Take & Read: American religious history

We Americans take our myths seriously. Peter Thuesen’s Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather (Oxford University Press) sets the stage for a handful of books on American myths. Thuesen demonstrates that tornadoes, “peculiarly American” and “religiously primal” phenomena, matter deeply to American views of God’s care for the nation. The storm watchers he writes about assume God’s protective power. But even now when a tornado hits with near-incomprehensible force, humans experience something akin to Rudolf Otto’s sense of the holy, inexplicable but unquestionably real. That reality presents a “profound theological problem”: What is God’s role in these storms?

The problem has shifted over the centuries. In colonial New England, weather conditions provided frequent raw material for explorations of God’s protection and chastisement of human beings. The belief that God both caused and gave shelter from storms puzzled that generation. In the 19th century, tensions between expanded scientific knowledge and the “fervent apocalypticism” of some religious movements sharpened questions about God’s relationship to natural laws. By the 20th century, Americans had a growing awareness of the scientific details about tornadoes but still no control over them.

The questions persist into our own time, perhaps most pointedly in Oklahoma. There, “the evangelical culture of middle America meets the frontiers of meteorology” at the University of Oklahoma’s National Weather Center and NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center. In Tornado Alley, God’s role in storms still engenders theological debate—and human beings’ role in climate change is the subject of scientific inquiry.