Bless Them All, Let God Sort Them Out

     My beloved Christina has given us a timely new meme which I was moved to turn into a bumper sticker. I received them in the mail yesterday and put one on my truck today! PLEASE share this sentiment widely and if you would like a bumpersticker yourself you can order them from the SUPPORT tab above.

     How many of you are familiar with “Kill them all and let God sort them out.” This “motto” became popular during the Vietnam War among American Special Forces troops. My beloved C’s bachelors degree was in medieval history and she was aware that the phrase’s origin was in the Crusades waged in France against the Albigensians, who came to be more widely known as the Cathars. They were Christians, but they rejected the authority of the Pope and other key aspects of Catholicism, so they were deemed heretics by the Catholic Church.

     On July 22, 1209, in the French town of Beziers, as they were celebrating the annual Feast of Mary Magdalene when suddenly the festivities were cut short when an army of “Crusaders” sent by Pope Innocent III showed up outside the walls of the town. The military leader of the army was Simon de Montfort, a French nobleman highly motivated by the Pope’s promise that he could keep the land of any heretics he killed. The Crusaders were accompanied by an official representative of the Pope, a French Cistercian monk named Arnaud Amalric. According to accounts as the attack began, a soldier asked Amalric how they would be able to tell which Beziers townspeople were Catholics and which were Cathars. Amalric supposedly answered (in French): “Kill them all. God will recognize his own.”