Question & Answer with Peter Thuesen about Tornado God

What drew you to this topic?

I’ve been fascinated by the weather since childhood. I grew up in North Carolina, but when I was a kid, my family took a trip every summer to visit relatives in Iowa. That’s where I first heard a tornado siren. One of my earliest memories is of being in my grandparents’ house when the siren went off at night and we had to take refuge in the basement. I remember being frightened but also fascinated by the thought of a tornado striking under the cover of darkness. Years later, as a scholar of religion, I became interested in the connection between weather and religious belief.

How are weather and religious belief connected?

The connection is as old as humanity itself. In ancient times, people attributed severe weather to the wrath of storm gods. We see this across the world’s religious cultures. Yahweh, the God of Israel, has many of the characteristics of a storm god who uses the weather to vanquish his rivals. The Bible is full of meteorological imagery of divine power. In early modern times, thinkers in the Enlightenment and scientific revolution mocked such beliefs as superstition and predicted they would pass away as humans became more scientifically and theologically sophisticated. But in America, this Enlightenment hubris came face-to-face with the tornado, the most violent storm on the planet.

Are tornadoes really the most violent storms?

Yes. In extreme cases, their winds can exceed 300 miles per hour, whereas the fiercest hurricane winds rarely exceed 200 miles per hour. And tornadoes’ destruction is much more localized and frighteningly random. A tornado can obliterate one house and leave the next house untouched.

Are tornadoes uniquely american?

In certain respects they are. Although they can form in other countries, strong tornadoes disproportionately strike the United States because of geography. The ideal conditions for tornado formation often occur in the Great Plains, where moist air from the Gulf of Mexico meets desert air from the west. Culturally, too, tornadoes are a kind of indigenous American storm. As the nation pushed westward, people encountered these fearsome winds that seemed to embody all the wildness of the frontier. Everywhere a tornado outbreak occurred, it marked the landscape with the indelible signature of death. The sight of a tornado, now so familiar to us on the internet, is a peculiarly American totem.

You say IN THE BOOK that tornadoes are not only peculiarly American but religiously primal. What do you mean?

I argue that the sense of awe before an unpredictable and mysterious power is fundamental to religion. That’s what ancient people experienced in the weather, and that’s what Americans still experience in the tornado. In that sense, we’re not that far removed from our premodern ancestors in that the tornado still inspires in us a sense of awe and wonder. The tornado still appears to us like a capricious god.

But hasn’t modern science dispelled the mysteriousness of tornadoes?

Yes and no. In the nineteenth century, many meteorologists and theologians thought that science would eventually unlock the mysteries of tornadoes and people would stop fearing them. But in more recent times, tornadoes were key to the discovery of chaos in nature. Chaos theory has taught us that while tornadoes are not purely random, there are limits to how accurately we can predict their behavior. So while scientists have made tremendous strides in being able to anticipate tornado outbreaks days in advance, they’ll never be able to predict a tornado’s path with perfect accuracy. In science as well as in religion, the tornado is an emblem of everything that humans can’t capture.

Is God the mystery behind the tornado? Do tornadoes prove the existence of God?

I wouldn’t say that. In fact, I’m highly skeptical of any such proofs. But tornadoes do prove the existence of mysteries beyond what is scientifically discoverable and measurable. And these mysteries are, in my view, the ultimate content of religion. That’s where I differ from scholars who regard religion as purely attributable to human social factors. To me, religion is about the mysteries that elude human grasp.

How do you respond to people who explain tornado fatalities by saying they were part of God’s plan?

I recognize that this is comforting to some people. They’d rather believe that a wise God is in control than that deaths from tornadoes are completely random. And while I disagree with them theologically, I don’t think they’re crazy either. If you believe in an all-powerful deity, I don’t see how you can’t at least wonder whether natural events are, as the legal phrase goes, acts of God. What bothers me more is when people appeal to divine providence as an excuse for doing nothing to protect society from severe weather, especially severe weather caused by climate change.

Is climate change causing more tornadoes?

The scientific jury is still out on that one. What seems more likely is that climate change is causing the dry line, the boundary between moist Gulf air and dry desert air, to shift eastward. As the Great Plains region becomes more arid, scientists think we may see more tornadoes in Midwestern states such as Indiana, where I live. That’s bad from the standpoint of disaster preparedness because the Midwest is much more populated than the Great Plains. But a shift in Tornado Alley is just one of many possible consequences of climate change. More intense and catastrophic hurricanes are another. We’ve seen abundant evidence of this the last few years. Sadly, under President Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate, we’ve seen a complete abdication of American leadership in fighting global warming.

Has religion influenced climate policy in the Trump Administration?

Yes, and in dangerous ways, unfortunately. Much of the influence can be traced to Oklahoma, the epicenter of the world’s most violent tornadoes, where former attorney general Scott Pruitt fought Obama-era environmental regulation and even helped scuttle an effort to construct state-funded tornado shelters in all public schools. Pruitt and Oklahoma’s senior senator, Jim Inhofe, are both climate change deniers who believe God will save the earth from destruction. When Trump was elected, he tapped Pruitt to head the EPA. When Pruitt eventually resigned, Trump replaced him with Inhofe’s former chief counsel, Andrew Wheeler. Trump has gutted his administration of scientific expertise and has forged a cynical alliance between evangelical climate-change deniers and anti-regulatory crusaders.

But isn’t Oklahoma also home to some of the most important scientific research on the weather?

Absolutely. While working on the book, I visited the National Weather Center at the University of Oklahoma, which is the national hub of severe weather research. I profile Howard Bluestein, a leading scientist there, whose efforts to place sensors in the path of tornadoes helped inspire the movie Twister. Interviewing him was a thrill and gave me hope that the scientific quest will continue, despite the daunting political challenges at present.

Did writing this book change your mind in any significant way?

When I first began the project, I thought a book on religion and weather would be easier and quicker to write than my previous book, a history of American debates over the doctrine of predestination. In the end, I realized that the weather topic is harder because it gets at so many mysteries about our place within the natural world. It’s one thing to stay purely within the theological realm; it’s another to relate theology and science. I’m skeptical that the two can finally be related in any comprehensive or convincing way, but the history of American efforts to do so is endlessly fascinating.

What’s the image on the book’s cover?

It’s a famous photo of a double-vortex tornado, taken by Paul Huffman of the Elkhart Truth in Elkhart, Indiana, on Palm Sunday, April 11, 1965. That tornado was part of the worst outbreak in Indiana’s history, killing 137 people in the state.