, and nationalist imagery combined to construct a worldview in which the Iran war was not merely a geopolitical conflict but a divinely ordained mission. He described how Trump had been framed by movement leaders as a divinely chosen figure, and how white Christian nationalism had provided a theological architecture for policies ranging from immigration restriction to military escalation that might otherwise have required secular justification.
Vote Common Good, an organization of progressive Christians that had been critical of the Christian nationalism movement, was cited in the piece as reporting increased engagement from evangelical communities disturbed by the explicit merger of religious identity and war policy. Giroux argued that the normalization of crusade imagery and rhetoric represented a dangerous departure from the American constitutional tradition and that its function as "public pedagogy" was to make explicitly theocratic governance appear natural, inevitable, and patriotic.