The Knights Templar and Christianity: Faith at the Core
The Knights Templar and Christianity cannot be pulled apart: before they were an army, the Templars were a religious order of warrior-monks who took the same vows as any monk and answered to the Church of Rome. Their very reason for existing — guarding pilgrims on the roads to Jerusalem — grew out of Christian devotion, and their daily life was governed by prayer, not merely the sword. To understand why the red cross meant so much to them, you have to begin with the faith at the core of the brotherhood. This guide walks through that faith: the order’s monastic foundation, its Rule, its devotions, and how a modern believer can carry the same spirit today.
A religious order first, an army second
The order was founded around 1119 by the French knight Hugues de Payens and a small band of companions. Their original mission was humble and explicitly Christian: to protect the streams of pilgrims travelling to the holy places around Jerusalem in the years after the First Crusade. They took their name from their quarters on the Temple Mount, the traditional site of Solomon’s Temple — hence the “Knights of the Temple,” or Templars.
What set them apart was a fusion the medieval world usually kept firmly separate: the monk and the knight. These were men who swore monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, yet were sanctioned to bear arms in defence of Christendom. The idea of a holy warrior who was also a professed religious brother was novel, even controversial, and it needed the Church’s blessing to flourish.
That blessing came in stages. At the Council of Troyes in 1129 the order won official endorsement and a written Rule. A decade later the papal bull Omne Datum Optimum (1139) placed the Templars directly under the authority of the Pope alone, exempt from local bishops and lords. In short, the order was woven into the very fabric of the Church.
Their full title said it plainly: the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. Poverty was not an afterthought but part of the vocation, and the early seal is often read as capturing it — two knights sharing a single horse, a picture of humility and brotherhood. Whatever wealth the order later amassed as an institution, the individual brother was meant to own nothing of his own. Faith, not gain, was the founding premise.
The Rule, St Bernard, and a life of prayer
The Templar Rule owed much to St Bernard of Clairvaux, the towering Cistercian abbot who championed the fledgling order and helped shape its regulations. Bernard’s treatise In Praise of the New Knighthood supplied the theological argument for the whole enterprise, portraying the Templar as a soldier who fought not for glory or plunder but for God, conquering his own sins as much as any earthly enemy.
In daily practice, life inside the order looked far closer to a monastery than a barracks. The brothers were bound to the canonical hours — the cycle of prayers from Matins before dawn through to Compline at night — and to hear Mass. When campaigning made attendance impossible, the Rule required a brother to recite a fixed number of Paternosters (the Lord’s Prayer) in place of the missed office. The order even kept its own chaplain brothers, priests who heard confessions and tended the knights’ souls.
Silence at meals, plain food, shared dormitories and simple, unadorned dress all echoed monastic custom. Meals were often taken while a passage of Scripture was read aloud, so that the body and the soul were fed together. Our look at a day in the life of a Knight Templar shows just how tightly prayer and discipline governed their waking hours — there was little glamour in the routine.
Discipline flowed directly from this religious identity. Breaches of the Rule were treated as spiritual failings, not merely military ones, and penances could be severe. Because the brothers were professed religious, their obligations, their conscience and even their hope of salvation were all bound up in keeping faith with the order and with God. To be a Templar was, first, to submit — and only then to fight.
SONS OF GOD – WARRIORS OF CHRIST
The Templars fought as men of faith first — wear the warrior-of-Christ spirit they lived by, no armour required.
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The red cross: a badge of Christian devotion
The most recognizable expression of Templar faith is the red cross. Around 1147, Pope Eugenius III granted the brothers the right to wear a red cross — traditionally the splay-armed cross pattée — upon their white mantles. The choice of colour was deliberate and layered with meaning: red for the blood of Christ and for the martyrdom a brother might one day face, set against the white that signified purity and his monastic vows.
For a Templar the cross was never mere decoration. It was a constant, visible reminder that he had taken up his own cross to follow Christ, marking him as a man set apart for a sacred cause. Even in death the symbolism held: to fall in battle beneath the cross was understood as a kind of martyrdom. That same emblem still carries weight today, which is why the cross sits at the heart of Templar-inspired design and continues to speak to believers centuries on.
Devotion to the Virgin Mary and the saints
Templar piety had a pronounced Marian character. St Bernard, their great patron, was himself famously devoted to the Virgin Mary, and that devotion filtered down through the order he helped build. Templar chapels and prayers frequently honoured Our Lady, and the brothers looked to her as a special protectress.
Alongside Mary, the warrior saints held a natural appeal for men whose vocation was armed service to the faith. This devotional world was expressed in stone as well as in word: some Templar churches were built on a distinctive round plan echoing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Our piece on Knights Templar architecture, which combined practicality and praise, explores how their buildings served both worship and defence.
“Not to us, Lord”: the theology behind the sword
Perhaps nothing captures the Templar mindset better than the motto they drew from Scripture: Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam — “Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name give the glory” (Psalm 115). It was a deliberate renunciation of personal pride. Any victory, they insisted, belonged to God, not to the knight who wielded the blade.
This was a theology very much of its own age, and modern readers rightly grapple with the concept of holy war that underpinned it. But for the Templars the framework was sincerely held: they understood their fighting as an act of devotion and penance — a way of offering God the one hard skill a knight actually possessed. Faith, in their minds, was not a coat of paint over soldiering; it was the reason the soldiering existed at all.
Carrying the faith today
You need no suit of mail to honour that spirit. Many people now wear the cross and the order’s mottos as a quiet statement of Christian identity — the modern descendant of the brother’s badge. Our SONS OF GOD — WARRIORS OF CHRIST design is made for exactly that: a way to wear the warrior-of-faith idea the Templars embodied, without costume or pretence. If short, memorable devotional phrases speak to you, our guide to Templar mottos on modern dog tag necklaces is worth a read as well.
Strip away the treasure legends and conspiracy theories, and the Knights Templar remain, at their very core, a Christian brotherhood: men who prayed before they fought and who believed the glory was never their own. That faith is the thread running through everything else — the cross on the mantle, the prayers before dawn, the vows they never expected to be easy. Understand the faith, and you finally understand the knights.