The Scourge of God

"I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you."

— Attributed to Genghis Khan

Maybe you're being stalked by some depraved serial killer. Maybe your nemesis is a horrible alien abomination seeking new, exotic Earth meats. Maybe you're facing something out of a Cosmic Horror Story, or maybe even Satan himself! Surely the best and brightest shall be the first to fall.

Not quite. It turns out that the common ground most monsters and antagonists, regardless of alignment, intelligence, or sanity, seem to share is a habit to pick targets who have just exposed some minor vice of their own. Given the choice between the prim and chaste (but initially vulnerable) Final Girl, or the smoldering, seductive temptress, they will, without fail, gut the temptress, probably just after she's had sex to show us how promiscuous she is.

Such a pattern will continue throughout the tale until the monster is out of sinful meat and will be forced to finally make an attack against their more saintly counterparts. By the end of the tale, the monster will run out of the "instant death" moves that allowed it to kill a normal human being before they even realized it.

A close relative of Karmic Death, except that victims of the Scourge of God generally aren't Asshole Victims, instead being "guilty" of comparatively minor foibles. One is left with the impression that the Big Bad, whomever they are, is the arbiter of some decidedly twisted justice, and that those who perished are somehow supposed to have deserved their fate. Occasionally, the "guilt" of these crimes can spill over to the innocent as either a parable for these original sins being so bad that others suffer too, or to hammer home that Anyone Can Die.

The name comes from the nickname for Attila the Hun used in the Golden Legend, which is itself a more catchy version of his reputation in Roman sources as the "scourge of all lands" and the "terror of mankind"; his success at pillaging half their empire was attributed as God's punishment upon the wicked.

It is especially ironic that even director John Carpenter, who essentially caused the "boom" in the masked slasher genre by making the film Halloween, was often mistaken to have been making a statement about promiscuity. Quite the opposite in fact: Carpenter has said on many occasions. The characters who were picked off during or after sex were only treated so because they were distracted and not concentrating on what was happening, not because he wanted to make any sort of moral statement. The main survivor of the teens in the film survived, for example, despite having partaken in illicit drugs earlier in the film, but was collected enough to survive a run-in with a masked maniac (with a fortunate chance stop-in of a psychiatrist with a vendetta, armed with a gun, who ended the encounter and saved her life). Similarly, in the first Friday the 13th, the survivor partakes in illicit drugs and, in the original script, a premarital affair. The survivor being a chaste and pure character is something that has occurred with the Flanderization of the genre.

See Sex Signals Death, Death by Gluttony, Death by Irony, The Punishment, Can't Get Away with Nuthin', Soiled City on a Hill. Compare Even Evil Has Standards. If the "god" is implied to be the Earth itself in retaliation for environmental damage, this is Gaia's Vengeance. Unrelated to Word of God or Shrug of God.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Death Note's Light Yagami claimed constantly to be a god of justice, and the bulk of his victims were criminals, however he had the bad habit of killing anyone who tried to stop him too... or that annoyed him. He also used to have standards, such as not writing the names of people that had killed in self-defense, or the names of people who had done their time and made a commitment to being functional, law-abiding citizens, but by the end, those standards had gone out the window.

Comic Books

• Tends to turn up a lot in the Chick Tracts. The entire purpose of the comics is to push a conservative, fundamentalist Protestant worldview, so naturally, anything that goes against it (rock music, evolution, Dungeons & Dragons) will lead people to suffering.

Fan Works

• Child of the Storm: During the Forever Red arc of the sequel, Ghosts of the Past, this is Asgard's response to the Red Room kidnapping, torturing, and brainwashing Harry. They curse Russia, and all nations under their influence, so that all their natural resources wither away (crops fail, fuels turn to dust, etc) as do any imported from elsewhere. And they make it clear that this is the just the start, and that they won't let up until Harry is freed and the perpetrators are surrendered.

Films — Live-Action

• Godzilla is the 100-to-500-foot, plasma-breathing, Immune to Bullets sublimated-god embodiment of this trope, and is referred to as such on a number of occasions.
• Harvey Dent from The Dark Knight begins as something like this in his conversion to the 'Fallen Angel' of Two-Face, but as the story reaches its climax beings to subvert the trope. He begins with those of with the most guilt and least sympathetic motivation (The Joker, Det. Wertz, Maroni) and moves on until he begins to punish those who are only questionably guilty or downright innocent.
• Eric from The Crow is a far more altruistic example than most, with the sinners in question being some of the most depraved, murdering, raping sadistic scum you're likely to ever meet, and he even helps a drug addict who he justifiably sees as more a victim than anything..
• Used in the 1950s horror movie The Horror of Party Beach (which was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000). The main character's girlfriend at the start of the movie is a hard-drinking party girl who flirts with any man she sees, so naturally she's the first victim of the mutant fish monster. Of course, this frees our hero up to get with his boss's sweet, chaste, beautiful daughter.
  • In another MST3K movie, Horrors of Spider Island, a dancing troupe is stranded on an island and their manager Gary gets bitten by a radioactive spider, turning him into a sort of were-spider. Naturally, his first victim is the only stripper in the group, who had also shamelessly flirted with Gary in front of his secretary-slash-girlfriend Georgia.
• Death in the Final Destination movies primarily goes after those who cheat him in some way, and is particularly ruthless in balancing the books, but at least in the later films, Death seems to wait for ridiculously minor infractions before bringing down the scythe. Such as disobeying the "No food or drinks allowed" sign (particularly onerous when you're at a theater with the same taboo, solely to force you to pay their markups).
• Played with extensively in Se7en; the serial killer targets people demonstrably guilty of one of the seven deadly sins (mostly). Subverted when the last person he kills is Brad Pitt's innocent (and pregnant) wife, which is then used as the justification for his own death via Suicide by Cop.
• Sam, from Trick 'r Treat, is a variation on this: he's the Scourge of the Celtic god Samhaine. Hell, he probably is Samhaine. Sam targets people who don't respect Halloween. Serial Killer Steven Wilkins has a similar agenda, but he oversteps his bounds by killing an (apparent) innocent, and is then eaten by a werewolf, with Sam's implicit sanction.
• Jackson the sniper in Saving Private Ryan.
• In John Waters's Serial Mom, Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner) is the eponymous protagonist. She's a Scourge of God but not against violators of morality, rather those sins are against propriety or etiquette, such as wearing white shoes after Labor Day.
• The Big Bad of Blood and Bone quotes Genghis Khan's pleasure of killing a man, riding his horse, taking his crops, having his way with his woman, leaving no one alive to mourn the dead; and the protagonist in return quotes that line at the top of the page. The antagonist thinks this is just to show that he also knows Genghis Khan but he really means what he says.
• The protagonist in Faster gives off a line relating to this trope after a man he killed realizes his wife was warning that he had it coming to him.
• In Pacific Rim, there's a cult in Hong Kong that view kaiju as this, using the skull of one as a place of worship.
• Referenced in Scream (1996) where Randy explains the rules to surviving a horror movie, with the explanation of Sex Signals Death and drug use are 'Sins' and those who break these rules are in for a Karmic Death.
• Hand Of God: Pernell believes himself to be charged with carrying out divine punishment against criminals, starting with his daughter-in-law's rapist, which his cohort KD carries out.
• In The Final Girls, this becomes a plot point due to the protagonists being trapped in a slasher film. They quickly realize that the villain Billy works under the conventions of the slasher genre, meaning that drugs and sex will lure him out. They use this to try and prepare a trap for him and later on to distract him so that another character can get away.
• Both versions of Dawn of the Dead have a character played by Ken Foree claim that the Zombie Apocalypse was sent by God to punish humanity. In the 1978 original, he tells the other main characters a quote that he learned from his grandfather, who had been a Macumba priest in Trinidad, claiming that "when there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth", implying that the zombies are the result of humanity's sin causing Hell to start literally overflowing with damned souls. In the 2004 remake, Foree gets a Remake Cameo as a televangelist who's more explicit about it, specifically blaming homosexuality, abortion, and premarital sex for the zombies on top of it.
• The boardroom scene in Dogma has the Fallen Angels Loki and Bartleby enter the executive boardroom of the fast-food chain/multimedia corporation Mooby's to declare them all to be idolaters for raising up "Mooby the Golden Calf" as a false consumerist idol, then proceeding to list off their various other sins (adultery, Date Rape, homophobia, elder abuse, pedophilia, corner-cutting on safety, and something so nasty that all we get is Bartleby whispering it into the CEO's ear while Loki says "you're his father, you sick fuck!") before gunning them all down. They allow a lone female executive to live because they deemed her to be an innocent.
• Inverted in Cabin Fever. Because the deadly flesh-eating plague afflicting the protagonists is waterborne, the only thing safe to drink is the beer that they brought with them. This is why Jeff, the asshole who took two cases of beer with him when he fled the cabin, is the only one who doesn't succumb to the illness, though the police still gun him down for other reasons at the end. Also, Karen, who would be Final Girl material in any other Don't Go in the Woods horror film, becomes the first victim here instead.
• Invoked in The Cabin in the Woods. The Ancient Ones want human sacrifices that conform to horror movie morality, with immoral young people being punished while a lone, pure virgin is allowed to survive (though she doesn't necessarily have to). It's explicitly noted that "the Whore" (the Ms. Fanservice who gets naked) has to die first.
• In Slaxx, the possessed pair of jeans stalking the boutique and killing its employees is fueled by the wrath of an Indian child laborer who got dragged into a cotton thresher and wants revenge against Canadian Cotton Clothiers for all of their awful Third World agricultural labor practices and hypocritical moral grandstanding. She even spares Libby and Shruti for being the Only Sane Employees at the boutique, and singles out their manager Craig for the most brutal death in the film.

Literature

• The Bible had no small number of these, the plagues of Egypt being perhaps the best-known.
  • The Horsemen of the Apocalypse in particular, while by far not the most impressive, are sufficiently iconic to deserve a mention.
  • The angel of death and destruction, Abaddon is perhaps the singular personification of this, being the one who is said would personally unleash Armageddon on God's command.
• In The Count of Monte Cristo, the Count believes himself to be God's instrument of vengeance upon his enemies. Somewhat justified considering that some of his main targets were rather naughty individuals besides betraying him. Not justified considering the Count's revenge also affects some of the enemies' innocent family members.
• Inverted for Agatha Christie's book, And Then There Were None. The murderer killed his victims from the ones he considered most innocent to the one he considered least innocent, so that the ones he considered the most guilty would suffer from anxiety and shock, while the slightly less guilty get a quick death.
  • The only exception is the first victim, Anthony Marston - while his crime is arguably one of the worst, the murderer reasons that he is too self-absorbed to be shaken by the psychological torture.
• Forest Kingdom: Subverted by the Walking Man in book 4 (Beyond the Blue Moon) — contrary to popular belief, he couldn't care less about minor vices. He reserves punishment for real monsters — like a pedophile/child-murderer/necromancer, who gets beaten into a barely recognizable corpse... bare-handed.
• In The Black Swan, Mercedes Lackey's retelling of Swan Lake, Baron von Rothbart's stated reason for capturing the swan-maidens is to punish them for being unfaithful to their husbands or disobedient to their fathers. (In reality it's because he can use them as a convenient battery for magical power). It’s played straight where Queen Clothilde is concerned, however, since she was plotting to keep the throne and make sure that her son, Siegfried, didn’t get it.
• Willie Rushton pointed out the essential flaw in this logic. In The Filth Amendment, he discusses the Puritan streak in British religion and cites the folk-myth that a stone circle in the countryside is really a group of girls who tempted fate by dancing on the Sabbath, offering the Devil an unparelleld opprtunity to manifest and turn both them and their musicians into pillars of stone for their sin. Rushton pointed out that Satan is a pretty unlikely founder of the Lord's Day Observance Society, and it would be in his best Satanic interests to encourage rampant sin, not punish it.
• The Scholomance: As revealed in book 3, all mals are a planet-wide karmic response to the use of malia by wizards. If every wizard went completely pure-mana (not even using the kill-bugs-and-rot-wood level of malia that most wizards can use without Jumping Off the Slippery Slope), new mals would eventually stop being born and wizardkind would be safe. Of course, the problem is that going pure-mana is hard, and being willing to use just a touch of malia gives you such a big advantage that it's hard to trust that nobody else is going to do it.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Oberyn Martell references this trope when he tells Tyrion that he is living evidence of the god's kindness. Because if gods were cruel, they would have made him (a bloodthirsty and violent man) the first born and heir of House Martell, while his older, more thoughtful and rational brother Doran, would have been the younger.
  • Even after his defeat at Blackwater, all of Stannis's enemies fear and despise him, and due to his reputation as a reclusive but efficient military commander, various characters are shown to fear or respect him, sometimes to a level beyond his actual abilities. While he himself never considers himself a god-sent scourge, his men, thanks to Melisandre, see him as the future savior of the world. It's to the point that, even when he's marching on Winterfell with a freezing, starving, outnumbered army stuck in the snow, about to face a qualitatively superior foe, his enemies are still terrified of him, from Cersei spending half of AFFC worrying that he's plotting all her misfortunes to the Bolton men in Winterfell whispering among themselves about how screwed they are when he shows up.
  Sansa Stark: For what was Stannis Baratheon, if not the Stranger come to judge them?
• In Ravenloft novel Vampire in the Mists, elven vampire Jander Sunstar is transported from Faerun to the Land of Mists by the Dark Powers to punish the vampire lord Strahd von Zarovich of Barovia for his crimes. While in his stay, he has vowed to destroy vampirism in all of its forms and views this as a crusade against the Dark Powers themselves.

Live-Action TV

• Bones has Broadsky, season six's villainous sniper. Booth has to remind people the guy is just a crazy murderer with a severely skewed moral compass.
• Inverted in Buffy the Vampire Slayer when a monster called "The Judge" kills on sight if he sees any sort of goodness or humanity in your soul. This becomes significant when he sees Angelus and lets him live.
• Babylon 5:
  • Ivanova references this when she encounters hybrid shadow-human ships:
  Ivanova: Who am I? I am Susan Ivanova. Commander. Daughter of Andrei and Sophie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengeance, and the boot that is going to kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth, sweetheart! I am Death Incarnate, and the last living thing that you are ever going to see. God sent me.
  • Sebastian the Inquisitor claims to have once believed himself to be such, pursuing a murderous course of action while believing himself to be The Chosen One. The Vorlons abducted him and taught him the error of his ways. His punishment is to spend the rest of his very long life only being allowed to torture and kill people by way of testing their worthiness. He hopes they will allow him to die one day.
  Sebastian: Good luck to you in your holy cause, Captain Sheridan. May your choices have better results than mine. Remembered not as a messenger, remembered not as a reformer, not as a prophet, not as a hero... not even as Sebastian. Remembered only... as Jack.
• Invoked in an early episode of Supernatural. The Hook Man (undead serial killer with a hook for a hand) is unknowingly linked to a very devout woman and kills people she views as sinners. He even comes after her when she realizes the correlation and views herself as immoral for wishing their deaths.
• Slasher: The Executioner targets people who are guilty of one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Most of his victims turn out to be rather despicable people guilty of crimes such as rape, murder by inaction, and extortion. When The Reveal comes around it is somewhat hinted that his father, a priest obsessed with punishing the sinful, was a source of inspiration in all this.

Music

• The protagonist of Poor Man's Poison's Hell's Coming With Me describes himself as "the righteous hand of God" when he returns to punish his hometown both for exiling him many years ago and for its general decadence and debauchery.

Tabletop Games

• Beast: The Primordial:
  • Beasts with the Hunger for Punishment (also called Nemeses) can only sate their Horror Hunger by killing or torturing someone who has violated a moral standard in which the Nemesis believes, and the victim must be at least generally aware of what they are being punished for. However, within these limits the quality of the feeding is defined only by the severity of the punishment, which need not be at all proportionate to the offense. A Nemesis could torture someone to death for simple littering, and their Horror would accept the meal with gusto.
  • Many Beasts with other Hungers likewise choose to limit their predation to those who violate some level of moral code, either for pragmatic reasons (if you need to kill someone, trolling for a rapist or mugger to kill lets you call it self-defense and you don't have to cover it up) or out of some residual morality.
• The Legion of Dusk in Magic: The Gathering is an faction led by vampire crusaders that are commanded to only feed on the blood of the guilty. Their definition of "guilty" usually extends to enemies of the state, rebels or heretics, but given that the Legion is encouraged to war against neighbors to have an constant blood supply, anyone could qualify as guilty.
• In Vampire: The Masquerade, certain vampires try to conform with their condition by acting this way. The Path of Night practiced primarily by the Lasombra teaches that they are literally to scourge the Earth, to act as an agent of evil and, thus, ultimately to do the bidding of the greater powers that dictate good and evil alike. More extremist sects of the Via Caelli such as the Path of Retribution sees themselves as actual instruments of God's wrath upon the world.
  • Ferox the Gargoyle is one individual example since he was a devout Christian while he served vampires as an Ghoul, and after his Embrace, all his memory was purged except for his doctrine and came to believe himself as an fallen angel sent to smite vampires in God's name.

Video Games

• Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus: Some of the Nazi officers see B.J. as this. A Kommandant - nicknamed the Butcher of Boston for reasons his own men are too scared to discuss - writes a note to his deceased wife. While he expresses no regrets over his past actions, his faith in the Nazi cause has begun to waver since finding out that the technological advancements they took credit for were actually reverse-engineered from the inventions of the Jewish Da'at Yichud.
  What does that say about us? Does that make us the sub-humans? What if Terror-Billy is not an agent of Satan, but sent by God to punish us? What if we deserve it?
  I think I must face the fact that I am no longer doing this work because I believe it is good and just, but for the love and respect of the men under my command.
  I am lost.
  I wish I could hear your voice. You were my rock.
• This is the name of the Hunnic Unique Power in Civilization. The Huns can raze cities at double speed, and gain extra production from pastures. They also have two unique units: The Battering Ram, which is really good at attacking cities (and nothing else), and the Horse Archer, which can be made without having any Horse resources. Don't ask how this works.
• In Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, the Doom Slayer is a vicious and unstoppable killing machine, but he only aims his violent rampage against the wicked demons of Hell, who are utterly terrified of him and openly consider him this trope. One Slayer's Testament says that he got his Super-Strength from "seraphim", implying that he may have literally been given his mission by God.
• Dragon Age:
  • The Darkspawn are said to be what came of the Tevinter Imperium's attempt to invade Heaven. The Maker was so angry he struck the magisters responsible with a terrible curse and cast them back to Thedas as corrupted monsters to sow chaos and destruction-according to the Chantry anyway; there are those who believe the Darkspawn's origin was something else and the Chantry made the story up to justify ostracizing mages, though the series hasn't definitively stated anything either way. While the magisters are revealed to be real, they claim that Heaven was already corrupted by the time they invaded, and there is evidence that suggests the Darkspawn's taint precedes the invasion making the Chantry's version of these events even more unclear.
  • The Blades of Hessarian in Dragon Age: Inquisition are an heretical Andrastian cult named in honor of the Tevinter Archon responsible for executing Andraste whose sword was taken by an slave that returned to the South and founded their order with the purpose to punish the weak and corrupt. In the game itself, they are little more than a group of bandits that prey on the Storm Coast under the direction of their Jerkass Bad Boss. Under special circumstances, it's possible to recruit them to the Inquisition, where they will vow to serve the Herald of Andraste.
• Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem: At the culmination of Roberto's chapter, the warlord that hired him Pious Augustus quotes Timur the Lame as he lets people fall to their death to become part of the Pillar of Flesh, right before he allows Roberto to make his greatest contribution to the project.
• Joshua Graham in Fallout: New Vegas wants to exterminate the White Legs because they sacked New Canaan and he is Fighting for a Homeland for his people. Depending on your actions, he can revert back to his violent self and become an warlord with his followers becoming no different from Caesar's Legion, the difference is that they use Christian influence instead of Roman ones. In addition, deep down he admits that he uses his religion as an excuse for his actions, and that he's trying to convince himself that God is behind him more than trying to convince the player.
• In Final Fantasy X, Sin seems to be this. In reality, this is just a lie the Church of Yevon teaches the people of Spira.
• Marduk from Sacrifice claims to be this to entire worlds. After arriving in a world, he examines it for traits he himself possesses. If it does, that world is unworthy and he destroys it.
  Marduk: I am the embodiment of all Creation's ills, and my purpose is but a simple one: To annihilate all that is unworthy. All that is a reflection of myself.
• The Soldier from Team Fortress 2 paraphrases Genghis Khan's line occasionally when dominating an opponent.
  Soldier: If God had wanted you to live, he would not have created me!
• Terraria: The Wall Of Flesh only appears when you chuck a voodoo doll of someone you know into a pit of lava.
• Vampyr (2018): One crazy priest insists that the Spanish influenza ravaging London at the time is the work of God to punish mankind for it's inequities. He is partially right as the one responsible is an vampire entity known as the Red Queen, who had the same motivation - make humans suffer for their sins - by unleashing calamities and plagues upon the world every few centuries she awakes.
• In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the "Carnal Sins" quest deals with a serial killer on the loose in Novigrad that leaves his pamphlet sermons where he denounces the people's degeneracy and associates himself with the Cult of the Eternal Flame targeting not just the more "loose" part of the populace such as prostitutes, drunkards and even artists that make lewd sculptures, but also people that disagree with the cult or even lost their faith as he believes his murders will wake people up to their "moral laxity". It becomes highly hypocritical when it's revealed he is a vampire himself when the Flame's cult denounces all non-humans.

Web Original

• In Novel1, we find out that the Sentiralites are God's punishment.
• Jebus in Madness Combat, judging from his internal monologue in episode 8.

Western Animation

• Castlevania (2017): Though Dracula's rampage against mankind for the unjust death of his wife Lisa doesn't seem like this trope at first glance, one of his minions taunts the Bishop that ordered her death saying that his actions led to God deserting him in disgust and allowing Dracula's goblins to enter the Bishop's cathedral and butcher everyone inside.
• The titular monster of The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was believed by the Vicar to have been sent by God to punish the townsfolk for the sin of tampering with nature to... force vegetables to grow beyond their natural sizes for the town's annual vegetable festival. Subverted with The Reveal that the Were-Rabbit is Wallace, who became the creature because one of his science experiments Went Horribly Wrong.

Real Life

• The context of Genghis Khan's quote in the above page is directed towards the Khwarazmian Empire (located in modern day Turkmenistan) whose monarch had the brilliant idea of executing his ambassadors sent to negotiate with him. Khan replied by destroying the empire completely, erasing their civilization from the face of the Earth and then gathered the survivors to deliver this speech. 13th-Century Persian historian Ata-Malik Juvayni is responsible for recording this event in his historical document regarding the Mongol Empire, though its important to note he did not witness this personally (he was born 20 years after Genghis Khan had died) so it's very plausible this line was an embellishment.
  • Genghis Khan's distant relative Timur the Lame also styled himself as the Scourge of God, as part of his general effort to be a spiritual successor to the Khan.
• Back in The '80s, a lot of conservative Christian groups proclaimed that AIDS was punishment for homosexuality and drug use. This (mostly) stopped once straight people and non-junkies (most notably Ryan White) started getting AIDS too, and especially once it became a public health catastrophe in Africa.
  • In fact, we could make an entire list of proclamations by religious groups or televangelists that some disaster or another (9/11, Katrina, the Haitian earthquake) was divine punishment for the sins of its victims. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Fred Phelps are particularly infamous for this, and it's one of the major forms of political rhetoric in the Islamic world.
  • The infamous Westboro Baptist Church takes this a step further by believing that all tragedies, natural or man-made, to be part of God's will. They believe everything from earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis to car crashes and mass shootings to be part of God's punishment for society's growing acceptance of homosexuality, abortion, divorce and remarriage, other religions, and the selling of Swedish vacuum cleaners. Their funeral protests are just their way of saying "thanks".
• Abraham Lincoln suggested this was the divine purpose behind The American Civil War in his second inaugural address. The speech is chock full of biblical references, and this passage hammers the point home: "...if God wills that it [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'" It's a pretty chilling speech, considering most people on both sides of the war thought they had the blessing of the Almighty on their side (see: Battle Hymn of the Republic).
  • Some people (including Ulysses S. Grant) also saw the American Civil War as a divine punishment for the preceding war against Mexico.^note The Mexican-American War certainly contributed to the conditions that led to the Civil War; mainly, the previous quantitative balance between free and slave states was drastically upended by the sudden increase in US-owned land south of the Mason-Dixon line. Anti-slavery activists also widely saw that war as being immoral and fought for the specific purpose of expanding the slave-eligible territory in the United States.
• Somebody told Pope Clement that divine judgement would come to Rome, and in 1527, the city was sacked by the Holy Roman Empire.
• C. S. Lewis deconstructed this sentiment by saying that while this may indeed be true, if we desire to have the devil's job, we must be ready for his wages.
• Invoked by Ronald Schaefer who wrote a history of the strategic bombing campaign of World War II called Wings of Judgement.
• Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command in World War II, used a Biblical quote about vengeance to justify the British bombing campaign against Germany. Alluding to the earlier Luftwaffe blitz on Britain, he pronounced: They have sown the wind. They shall reap the whirlwind. One bombing offensive was even code-named Whirlwind.
• Plenty of Christians, especially Conservative Christians and anti-Semitic Christians, believe that Adolf Hitler's war on Europe was divine judgement.
• During the run-up to the 2004 US Presidential election, a map of the paths taken by hurricanes Charley, Frances, and Ivan in the 2004 hurricane season started making its rounds of the internet claiming that the hurricanes only hit counties that had voted Republican in the 2000 election, implying that God was punishing those counties for their vote. The map deliberately manipulated the paths of the hurricanes to make the claim, however, and the hurricanes trashed counties that voted Democrat as well.
• The first Viking attack on Lindesfarne was described by the monks as this.
• During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther said the Ottomans invading Europe were sent by God as punishment for the Holy See's corruption, saying that "To go to war against the Turks is to resist God who punishes our iniquities through them". This got him into hot water with some people including the Pope, who perceived this as advocating for capitulation to the Turks. He later changed his mind when their advance become more threatening with the first Siege of Vienna, denouncing those calling for defeatism and urging them to fight the Ottomans.
• Smallpox was believed to be this back before people knew that diseases were caused by microorganisms such as viruses. This thinking was so prevalent that when a vaccine for smallpox was invented, many theologians objected that deliberately preventing the disease was a sin because it thwarted the will of God.
• Charles Trevelyan is infamous for aggravating the Irish Potato Famine by limiting food distribution stating that the plague was "the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson" for being Catholics in contrast to the Anglican-majority British. The fact he was unrepentant about his words or actions even after the death toll became publicly known only fueled arguments that he really wanted to exterminate the Irish.
• During the rampage of the Beast of Gevaudan, the French clergy believed the beast to be God punishing France for their lack of faith.
• Notorious Brazilian bandit Virgulino Ferreira da Silva, also known as Lampião, was a devout Roman Catholic that prayed to the saints and made his mark in the Northeast by portraying himself as an instrument of justice ordained by God to fight against the corrupt local authorities, being recorded as saying, "When I fire upon a man, he dies because God wants to; if God didn't want it, he wouldn't die."
• The Jewish Revolts resulted in the Second Temple of Jerusalem being destroyed by the Roman Empire, which was viewed by both Jews and early Christians as God's punishment but for different theological reasons: the Jews believed God was chastizing them for neglecting to study and follow the Torah, while the Christians viewed it as a punishment for rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. This solidified the split between Christianity and Judaism as the former started out as a Jewish sect, but became its own separate religion over time. More recently, some ultra-Orthodox Jews have suggested that the Holocaust was a punishment God sent for others' lack of strict observance. This has gone down about as well as you'd expect in other quarters.
• The Christian lobbyist Tony Perkins preached that God sent natural disasters to punish gays, who then made headlines when his home was destroyed by a natural disaster. We'll leave it at that and let YOU decide whether it's magic or mundane.

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