Knight Templar, formally the Order of the Temple, is the culminating order of the York Rite's Commandery body, conferred after the Order of the Red Cross and the Order of Malta. It is a Christian order within the York Rite, and candidates affirm a Christian profession of faith to receive it, a requirement that sets the Commandery apart from the Craft degrees beneath it, which impose no particular doctrinal test beyond a general belief in a Supreme Being.
The order takes its name and much of its public symbolism from the medieval Knights Templar, the crusading military order suppressed in the early fourteenth century, though the Masonic order that bears the name today is a modern revival body rather than a continuous historical descendant, a distinction the broader scholarship on both medieval Templar history and modern Masonic Templarism treats as well established. The romantic and chivalric associations of the medieval order gave the Commandery's founders a rich, publicly known well of imagery to draw on when the degree took its modern form.
Knight Templar is, by a wide margin, the best known of the York Rite's orders outside Masonic membership itself, its public ceremonial appearances, including the distinctive uniforms Commandery members wear at civic and fraternal events, making it the most visible face of the York Rite to non-Masons even though it sits at the top of a sequence most Masons who join the Rite pass through the Chapter and Council to reach.