Dangerous Swordplay, Michael Voris and Catholic Masculinity
by Jason Steidl
Note: This paper was presented at the American Academy of Religion on November 20, 2023, the day before Michael Voris resigned from Church Militant for an “unspecified violation of the organization’s morality clause.”
(1) Michael Voris, the founder alt-right Catholic media outlet Church Militant, is a sword connoisseur. “We’ve got swords all over the place here at St. Michael’s Media and ChurchMilitant.tv. They’re all in my room,” he said in an interview with Catholic website, The New Emangelization. (2) Voris sometimes holds a sword in recordings of his popular segment The Vortex, and he routinely highlights them on tours of his home and office. Two of his published books exhibit swords on their covers.
Swords are also prominent in Voris’ rhetoric. At various times, he has claimed that Catholics must put their sinful desires to the sword, that Christ came into the world bearing a sword, and that the kingdom of God is to be established on earth by the sword. In many cases, Church Militant equates swordplay with masculinity, making it a sign of contradiction to what Voris sees as the feminization of Catholic spaces and spirituality.
Unfortunately, distinctions between symbolic, spiritual, and physical swords are impossible to parse out. Like many alt-right leaders, Voris employs ambiguous yet violent language and images to stir up his followers. Swords, whether material, imagined, or rhetorical, help accomplish this task.
(3) Church Militant began as Real Catholic TV in 2008, when Notre Dame alum and former news anchor Michael Voris announced the “World’s first Catholic tv station solely on the internet.” (4) Two years earlier, he had found a Crusader’s sword on E-Bay, believing that the purchase was a miraculous sign from his mother, whose 2004 death had spurred his conversion to militant Catholicism. The sword became ubiquitous at Church Militant events, even, at times, being placed on the altar where the Catholic media outlet held Mass. “This is just one fantastic (sword),” he opined in 2016. “You know, you can chop people’s heads off, or devils’ tails with it.”
By 2010, the media had caught on to Voris’ fascination with swords. (5) That year, an AP news report published a photo of the Catholic media sensation brandishing his favorite weapon. The image would follow reporting on Church Militant more than a decade later, when it was included in national reports on the city of Baltimore’s refusal to allow Church Militant to protest outside of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ annual meeting in 2021. The image—in which Michael Voris wields a sword with a broad grin on his face—became a sign of the public’s fear of alt-right Catholic violence.
For Voris, swords, and the violence they represent, are at the heart of Christian faith.
(6) In a Christmas-themed episode of the Vortex that has been recycled in three different forms over the last decade, Voris focuses in on images of violence in the Gospels. Christmas, he says, is not a celebration for those want a “Church of Nice” wherein “the emasculated clergy will fawn and ooze and gush over the cribs and the mangers.’” Neither is it for those seeking a “weak God, a cooing slurpy baby of a God, laying there cute and cuddly, demanding absolutely nothing other than making googoo faces.” No, Voris says, the Christ child “demands your blood, your sacrifice, your sword be laid at the foot of that manger...” According to Voris, Jesus “was a born killer, and following the babe means violence, division, hatred—and death.”
Interestingly, Voris finds scriptural proof, however poorly interpreted and unceremoniously ripped from its original context, for his claim that Jesus’ birth ushered violence into the world. He cites Jesus’ words in Luke 22:36: “I have not come to bring peace, but the sword.” He calls to mind Simeon’s prophecy to Mary at the presentation—“Because of him, mother, a sword your own soul shall pierce.” He tells the story of King Herod’s decree to put the Holy Innocents to death. Finally, he recalls the Christ of the Apocalypse, who comes with sword to judge the nations.
Once more, Voris says, “You cannot approach the sacred creche without your sword drawn and ready to be placed in his service…. Anyone who loves Him must take up the sword and join the battle till the day they die. To love God means to hate.”
(7) Voris’ most common enemies are the liberals he sees ruining the church. He frequently attacks “homosexualists” such as Fr. James Martin and the author of this paper. This is ironic, although perhaps not surprising, since in 2016 Voris himself was outed as one who had “lived a life of live-in relationships with homosexual men.” In that sense, we might interpret his sword play as one way that Voris is seeking to reconstitute his own masculine credentials.
(8) Along with effeminate clerics and homoheretics, Church Militant heaps opprobrium on those who reject its favored symbol of violent masculinity. In a 2021 piece, the website shamed The Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem after it exchanged ceremonial swords for the bishop’s crozier. The article explained that the order had recently accepted women as members, and now, “Woke Knights Dump Sword to Charm Dames.” But even in this piece, for all its attempts to be butch and straight, homoeroticism is not far from Church Militant’s analysis. The author laments how “both knights and dames will now be invested through a ceremonial dubbing with the bishop’s crozier, instead of the traditional practice of dubbing only men with the sword.”
(9) Sword dubbing or not, Voris is eager to share his love of swords with young Catholic men. After pointing to a crusader’s sword in his office—a “big 20-pound Gladius” that would “knock you out if someone hit you with it,” he goes on to explain the effect it has on children. “You bring in any guy, and it’s noteworthy—particularly young guys, young boys who come in with their parents. They’ll look around, they’re bored and they see books and all this. Boy, they see that sword and it’s like, bam. Their eyes light up and they go to it. There’s something in our natures, our masculine natures, about the chivalrous, the pick up the weapon. It’s just who we are to fight.”
(10) For nearly two decades, the formerly gay Michael Voris has been fighting for his vision of a butch, masculine, and violent Catholicism. Swords permeate his spiritual and carnal imagination. The bigger the sword, the better. The more it can effect worldly violence, the more it serves as a potent symbol for spiritual violence.
In a world rife with Freudian over analysis, we might be suspicious of those who constantly search for sexual or violent meaning in innocent objects. Sometimes, a sword is just a sword. But sometimes, a sword stands for much more.
Jason Steidl is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Religious Studies at St. Joseph’s University New York. He is the author of LGBTQ Catholic Ministry: Past and Present (Paulist Press 2022). Since 2015, he has been part of Out at St. Paul (OSP), the LGBTQ ministry of St. Paul the Apostle Church in Manhattan, and serves on the board of directors for Fortunate Families.