Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather
By Peter J. Thuesen
Oxford University Press, 2020

Many readers looking at the subject of Peter Thuesen’s new book Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather will immediately think of the tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri in 2011, doing enormous amounts of damage and killing 158 people. “The question that weighs on us at a time like this,” President Barack Obama said at the time. “Why? Why our town? Why our home? Why my son, or husband, or wife, or sister, or friend? Why?”

Obama concluded that “We do not have the capacity to answer,” and Thuesen elaborates:

Evidence suggests that most evangelicals would agree that Christians cannot know why one person dies and another lives, but they assume that God is involved nonetheless. And because they believe in divine involvement, evangelicals seek to relate stories of both death and survival in a way that edifies, as in classical conversion narratives.

The tension between these two narratives - life and death - is naturally at the heart of a book about how religious people view catastrophic meteorological events that are routinely called “acts of God.” As Thuesen describes, it was also at the heart of a 1958 book called Chance and Providence by Manhattan Project physicist and subsequent Episcopal priest William Pollard. “Whether we like it or not,” he wrote, we live in “a world in which indeterminacy, alternative, and chance are real aspects of the fundamental nature of things, and not merely the consequence of our inadequate and provisional understanding.” 

Of course a certain element of unpredictability is a fundamental characteristic of tornadoes, which Thuesen interestingly claims have a “peculiarly American character” and align themselves well with the more recursive strains of American fundamentalist religions and the emphasis of their preachers on “the raging of the Old Testament God and the inscrutability of his ways.” A tornado looms over a small Midwestern town; it suddenly worsens; a funnel touches the ground and stalks through a town with deliberate, almost unimaginable power; then it dissipates, and the town’s inhabitants crawl out of hiding to assess the damage. The town is 99% Christian, and its six churches are full every Sunday - but four of those churches have now been reduced to rubble, and an assisted care facility was destroyed along with the lives of 45 elders inside it, and a Congressman’s pregnant wife was killed instantly when a tractor wheel went through the windshield of her car, but both her lying husband and his mistress were untouched. Every tornado strike produces a hundred such instances, each one underscoring essential theological realizations: if a god is directly responsible for both the existence and the path of a tornado, that god is acting according to something that in no way resembles the standard Christian conception of ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ And if a god isn’t directing the tornado but merely watches while it kills the innocent, then is that god worthy of worship every Sunday? And if that god isn’t even watching, how is the situation of those faithful functionally any different than atheism? 

Tornado God isn’t only about tornadoes, despite its title. Thuesen is insightful and interesting and even witty on a whole range of natural disasters that have struck America in the last three centuries. He’s combed through the frightened and impressionistic newspaper accounts that tend to follow such disasters, and he’s carefully non-demagogic about charting the interpretations of the countless priests and ministers who’ve sought to explain the inexplicable, to rationalize the irrational, and sometimes to weaponize an omni-directional explosion. Thuesen does this without much more than a trace of anger; the little miracle of Tornado God is that it can tell so many stories of credulousness and hypocrisy without becoming embittered by it all. 

The book will fascinate the many thousands of Americans who live in tornado country and will hear the familiar dolorous klaxon several times this summer (and perhaps be unfortunate enough to hear various clergy members try to make sense of a ten-block swath of devastation). But Tornado God has points of interest for any reader who’s wondered what an ‘act of God’ may or may not say about the deity. And the book arrives on the doorstep of the American hurricane season.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.