The Knight in Shining Armour: Crusading Identities and the Cost of Moral Certainty

Last weekend, two political marches took place in London, drawing thousands who gathered to demonstrate their support for competing visions. As I watched the news, these large gatherings, while certainly driven by personal motivations and nuances, seemed to express more than firm beliefs or political disagreements on the highlighted issues. Both events carried a festival-like atmosphere, with families and friendship groups uniting to make a rallying cry for attention and change.

There is a moral lens through which people do not merely hold beliefs, but by which they become inhabited by them. At the same time, viewed through another lens, a deep sense of menace is present: the social policing of who stands on the right side of history. Something totalising is at play here: all-or-nothing perspectives that leave little room for ambiguity.

This led me to think about crusaders.

We are often given a simplified children’s-history version of the Crusades as merely medieval military campaigns. Yet surrounding them was a much deeper symbolic and group structure embedded in European, particularly British, cultural memory. The Crusades were not simply about fighting somewhere far away. They became identities people entered. People became crusaders: a moral type, a redeemed or purified self, a person organised around sacred purpose. And once identity fuses with moral mission, ordinary forms of thought begin to alter. Opponents no longer appear merely mistaken, but spiritually suspect.

The old village cultures of Britain understood something about this long before psychology named group process or identity fusion. Medieval life was saturated with shared symbolic worlds: saints’ days, pilgrimage stories, miracle plays, apocalyptic fears, rumours of distant holy wars. Most people would never travel further than nearby market towns, yet emotionally they inhabited narratives stretching across Europe, Jerusalem, heaven, hell, and eternity itself.

Life in these villages was precarious. Harvest failure, plague, infant death, hunger, and exposure to the elements wove uncertainty into the centre of ordinary existence. Shared religious narratives helped organise diffuse fear into meaningful struggle. Anxiety became dramatised and externalised. Chaos acquired shape.

Within that matrix, the crusader fantasy offered something psychologically powerful. A farm labourer could become part of a bigger history. Suffering could become purposeful. Violence could become sanctified. Inner conflict could be relocated outward onto visible enemies: the infidel, the heretic, the contaminating force threatening Christendom itself. Once this occurred, violence no longer felt morally troubling in the same way. It began to feel cleansing.

Crusading identities were not mere delusion. They achieved real things (for better and for worse) and furnished genuine meaning and purpose amid chaos and instability. Their modern equivalents can do the same. Yet the costs remain real: to complexity of thought, to human relationships, and above all to those who find themselves reduced to symbols within someone else’s moral drama.

To me, one of the most powerful literary stories orbiting this atmosphere is not actually from the Crusades themselves, but from the mythic afterlife of crusading culture: the legend of Parsifal and the Grail.

Parsifal begins as a boy hidden away in the forest by his mother after his father and brothers die as knights. She tries to protect him from the world of chivalric glory because she knows what it does to men. Yet the moment he encounters knights in shining armour, he becomes enchanted. He mistakes them almost for divine beings.

The glamour overwhelms him. The shining image precedes thought. Although you cannot know what you do not know. Before doctrines are analysed, they are often felt aesthetically: through rhythm, spectacle, emotional contagion, belonging, and the intoxicating experience of standing with others near hope and certainty. Identification frequently arrives before reflection.

Parsifal leaves home and enters a world organised around sacred quests, purity, salvation, honour, and destiny. Yet throughout the Grail stories, what repeatedly emerges is not triumphant righteousness but blindness. Good intentions are never enough, and the messiness of life cannot be avoided. The knights pursue holiness while remaining profoundly unconscious of themselves. The Grail kingdom itself becomes wounded, partly because symbolic systems promising transcendence begin severing people from ordinary human vulnerability and relationship. The kingdom becomes a wasteland where nothing can grow. The king is cursed to sit forever in agony from his wound, surrounded by abundance yet unable to partake.

The crucial moment comes when Parsifal encounters the wounded King and fails to ask the necessary compassionate question: “Whom does the Grail serve?” Or, in some versions, simply: “What ails you?”

He has absorbed the external code of knighthood but not yet developed the inward capacity for human recognition. I keep thinking about that now.

Because contemporary professional cultures can sometimes produce something structurally similar: clinicians who care about justice, yet increasingly experience themselves as moral actors within a sacred historical struggle.

The longing underneath this is deeply ethical. Clinical psychology emerged in part through genuine encounters with suffering, exclusion, institutional violence, trauma, inequality, humiliation, and neglect. It would be absurd to deny the reality of power or the ways systems wound people. Yet something shifts when professions cease merely analysing suffering and begin unconsciously organising themselves around crusading identities.

Nuance starts sounding evasive. Questions acquire social risk. Public speech becomes increasingly performative rather than exploratory. People begin speaking less like clinicians engaged in difficult thinking and more like emissaries of moral clarity and political ambition.

It seems to me the crusade structure replicates fractally. The medieval village becomes the training course. The moral theatre becomes the online professional sphere. Pilgrimage becomes institutional activism. Public confession becomes the reflective statement. The heretic becomes the colleague whose language feels unsafe, problematic, or insufficiently aligned.

The scale changes. The psychological pattern does not.

Crusading identities seem to emerge especially during periods of collective uncertainty. The original Crusades did not arise from social confidence but from instability: fragmented authority, economic strain, apocalyptic anxiety, fears of contamination, crises of legitimacy.

Likewise, contemporary professions inhabit profound uncertainty. The authority of expertise feels increasingly unstable. The social contract around institutions has weakened. Digital life intensifies surveillance and moral exposure. Economic pressure stretches care systems beyond containment. Clinicians are asked simultaneously to heal suffering, dismantle oppression, manage risk, perform institutional virtue, and remain emotionally regulated throughout.

Under such conditions, crusading identities can become psychologically relieving. They convert unbearable ambiguity into moral direction. They answer the exhausting question: “What kind of person am I in all this?”

But is there is a cost? Once the clinician becomes a crusader, the patient changes too. The patient risks becoming less a person to encounter and more evidence within a moral framework. The temptation grows to interpret rather than listen, to classify rather than remain uncertain, to recruit experience into ideology rather than allow experience to alter ideology.

Perhaps this is why I keep returning to the image of the knight in shining armour. At first glance it appears noble, protective, reassuring. The figure gleams. The metal reflects the light. The body is disciplined, elevated above ordinary flesh. Across centuries the image has carried fantasies of rescue, courage, purity, masculine virtue, moral certainty.

Yet the closer one gets to armour, the more uncanny it becomes. Armour is not skin. It is a second skin. A manufactured surface placed between self and world. Psychologically, armour protects not only against violence, but against penetration more broadly: emotional penetration, uncertainty, dependency, vulnerability, shame, contamination, seduction, ambiguity. The armoured figure can move through danger while appearing untouched by it.

And the shining quality matters.

Shining armour is simultaneously visible and concealing. It reflects light brilliantly, yet reveals nothing of the body beneath. One sees the sky, the landscape, oneself mirrored upon its surface but not the knight himself. The person disappears into the gleam.

The polished surface offers the illusion of revelation while preventing encounter. It says:“Notice my presence and take a look at yourself.” But also: “You cannot reach me.”

Perhaps this partly explains why the knight in shining armour became such a potent cultural image. It condenses a fantasy deeply woven into certain forms of masculinity, professionalism, and moral life: the fantasy that goodness requires invulnerability. That to protect others one must cease being permeable oneself.

But armour is not neutral clothing and it changes the body that wears it. Historically, armour was exhausting. Heavy. Restrictive. Hot. It narrowed movement and altered sensation. The body survived through insulation. It can only be worn for short periods of time as collapse and burnout were so common. 

Psychologically something similar can occur.

When people enter crusading or heroic identities, they often become increasingly defended against experiences that might soften, complicate, or alter them. Reflection remains possible  (indeed often becomes hyper-developed) but it risks becoming reflective in the optical rather than emotional sense.

So we become the polished clinician. The morally certain activist. Who is endlessly articulate professional. The person who can analyse everything except the wound beneath the armour itself. A power struggle ensues.  Who can slug it out for longest wins. 

And yet underneath all armour remains a vulnerable body precisely because vulnerability exists. One cannot understand armour without understanding fear. Medieval warfare was horrifyingly intimate. Flesh was fragile. Death arrived through puncture. Armour represented survival through hardness. Likewise the culture wars of today feel profoundly personal. 

But hardness always carries a psychological cost.  As to become impenetrable is also to risk becoming unreachable.

Perhaps this is why the old myths remain psychologically wiser than many contemporary certainties. Again and again, the armoured figure cannot complete the deeper task of relationship until something softens, cracks open, or becomes exposed.

Parsifal matures not through greater certainty, but through becoming more capable of recognising suffering without immediately subsuming it into heroic fantasy. The question “What ails you?” requires permeability. One must be affected by another’s suffering enough to ask.

Perhaps armour becomes especially seductive within exhausted, isolated cultures. Permeability is difficult when institutions themselves feel unstable, persecutory, or emotionally extractive. Under such conditions openness can begin to feel less like virtue and more like exposure.

The clinician may begin to shine. But the deeper question may be whether they can still be touched. Can something from outside the self still enter and alter the internal world? Or has the reflective surface become too complete?

There is a point at which reflection ceases to be openness and becomes merely deflection. The knight in shining armour may therefore contain a tragic paradox at its centre.

The very defence that protects the self from annihilation may also prevent the intimacy, encounter, and mutual penetration through which human life becomes psychologically real.