Remarks delivered as part of a panel discussion, “Earth, Water, Wind, and Fire: A Roundtable on Religion and the Anthropocene in North America,” at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Denver, November 21, 2022.
In the beginning was the wind. The Book of Genesis opens with the Ruach Elohim—the mighty Wind of God—sweeping over the waters. Later in scripture, the wind is a metaphor for the power of Israel’s God, whose voice “causes the oaks to whirl, and strips the forest bare” (Psalm 29:9). The wind is mysterious because it’s unseen, save for the dust it sucks into its vortex. As Wittgenstein remarked, “How can the wind move a tree, since it is after all just wind? Well, it does move it; & don’t forget it.” Known only by its effects, the wind is unaccountable and unstoppable. Says the prophet Nahum: “The Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet.”
Americans have typically seen the wind through this biblical lens. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most people assumed that God was behind the wind, even if his purposes weren’t always clear. By the late nineteenth century, as the economic scope of natural disasters increased in proportion to urbanization, religious debates grew accordingly. In 1896, a half-mile-wide tornado, henceforth known as the Great Cyclone, gouged a seven-mile path through St. Louis, killing at least 255, injuring 1,000, and destroying or damaging some 7,500 buildings. In the aftermath, religious liberals and conservatives argued over whether the storm was sent by God or simply a product of natural forces. Missouri Synod Lutherans, who lost their mother church, Trinity German, to the tornado, pointed out the coincidence, which they did not regard as coincidental, that the lectionary for the following Sunday included a line from the Gospel of John testifying to God’s unpredictable power: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.”
Divine inscrutability reemerged as a theme seven years later when Ellen Burnett Jefferson, a 22-year-old domestic laborer, prophesied that the Lord would send a tornado to destroy Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on May 29, 1903. Even as headlines in the local newspaper exuded racist scorn (“Awful Calamity to Befall Pine Bluff Says a Crazy Negro Woman,” read one), a mass exodus of citizens ensued. When the predicted doomsday brought a storm but no tornado, the press heaped further ridicule. But for her own part, Jefferson knew the Lord’s judgments are unsearchable and his ways past finding out. Why God had spared Pine Bluff was “the Lord’s business,” she told a reporter. “I didn’t want to make this prophecy. I tried to get out of it, but the Lord wouldn’t let me.” Jefferson was a cross between the biblical Jonah (the reluctant harbinger of God’s message of doom), and Job (who was left abased and silenced by God’s mystery in the whirlwind).
It wasn’t just frustrated prophets like Jefferson who found the whirlwind inscrutable. By the late nineteenth century, scientists were realizing that something in the wind eluded their grasp. In 1876, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz wrote that of all the phenomena of nature, the winds “are the most capriciously variable ones, the most fugitive, the most impossible to grasp; they escape every attempt of ours to catch them in the enclosure of law.” Helmholtz’s words proved prescient, for a century later, wind inspired the chaos theory of the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz. Thanks to his work, scientists now recognize tornadoes and other storm winds as deterministic systems that nevertheless defy precise prediction because of their nonlinearity and their sensitivity to small changes in variables. As Lorenz’s protégé Howard Bluestein explained to me in an interview for my book Tornado God, even with the most powerful computers, scientists will never obtain measurements fine enough to predict the path of a tornado with perfect accuracy. That’s the upshot Lorenz’s famous 1972 essay, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”
Chaos theory in a way vindicates the ancient biblical wisdom of the wind’s inscrutability. Because chaos shrouds tremendous unknowns, it seems to leave room for God in those underlying mysteries. But recent science has also taught us that human beings are variables in that chaos. If the flap of the proverbial butterfly’s wings can set off a tornado in Texas, how much more can the emissions from millions of human-made automobiles alter the macro system of climate. Thus we come to the Anthropocene. We humans do have agency—too much for our own good. However random the winds and weather may appear, their chaos is deterministic, and we’re part of the equation. At the macro level, the calculation is not difficult at all: more CO2 = a warmer planet. Though it’s difficult to know how much any individual storm can be attributed to climate change, we now know, for example, that more intense hurricanes and destructive flooding are the new normal in warming world. Witness Hurricane Ian, with its catastrophic storm surge and winds just shy of Category 5. And while we still refer to such storms as natural disasters, we recognize today that there’s really no such thing—no disaster without at least some human causes, whether anthropogenic global warming, or unregulated coastal development, or racist neglect of minority communities. While these mundane human factors are a far cry from the biblical notion of an inscrutable God sending the winds, the Bible foreshadows the human theme too. As the prophet Hosea declares: “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”
What, then, are the lessons of the wind for the study of American religion? We need to leave room for the unaccountable—the chaotic, the mysterious, the things that elude our grasp. But we also need to factor in that which can be accounted for: the all-too-predictable human elements in every eruption of religion. As a mystic at heart, I gravitate toward religion’s unaccountable side. But in this age of environmental peril and Trumpist delusion, it’s hard not to fixate on religion as a toxic enabler of human folly. I can only hope that Americans (and all humans) will recognize the whirlwinds they can’t control and avoid reaping the ones they can.
© 2022 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved
Bibliographical Note
The Ludwig Wittgenstein quotation is from Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, trans. Peter Winch (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), 41e. All other quotations are cited in Peter J. Thuesen, Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Illustration credit: Tornado near Benkelman, Nebraska, May 26, 2021; photo by Jason Frederick, via the National Weather Service.