Transcript: Tornado God with Peter Thuesen
CHRIS: 2020 has brought America the COVID-19 pandemic, the largest wildfire season in California history, according to the California officials, and so many hurricanes that we have had to start using Greek letters to identify them. These things have traumatized Americans and America itself.
When Americans have experienced trauma, they have often reached out to religion hoping for some emotional comfort, physical assistance and answers to help them understand the sometimes chaotic and destructive world that surrounds them.
Peter Thuesen just published what is, for these reasons, a very timely book called Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather, which, and I’m quoting here from the book cover flap, "captures the harrowing drama of tornadoes, as clergy, theologians, meteorologists, and ordinary citizens struggle to make sense of these death-dealing tempests. Mr. Thuesen says something that all Americans should listen to: ‘in the tornado, Americans experience something that is at once culturally peculiar and religiously primal In the whirlwind, Americans confront the question of their own destiny’ "
Peter J. Thuesen is a historian of American religion and Professor of Religion Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and co-editor of "Religion and American Culture: a Journal of Interpretation." He was awarded the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History for his book In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible. Mr. Thuesen has a PhD from Princeton University and taught previously at Tufts University and Yale Divinity School.
We are very happy to have Peter here to help us understand a very particular part of American religious history – religion and tornadoes, even as we experience our own natural calamities. Also, we hope to better understand generally what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion, and thus be better equipped as citizens to ensure that the American experiment in self-government endures.
Peter, you begin the book with the April 1974 “Super Outbreak” tornado system and the particular tornado that touched down in Xenia, Ohio. Can you share this story with us and why you chose it to “frame” the rest of the book?
PETER: Sure, well, and first I want to thank you Chris for having me for this podcast, I’m really excited about what you are doing and I’m thrilled to be able to take part in this.
The Xenia story is I think particularly compelling and poignant. As you say, yes, it was part of what later became known as the “super outbreak.” There was a rash of tornadoes that broke out over the American continent that afternoon on April 3, 1974. And, in Xenia alone 34 people were killed and so it indelibly imprinted that town with this disaster. But Xenia also is I think kind of symbolically significant partly because of its name. The word means “hospitality”, from the root meaning “hospitality” in Greek. And so the question I explore at the beginning of that section of the book is, what was Xenia welcoming, or well, it wasn’t really welcoming this thing into its midst, there on April 3, 1974? Was this a visitation of God or was it something else? And that’s the question that Xenia residents had to wrestle with powerfully in the aftermath of the tornado. Was this God that did this to them or not? And that’s the perennial question in American history. We are subject to the forces of nature and yet are those forces somehow linked to God’s plan, God’s providence? The newspaper accounts of Xenia residents reflecting on this afterwards are so powerful – some of the personal stories of loss are so powerful. And that has been true for every weather disaster in American history but I was particularly touched by the Xenia story partly because I live relatively close to Xenia in Indianapolis, so it is not a long drive away. There is that midwestern profile that I am familiar with, and so I decided to open the book with that.
CHRIS: When I read that first part, there is a picture in the book of three people at their slab, the Lauderbachs, husband, wife and a very young child. And, you know, you just, they are looking up at the camera and you just stare at them but then their surroundings where their house was, it is just a slab. So it becomes very personal even from my perspective, I don’t live near it, I don’t study this. But you mention that the newspaper reports were very revealing, very poignant. Can you share one or two, of either the letters or the editorials that came out as a result of the tornado in Xenia? I was especially struck by the letters, I think you quoted three from out of town residents, sort of trying to explain, from their perspective, why it had happened in Xenia. That was very interesting.
PETER: Right well you saw there some of the typical responses that have happened in the wake of disaster. I mean there was one person who wrote into the local paper who said that Xenia always had a reputation for wickedness so this must be God’s retribution for that. But then a local newspaper editor took issue with that quite strongly and said that his God is not a God that would do this kind of thing to people. And what is so striking to me as a historian about that is that the debate really is as old as America itself. I mean in the sense that Americans since the beginning of European colonization when they brought the Christian tradition with them as a way to reflect on these things, Christian and other traditions but particularly the Christian tradition, they have been debating these events in such terms. And, so, really, Xenia just in the newspaper back and forth in the aftermath provided a kind of microcosm for these long running debates in American history.
CHRIS: OK, yeah, well, you talk about time, this was in 1974. So, I want to go back to 1694 Cotton Mather – you have a story in there about Cotton Mather who was giving a sermon about “the God of glory thundereth” – I grabbed that from his sermon, that is not the title, but he used that scripture - and then what happens to his home while he is at church talking about this. Can you briefly tell us about this and perhaps more importantly, what it tells us about how early Americans, so this is in the colonial period, saw natural calamity such as tornadoes or lightning strikes?
PETER: Sure. I love Cotton Mather, he is one of the most interesting figures in American history. Of course, the whole family of Mathers is illustrious. It was this ministerial family steeped in the long Calvinist tradition. And they were highly intellectual, and Cotton Mather was very smart, and he knew he was smart, and so he was a little bit full of himself. And only Cotton Mather could have gotten into this sort of situation it seems. He was preaching and he felt an urge to put down his notes and to speak on God and the weather basically. And it was during that sermon that someone handed him a note to say that his house had just been struck by lightning. And rather than just dropping everything and ending his sermon and rushing home, Mather, to model an unconcern for worldly things, continued his sermon. And so he went on to make the point, and this was later published, that though there are natural causes to the weather, the weather is still under the control of God, “the high thunderer” as he put it.
And that is the tension that began to emerge in colonial clergy and other figures who wrote about this in the 17th and 18th centuries. That on the one hand, the weather is governed by natural law and is predictable in that sense. Over time American learned more and more about how the weather worked. But on the other hand, for theists, for believers in God, the weather is still under God’s control somehow, and how do you balance those two? And, you know, Mather may not have wanted to admit it, but he sensed this tension. In fact, over time, the clergy started becoming worried that people would, as they put it, “stop at second causes” – “second causes” was the phrase for those secondary forces in nature, the wind, the humidity, and so forth, that govern the weather. And they warned people – don’t stop at second causes, remember that there is a first cause behind all of this, don’t forget the first cause and that’s God. So they sensed this atheistic possibility and they wanted to guard against it and so that is what that story from Cotton Mather’s sermon illustrates.
CHRIS: Right, sounds like it would be a great little video, you know, of him getting the note.
PETER: Oh, I wish we had it. Yes, I know.
CHRIS: Fantastic.
CHRIS: You write also in this same chapter something very, very fascinating that from an American religious history perspective, that Protestants & Catholics confronted physical calamities in significantly different religious ways. And I think we all know Protestants were the majority, Catholics were a very small minority. But even so, they really viewed violent weather let’s say, in different ways. Can you tell us about this and its implications?
PETER: Well, yes, I mean, one of the key differences was that in a Catholic way of being religious, there were more mediating figures, kind of buffers, between the individual and God and those included the saints. And, so, the Saints provided a measure of protection for people that Protestants were bereft of once the Protestant Reformation rejected, for the most part, the old Catholic cult of the Saints. Martin Luther, the early great Protestant reformer, is a prefect example of this. The details of it are somewhat disputed and whether the way Luther wrote about this particular story is entirely accurate is also disputed, but there is this famous story of Luther being caught in a thunderstorm and he is terror struck and the first thing he thinks to do is pray to St. Anne, who is among other things, the patroness of people caught in thunderstorms, and so he makes a spontaneous vow, according to the old story, “St. Anne hep me and if you help me I’ll become a monk.” And so when he survives this calamity of course he is not going to renege on his vow, and so he enters a full-time religious life, takes a vow of celibacy that of course he later then in the course of the Reformation, renounces. So, the Saints provided protection, but then later Luther comes to reject that mediating function of the Saints by in large, and other Protestants rejected even more strongly. So the way I put it in the book is basically that for Protestants there is very little if anything standing between the individual and Almighty God when it comes to the sometimes frightening power of the weather.
CHRIS: Right, in fact, there is one sentence that you wrote that really almost came out and slapped me, right, you said: "Protestants faced the world alone” because of what you just explained. So, are there any implications for the entire American experiment in self-government of that sort of statement? Because this was a Protestant nation, more than anything else at the beginning. What are its implications, if any, in your mind?
PETER: Well, that is a really interesting question. I think, I mean, one could say that one implication is that once Americans become convinced that God is on their side then that is a powerful contributor to American nationalism and even the weather itself can buttress that kind of nationalistic fervor. I tell in the book about how in a couple of situations in English Protestant history there was the wide-spread feeling that God had supported the Protestant cause through meteorological intervention basically. So, when the English were facing the Spanish Armada in 1588, a storm helped defeat the Spanish Armada. Then a century later in 1688 the weather was said to have assisted William of Orange in invading England and overthrowing England’s last Catholic king.
And so the so-called “Protestant winds” of 1588 and 1688 were seen as interventions on behalf of Protestantism, and that kind of laid a foundation for later American nationalism. So, Americans in their doctrine of Manifest Destiny overspreading the American continent became convinced that God was on their side and even the weather would not stand in their way. Even the weather would sometimes assist them. And yet, the weather has a powerful way of frustrating expectations and so that is a recurring theme too, that as soon as people thought that weather would cooperate, it didn’t.
CHRIS: Peter, throughout the book I noticed that Americans reached out and grabbed the same few biblical verses, it seemed, over and over and over when they had to make sense of the whirlwinds’ awesome and terrible destruction around them. Can you share perhaps what some of those verses are or just generally how Americans used the Bible to decipher these whirlwinds.
PETER: Well, that is a great question, because one of the things that is most striking about the American experience with violent weather is that people, particularly Christians, who were the majority religious adherents in American history appealed to scripture again and again in trying to make sense of violent weather. I realized in the course of this project this was happening so much that I convinced the publisher to
include a scriptural index as part of the book because there are certain citations that occur again and again. So a tornado happens and someone inevitably appeals to a verse like Nahum 1:3, where it says “the Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and the storm”, and that’s just one small example. The Hebrew Bible is full of verses that use meteorological imagery to illustrate divine power. I think there is something very primal about that across religious cultures. And you see it vividly in Hebrew scripture. And so those verses just jumped out to Americans in the wake of a storm and seemed to confirm a Providential reading of disaster even while raising lingering questions about what kind of God sends that kind of destruction. So, I mean, the Bible was both a touchstone I think and at times a source of comfort but also a source of religious questions about these terrible things.
CHRIS: Peter, along the Bible theme, you tell us in the book about two particular “Biblical winds”: one is the Pentecostal wind “the mighty rushing”, and it is sort of a positive one, and then the apocalyptic winds in the Book of Revelations, as destructive winds. Tell us about those two and how they were understood and used by Americans to try to understand violent weather.
PETER: Yes, well, that is one of the paradoxes of the wind as an instrument of God’s power, that is both a wind that builds up and enlivens people but it is also a wind that at times destroys. And so what I refer to as the Pentecostal wind is this story of course of the first Pentecost in the book of Acts where a rushing mighty wind descends and in that instance the wind becomes an image of the power of the Holy Spirit. But at the close of the Bible the wind figures into the element that brings destruction at the end, the unfolding apocalypse – so the four winds of the apocalypse recur throughout Christian history as an image of destruction – you find that in some medieval art for example.
And, so it is really two sides of this religious coin in the human experience, that God both creates but also destroys. And that is something that Americans perennially wrestle with.
CHRIS: You quote Henry Ward Beecher saying, and here I’m quoting from one of his sermons: “here is where the storms end. God no longer rules by force and fear, but by hope and love.” Can you speak Peter to the changes in how Americans understood violent weather in religious terms between colonial times and post-Civil War?
PETER: Yes. I mean, and I think a big part of the change is the rise of what we would begin to recognize as modern science, and a more scientific understanding of the weather. And with that a rising optimism that these once mysterious forces could be understood and maybe even mastered. You mentioned Henry Ward Beecher, and so by the latter half of the 19th century, I mean he was maybe the most famous preacher of his day, so very prominent figure. And he was involved in a tornado disaster, or the aftermath of it rather, that occurred in Iowa at Grinnell, lowa; Grinnell College was pretty much wiped out by a tornado in 1882. So the leaders of the college then went back east and appealed to Beecher in Brooklyn and others for help in raising money to rebuild the college. And Beecher used that incident partly as an occasion to talk about how he felt that a scientific world view was replacing an old superstitious one and in the face of disasters like that and people could turn them to good, that good would come of them, and that people no longer be, as he put it, a “trembling and ignorant race” before the forces of nature. The namesake of the Grinnell College, Josiah Grinnell, even commented “that cyclone was a real windfall.” That seems in retrospect to be a rather callous comment since 30 townspeople were killed in that disaster. And yet what he meant was, we built Grinnell up better than ever before or after this. And that was typical of this emerging scientific optimistic confident mentality in the latter half of the 19th century. And so, Beecher was basically repudiating much of his old Puritan inheritance that assumed that weather disasters were punishment for some kind of human misconduct. Instead, he wanted to push the view that these were natural, and God’s purpose was to enlighten and to build up and not to destroy.
CHRIS: Wow. Very interesting.
We are listening to Peter J. Thuesen, historian of American religion and Professor of Religion Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and co-editor of "Religion and American Culture: a Journal of Interpretation." Mr. Thuesen has a PhD from Princeton University and taught previously at Tufts University and Yale Divinity School.
CHRIS: Peter, I want to move to talking about the deadliest tornado in American history, as you know, the “Tri-State Tornado”, which hit Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana on March 18, 1925. Can you first describe, perhaps briefly, the physical picture for us then how people saw this in religious terms?
PETER: Yes. I mean the Tri-State Tornado is really an event that still stands out even in light of our recent weather disasters, that have been exacerbated by climate change.
The Tri-State Tornado still stands out as an especially destructive force. We’re not absolutely sure, but we think it was a singe tornado that moved across those states, a long-track tornado that maintained its destructive power over hundreds of miles. So nearly 700 people were killed in that disaster. And some of the little towns along the way were absolutely wiped off the map. One bigger town Murphysboro, Illinois, wasn’t completely destroyed but so many residents of that town were killed that it is indelibly imprinted in that town’s memory and history. And after the storm passed people were left absolutely stunned. I have a picture in the book of a man with a stunned look on his face, by his overturned piano in a pile of rubble that presumably was once his house.
And there is another photo I’ve seen of a child whose head was bandaged and he’s holding a dog and fortunately the dog is still alive. But there are cases like those of these poignant examples of people who were left speechless and stunned by the destructive power of this storm. And the way I talk about that storm in the book is that – it was a reminder even in the wake of the rise of modern science in the 19th century, that the forces of nature could only be mastered so far. Henry Ward Beecher’s optimism met its match in a sense in that disaster. And so it, I think, put the brakes on some of the hope that the tornado would someday be conquered.
CHRIS: Yeah, no, I think, I’m reminded of something I read, and I’m going to quote something you wrote in this chapter and I’d like you to explain what you meant. You write “The Tri-State Tornado represented the obverse of American exceptionalism – that instead of Nature’s nation, blessed by God, the United States was the singular recipient of Nature’s wrath … the Tri-State Tornado was a symbolic tipping point toward new ways of thinking about God, nature and American chosenness.” There’s a lot of stuff packed in those sentences. What do you mean? What does all of this mean maybe in the larger picture maybe of American exceptionalism, thoughts about that, you know, chosenness, etc.?
PETER: Right. Yes, the Tri-State Tornado, I mean, I should back up a bit and say, it wasn’t the first shock to the American system in the wake of scientific advances of the 19th century. At the end of the 19th century, in 1896, a massive tornado hit St. Louis, Missouri, and St. Louis was at that time was the 4th largest city in the United States and some 255 people were killed in that and a large section of the city was destroyed. And so 1896 St. Louis, and then the Tri-State Tornado in 1925, in the wake of disasters like that, and I should add too, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which killed some 6,000 people, I mean, if you want to talk about scale of disasters, that is even greater. But disasters such as this began to cause certain theologians to question, certainly the optimism of someone like Henry Ward Beecher, but also to question the long regnant assumption in American history that Americans were somehow particularly blessed by God. And one of the first people to do this was someone who was actually a young boy when the St. Louis tornado of 1896 hit. He was living nearby in St. Charles, Missouri, and this was Reinhold Niebuhr. And Reinhold Niebuhr in the wake of these disasters of the late 19th early 20th century began to rethink American exceptionalism and also to rethink the way the Bible had been used to interpret the weather. And so one of the passages that Niebuhr most focused on was Matthew 5:45 from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says the rain falls on the just and the unjust. And Niebuhr came to the conclusion that in that passage we see what he called an illustration of God’s “trans- moral” mercy. That nature is basically blind to the recipient of either its blessings or its curses. And this had huge implications for the way Americans thought about their own experience. I mean Niebuhr said we can’t assume in effect that nature is on our side. In fact, very often it is not. It is from that, that Niebuhr developed all sorts of related conclusions about American destiny and chosenness. In the in the 20th century as Niebuhr reconsiders this old colonial providential view of American chosenness, he realizes what he calls the radical implications of this passage. And so it’s the first in of a number of 20th century reflections I think on how difficult God’s providence really is to understand. Whereas previous thinkers in the American experience often assumed that the interpretations of providence was relatively easy.
CHRIS: That reminds me of the story, I’m going back here in time when Benjamin Franklin and the invention of the lightning rod and how people saw that when there was big storm that hit Boston, which had the most lightning rods. Can you elaborate on that story briefly, that really shows how Americans in the colonial period saw things, with regard to science now, this was a scientific thing, the lightning rod.
PETER: Sure, there was this controversy in the mid-1700s over lightning rods. Many people conclude that lightning rods brought down God’s wrath, that they were tempting fate (well, but not in an atheistic sense) – they were angering God by attempting to protect people from God’s wrath and deflect the power of the lightning. So people like Benjamin Franklin and others were engaged in this debate. I mean it was the same sort of debate that occurred interestingly over smallpox inoculation. Is that a presumptuous thing for people to do to try to protect themselves against illness if illness is seen as a providential punishment for some wrongdoing? So some of the colonial clergy had to step up and defend the practice of inoculation. I mean Cotton Mather did. Jonathan Edwards did. Jonathan Edwards took an inoculation for smallpox right after becoming president of the College of New Jersey – Princeton – and it killed him. So it’s a sad story in Edwards’ case. And yet, he was trying to defend modern science as something that was in keeping with a religious and pious view of the world. And yet, you know, on the popular level a lot of people felt that inoculation was dangerous because it interfered with God’s providential purposes.
CHRIS: And, did you notice, so you also would also look at, you know, sermons of local churches, right. You were looking at intellectual theologians, you were looking at newspaper editors and letter writers, and you were looking at local church sermons, right?
PETER: Well, one thing I think is that in the context of a sermon, in the context of a religious service, the burden, the recuring burden on clergy has always been to find a way to comfort. And so the question that is interesting to trace is, how did the clergy rise to that challenge, and did they make the same arguments in the17th or 18th century as they make in the 20th century. One thing that I see over time is that by the 20th century there are many more clergy willing to say “we don’t think that God is involved in the tornado at all”, and that becomes a way to comfort. Whereas the colonial clergy, as I suggested in talking about Cotton Mather, would have been much more averse to making such a statement. Even though they were aware of secondary causes in nature, they feared if you stressed that angle too much that you would be on a slippery slope to atheism. Whereas in the 20th century, clergy increasingly I think resort to pretty much an outright denial that God is involved in deadly weather and twisters. And it’s understandable that they would use that as a way to comfort, and yet that doesn’t answer the basic questions for religious people, of how we should understand our place in the natural world if we are religious and want to maintain a theistic frame of reference.
CHRIS: Yeah, right. So even closer to us in time, Peter, is the 2013 tornado that hit Plaza Towers Elementary School in the city of Moore, which is just outside of Oklahoma City, and it killed seven children there. You write this and I’ll quote: “the geographical location of [this tornado] was significant”, being where the Bible Belt and Tornado Alley overlap, which I found very interesting to consider and think about. And I think in your book much comes out of this analysis, right, that here are two things that are overlapping, can you explain that to us, what you are talking about there and its significance?
PETER: Yes, well, Oklahoma is the focus of the much of the last part of the book and of course it is because it is tornado alley, even taking into account that climate change may be shifting tornado alley gradually eastward, Oklahoma still is the home to more violent, destructive tornadoes than anywhere else on earth. And so, residents of Oklahoma have always had a special relationship with violent weather. And it’s special for another reason, or maybe I should say it’s representative for another reason, in that evangelical Protestantism is especially important in the religious experience of that state. And so violent weather tends to be viewed through an evangelical lens, this is the Bible Belt angle. And by Bible Belt angle I mean through a Biblical lens, because of course for an evangelical Protestant the Bible is still the principal authority and principal source of comfort in wake of disaster. So this event that you mention, the 2013 Moore tornado, it was a massive F5 tornado that just literally chewed up huge sections of the town. And made a direct hit on Plaza Towers Elementary school, which I later visited a couple of years later after it had been rebuilt, and 7 children were killed, it was in the middle of school day. And so it raised the old problem of theodicy - how you explain evil or suffering with particular acuteness. And because of the evangelical influence in Oklahoma, many people commented in the press, we can’t know why God allows these things and yet we still have to have faith that God is in charge. And yet, there was also what became a well-known incident when one person in the town was interviewed by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, and he said to her at one point in the interview “do you thank God for the fact that you survived?” She hesitated a moment, “Well, I, I’m an atheist.” And it was an awkward moment for Wolf Blitzer because he was caught off guard. She was then later defended by atheist organizations for her honesty. But it put on display this long running tension in American history between viewing the weather naturalistically and something God is very much involved in. And so the Moore tornado 2013 I think put that all on display particularly powerfully.
CHRIS: Peter, before we leave this 2013 tornado event, in 2010 Oklahoma put out a poll, asking Oklahomans who the most powerful person in the state was. Share with us that anecdote, I think it is fascinating and sort of reflective of this overlap between the Bible Belt and violent weather in some ways.
PETER: Yes, well, the surprising thing was that the beloved local weatherman Gary England came in first and Jesus came in second. It is reflective of the fact that the weather is in some sense a religion in Oklahoma. At least it puts people in touch with things that they consider most important. I mean there are have been a number of local journalists who have written about this phenomenon. Holly Bailey wrote a great book in the wake of the Moore tornado in 2013. She talks some about this that and how weather watching really is a quasi-religion in Oklahoma, anytime tornadoes are in the forecast they send helicopters up so that if a tornado happens they can actually follow it and film it as it is moving across the landscape. And so there is this, even though it is mixed with fear, people are attracted to them and at the same time they fear them. To me that is the perfect emblem for the power of the divine, the divine is both attractive and fearsome at once. So that is why I love Oklahoma for a laboratory for thinking about these things.
CHRIS: So, towards the end of the book you talk quite a bit about Hurricane Katrina, not a tornado but definitely calamitous weather, and you write this, and I just want you to elaborate on your observation: I am quoting here: “While admiring [the benevolence of faith-based groups that descended upon the Gulf coast after Katrina], [historian James Hudnet-Beumler] could not shake the feeling that it was ‘some kind of Protestant penance for a societal and governmental failure….” Can you elaborate a little bit, I know you are quoting other people, but tell us a little about this and what it means in context of American’s religious understandings of violent weather?
PETER: Yes, well, I’m glad you brought up Katrina because Katrina brings in another whole dimension of this and that is the issue of, or the tension I should say, between divine control and human responsibility. And if we want to talk about perennial debates associated with the weather, that is certainly one. I mean, what is beyond human control - and so that is the side that religious people would view as the divine side, what is beyond human control versus what is within humans’ power. And Katrina is in our recent national history the most glaring example of a failure of Americans to do what is within their power to help ameliorate a disaster. And so much has been written about that, about all the structural problems that contributed to that disaster. Ted Steinberg, another historian, has written about this and basically his argument is that the old phrase “Acts of God” is misleading, because there are really no “Acts of God” in the sense that there is always going to be human involvement in disaster and human reasons for suffering. So that is something that Americans had to reckon with and they’re increasingly going to need to reckon with as disasters, hurricanes in particular, become more destructive in this new world we find ourselves in of human-induced climate change. Hurricanes are becoming more intense, they’re causing more catastrophic flooding, which raises all kinds of questions about our priorities and what we as a society owe to each other to the common good to try to minimize both loss of life and economic destruction as well.
CHRIS: Well, this has been fantastic. I just have one last question. You write on the second-to-last page of your book “…in religion the tornado is an emblem of everything that humans cannot capture.” Why did you write that and what could the implications be to me as an American and to America itself?
PETER: Yes, I do think that the tornado is a particularly powerful emblem, it’s certainly a particularly American emblem, in that the United States is home to more violent tornadoes than any other nation on earth, I mean other nations can certainly have tornadoes, but our particular geographical situation gives rise to more violent tornadoes than anywhere else on earth and so that’s why tornadoes loom so large in the American imagination. But in terms of religion, when I say that they are an emblem of everything humans cannot capture, I meant, they have throughout our history given us questions that have again and again proven unanswerable, or at least questions whose answers that have been proposed will never satisfy everyone. And I don’t expect that to change either. I don’t expect the march of modern science which has certainly gotten better and better at predicting tornadoes, ever to completely dispel the mysteries that tornadoes raise. And among those mysteries is the very basic question of how we as humans relate to the natural world and how the natural world relates to the divine world for Americans who are religious.
CHRIS: Thank you, Peter. We have been listening to Peter J. Thuesen, historian of American religion and Professor of Religion Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and author of Tornado God, published by Oxford University Press earlier this year. Thank you so much Peter for taking time to participate and for all your efforts that went in to writing the book.
PETER: Thank you, Chris, for having me.
When Americans have experienced trauma, they have often reached out to religion hoping for some emotional comfort, physical assistance and answers to help them understand the sometimes chaotic and destructive world that surrounds them.
Peter Thuesen just published what is, for these reasons, a very timely book called Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather, which, and I’m quoting here from the book cover flap, "captures the harrowing drama of tornadoes, as clergy, theologians, meteorologists, and ordinary citizens struggle to make sense of these death-dealing tempests. Mr. Thuesen says something that all Americans should listen to: ‘in the tornado, Americans experience something that is at once culturally peculiar and religiously primal In the whirlwind, Americans confront the question of their own destiny’ "
Peter J. Thuesen is a historian of American religion and Professor of Religion Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and co-editor of "Religion and American Culture: a Journal of Interpretation." He was awarded the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History for his book In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible. Mr. Thuesen has a PhD from Princeton University and taught previously at Tufts University and Yale Divinity School.
We are very happy to have Peter here to help us understand a very particular part of American religious history – religion and tornadoes, even as we experience our own natural calamities. Also, we hope to better understand generally what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion, and thus be better equipped as citizens to ensure that the American experiment in self-government endures.
Peter, you begin the book with the April 1974 “Super Outbreak” tornado system and the particular tornado that touched down in Xenia, Ohio. Can you share this story with us and why you chose it to “frame” the rest of the book?
PETER: Sure, well, and first I want to thank you Chris for having me for this podcast, I’m really excited about what you are doing and I’m thrilled to be able to take part in this.
The Xenia story is I think particularly compelling and poignant. As you say, yes, it was part of what later became known as the “super outbreak.” There was a rash of tornadoes that broke out over the American continent that afternoon on April 3, 1974. And, in Xenia alone 34 people were killed and so it indelibly imprinted that town with this disaster. But Xenia also is I think kind of symbolically significant partly because of its name. The word means “hospitality”, from the root meaning “hospitality” in Greek. And so the question I explore at the beginning of that section of the book is, what was Xenia welcoming, or well, it wasn’t really welcoming this thing into its midst, there on April 3, 1974? Was this a visitation of God or was it something else? And that’s the question that Xenia residents had to wrestle with powerfully in the aftermath of the tornado. Was this God that did this to them or not? And that’s the perennial question in American history. We are subject to the forces of nature and yet are those forces somehow linked to God’s plan, God’s providence? The newspaper accounts of Xenia residents reflecting on this afterwards are so powerful – some of the personal stories of loss are so powerful. And that has been true for every weather disaster in American history but I was particularly touched by the Xenia story partly because I live relatively close to Xenia in Indianapolis, so it is not a long drive away. There is that midwestern profile that I am familiar with, and so I decided to open the book with that.
CHRIS: When I read that first part, there is a picture in the book of three people at their slab, the Lauderbachs, husband, wife and a very young child. And, you know, you just, they are looking up at the camera and you just stare at them but then their surroundings where their house was, it is just a slab. So it becomes very personal even from my perspective, I don’t live near it, I don’t study this. But you mention that the newspaper reports were very revealing, very poignant. Can you share one or two, of either the letters or the editorials that came out as a result of the tornado in Xenia? I was especially struck by the letters, I think you quoted three from out of town residents, sort of trying to explain, from their perspective, why it had happened in Xenia. That was very interesting.
PETER: Right well you saw there some of the typical responses that have happened in the wake of disaster. I mean there was one person who wrote into the local paper who said that Xenia always had a reputation for wickedness so this must be God’s retribution for that. But then a local newspaper editor took issue with that quite strongly and said that his God is not a God that would do this kind of thing to people. And what is so striking to me as a historian about that is that the debate really is as old as America itself. I mean in the sense that Americans since the beginning of European colonization when they brought the Christian tradition with them as a way to reflect on these things, Christian and other traditions but particularly the Christian tradition, they have been debating these events in such terms. And, so, really, Xenia just in the newspaper back and forth in the aftermath provided a kind of microcosm for these long running debates in American history.
CHRIS: OK, yeah, well, you talk about time, this was in 1974. So, I want to go back to 1694 Cotton Mather – you have a story in there about Cotton Mather who was giving a sermon about “the God of glory thundereth” – I grabbed that from his sermon, that is not the title, but he used that scripture - and then what happens to his home while he is at church talking about this. Can you briefly tell us about this and perhaps more importantly, what it tells us about how early Americans, so this is in the colonial period, saw natural calamity such as tornadoes or lightning strikes?
PETER: Sure. I love Cotton Mather, he is one of the most interesting figures in American history. Of course, the whole family of Mathers is illustrious. It was this ministerial family steeped in the long Calvinist tradition. And they were highly intellectual, and Cotton Mather was very smart, and he knew he was smart, and so he was a little bit full of himself. And only Cotton Mather could have gotten into this sort of situation it seems. He was preaching and he felt an urge to put down his notes and to speak on God and the weather basically. And it was during that sermon that someone handed him a note to say that his house had just been struck by lightning. And rather than just dropping everything and ending his sermon and rushing home, Mather, to model an unconcern for worldly things, continued his sermon. And so he went on to make the point, and this was later published, that though there are natural causes to the weather, the weather is still under the control of God, “the high thunderer” as he put it.
And that is the tension that began to emerge in colonial clergy and other figures who wrote about this in the 17th and 18th centuries. That on the one hand, the weather is governed by natural law and is predictable in that sense. Over time American learned more and more about how the weather worked. But on the other hand, for theists, for believers in God, the weather is still under God’s control somehow, and how do you balance those two? And, you know, Mather may not have wanted to admit it, but he sensed this tension. In fact, over time, the clergy started becoming worried that people would, as they put it, “stop at second causes” – “second causes” was the phrase for those secondary forces in nature, the wind, the humidity, and so forth, that govern the weather. And they warned people – don’t stop at second causes, remember that there is a first cause behind all of this, don’t forget the first cause and that’s God. So they sensed this atheistic possibility and they wanted to guard against it and so that is what that story from Cotton Mather’s sermon illustrates.
CHRIS: Right, sounds like it would be a great little video, you know, of him getting the note.
PETER: Oh, I wish we had it. Yes, I know.
CHRIS: Fantastic.
CHRIS: You write also in this same chapter something very, very fascinating that from an American religious history perspective, that Protestants & Catholics confronted physical calamities in significantly different religious ways. And I think we all know Protestants were the majority, Catholics were a very small minority. But even so, they really viewed violent weather let’s say, in different ways. Can you tell us about this and its implications?
PETER: Well, yes, I mean, one of the key differences was that in a Catholic way of being religious, there were more mediating figures, kind of buffers, between the individual and God and those included the saints. And, so, the Saints provided a measure of protection for people that Protestants were bereft of once the Protestant Reformation rejected, for the most part, the old Catholic cult of the Saints. Martin Luther, the early great Protestant reformer, is a prefect example of this. The details of it are somewhat disputed and whether the way Luther wrote about this particular story is entirely accurate is also disputed, but there is this famous story of Luther being caught in a thunderstorm and he is terror struck and the first thing he thinks to do is pray to St. Anne, who is among other things, the patroness of people caught in thunderstorms, and so he makes a spontaneous vow, according to the old story, “St. Anne hep me and if you help me I’ll become a monk.” And so when he survives this calamity of course he is not going to renege on his vow, and so he enters a full-time religious life, takes a vow of celibacy that of course he later then in the course of the Reformation, renounces. So, the Saints provided protection, but then later Luther comes to reject that mediating function of the Saints by in large, and other Protestants rejected even more strongly. So the way I put it in the book is basically that for Protestants there is very little if anything standing between the individual and Almighty God when it comes to the sometimes frightening power of the weather.
CHRIS: Right, in fact, there is one sentence that you wrote that really almost came out and slapped me, right, you said: "Protestants faced the world alone” because of what you just explained. So, are there any implications for the entire American experiment in self-government of that sort of statement? Because this was a Protestant nation, more than anything else at the beginning. What are its implications, if any, in your mind?
PETER: Well, that is a really interesting question. I think, I mean, one could say that one implication is that once Americans become convinced that God is on their side then that is a powerful contributor to American nationalism and even the weather itself can buttress that kind of nationalistic fervor. I tell in the book about how in a couple of situations in English Protestant history there was the wide-spread feeling that God had supported the Protestant cause through meteorological intervention basically. So, when the English were facing the Spanish Armada in 1588, a storm helped defeat the Spanish Armada. Then a century later in 1688 the weather was said to have assisted William of Orange in invading England and overthrowing England’s last Catholic king.
And so the so-called “Protestant winds” of 1588 and 1688 were seen as interventions on behalf of Protestantism, and that kind of laid a foundation for later American nationalism. So, Americans in their doctrine of Manifest Destiny overspreading the American continent became convinced that God was on their side and even the weather would not stand in their way. Even the weather would sometimes assist them. And yet, the weather has a powerful way of frustrating expectations and so that is a recurring theme too, that as soon as people thought that weather would cooperate, it didn’t.
CHRIS: Peter, throughout the book I noticed that Americans reached out and grabbed the same few biblical verses, it seemed, over and over and over when they had to make sense of the whirlwinds’ awesome and terrible destruction around them. Can you share perhaps what some of those verses are or just generally how Americans used the Bible to decipher these whirlwinds.
PETER: Well, that is a great question, because one of the things that is most striking about the American experience with violent weather is that people, particularly Christians, who were the majority religious adherents in American history appealed to scripture again and again in trying to make sense of violent weather. I realized in the course of this project this was happening so much that I convinced the publisher to
include a scriptural index as part of the book because there are certain citations that occur again and again. So a tornado happens and someone inevitably appeals to a verse like Nahum 1:3, where it says “the Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and the storm”, and that’s just one small example. The Hebrew Bible is full of verses that use meteorological imagery to illustrate divine power. I think there is something very primal about that across religious cultures. And you see it vividly in Hebrew scripture. And so those verses just jumped out to Americans in the wake of a storm and seemed to confirm a Providential reading of disaster even while raising lingering questions about what kind of God sends that kind of destruction. So, I mean, the Bible was both a touchstone I think and at times a source of comfort but also a source of religious questions about these terrible things.
CHRIS: Peter, along the Bible theme, you tell us in the book about two particular “Biblical winds”: one is the Pentecostal wind “the mighty rushing”, and it is sort of a positive one, and then the apocalyptic winds in the Book of Revelations, as destructive winds. Tell us about those two and how they were understood and used by Americans to try to understand violent weather.
PETER: Yes, well, that is one of the paradoxes of the wind as an instrument of God’s power, that is both a wind that builds up and enlivens people but it is also a wind that at times destroys. And so what I refer to as the Pentecostal wind is this story of course of the first Pentecost in the book of Acts where a rushing mighty wind descends and in that instance the wind becomes an image of the power of the Holy Spirit. But at the close of the Bible the wind figures into the element that brings destruction at the end, the unfolding apocalypse – so the four winds of the apocalypse recur throughout Christian history as an image of destruction – you find that in some medieval art for example.
And, so it is really two sides of this religious coin in the human experience, that God both creates but also destroys. And that is something that Americans perennially wrestle with.
CHRIS: You quote Henry Ward Beecher saying, and here I’m quoting from one of his sermons: “here is where the storms end. God no longer rules by force and fear, but by hope and love.” Can you speak Peter to the changes in how Americans understood violent weather in religious terms between colonial times and post-Civil War?
PETER: Yes. I mean, and I think a big part of the change is the rise of what we would begin to recognize as modern science, and a more scientific understanding of the weather. And with that a rising optimism that these once mysterious forces could be understood and maybe even mastered. You mentioned Henry Ward Beecher, and so by the latter half of the 19th century, I mean he was maybe the most famous preacher of his day, so very prominent figure. And he was involved in a tornado disaster, or the aftermath of it rather, that occurred in Iowa at Grinnell, lowa; Grinnell College was pretty much wiped out by a tornado in 1882. So the leaders of the college then went back east and appealed to Beecher in Brooklyn and others for help in raising money to rebuild the college. And Beecher used that incident partly as an occasion to talk about how he felt that a scientific world view was replacing an old superstitious one and in the face of disasters like that and people could turn them to good, that good would come of them, and that people no longer be, as he put it, a “trembling and ignorant race” before the forces of nature. The namesake of the Grinnell College, Josiah Grinnell, even commented “that cyclone was a real windfall.” That seems in retrospect to be a rather callous comment since 30 townspeople were killed in that disaster. And yet what he meant was, we built Grinnell up better than ever before or after this. And that was typical of this emerging scientific optimistic confident mentality in the latter half of the 19th century. And so, Beecher was basically repudiating much of his old Puritan inheritance that assumed that weather disasters were punishment for some kind of human misconduct. Instead, he wanted to push the view that these were natural, and God’s purpose was to enlighten and to build up and not to destroy.
CHRIS: Wow. Very interesting.
We are listening to Peter J. Thuesen, historian of American religion and Professor of Religion Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and co-editor of "Religion and American Culture: a Journal of Interpretation." Mr. Thuesen has a PhD from Princeton University and taught previously at Tufts University and Yale Divinity School.
CHRIS: Peter, I want to move to talking about the deadliest tornado in American history, as you know, the “Tri-State Tornado”, which hit Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana on March 18, 1925. Can you first describe, perhaps briefly, the physical picture for us then how people saw this in religious terms?
PETER: Yes. I mean the Tri-State Tornado is really an event that still stands out even in light of our recent weather disasters, that have been exacerbated by climate change.
The Tri-State Tornado still stands out as an especially destructive force. We’re not absolutely sure, but we think it was a singe tornado that moved across those states, a long-track tornado that maintained its destructive power over hundreds of miles. So nearly 700 people were killed in that disaster. And some of the little towns along the way were absolutely wiped off the map. One bigger town Murphysboro, Illinois, wasn’t completely destroyed but so many residents of that town were killed that it is indelibly imprinted in that town’s memory and history. And after the storm passed people were left absolutely stunned. I have a picture in the book of a man with a stunned look on his face, by his overturned piano in a pile of rubble that presumably was once his house.
And there is another photo I’ve seen of a child whose head was bandaged and he’s holding a dog and fortunately the dog is still alive. But there are cases like those of these poignant examples of people who were left speechless and stunned by the destructive power of this storm. And the way I talk about that storm in the book is that – it was a reminder even in the wake of the rise of modern science in the 19th century, that the forces of nature could only be mastered so far. Henry Ward Beecher’s optimism met its match in a sense in that disaster. And so it, I think, put the brakes on some of the hope that the tornado would someday be conquered.
CHRIS: Yeah, no, I think, I’m reminded of something I read, and I’m going to quote something you wrote in this chapter and I’d like you to explain what you meant. You write “The Tri-State Tornado represented the obverse of American exceptionalism – that instead of Nature’s nation, blessed by God, the United States was the singular recipient of Nature’s wrath … the Tri-State Tornado was a symbolic tipping point toward new ways of thinking about God, nature and American chosenness.” There’s a lot of stuff packed in those sentences. What do you mean? What does all of this mean maybe in the larger picture maybe of American exceptionalism, thoughts about that, you know, chosenness, etc.?
PETER: Right. Yes, the Tri-State Tornado, I mean, I should back up a bit and say, it wasn’t the first shock to the American system in the wake of scientific advances of the 19th century. At the end of the 19th century, in 1896, a massive tornado hit St. Louis, Missouri, and St. Louis was at that time was the 4th largest city in the United States and some 255 people were killed in that and a large section of the city was destroyed. And so 1896 St. Louis, and then the Tri-State Tornado in 1925, in the wake of disasters like that, and I should add too, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which killed some 6,000 people, I mean, if you want to talk about scale of disasters, that is even greater. But disasters such as this began to cause certain theologians to question, certainly the optimism of someone like Henry Ward Beecher, but also to question the long regnant assumption in American history that Americans were somehow particularly blessed by God. And one of the first people to do this was someone who was actually a young boy when the St. Louis tornado of 1896 hit. He was living nearby in St. Charles, Missouri, and this was Reinhold Niebuhr. And Reinhold Niebuhr in the wake of these disasters of the late 19th early 20th century began to rethink American exceptionalism and also to rethink the way the Bible had been used to interpret the weather. And so one of the passages that Niebuhr most focused on was Matthew 5:45 from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says the rain falls on the just and the unjust. And Niebuhr came to the conclusion that in that passage we see what he called an illustration of God’s “trans- moral” mercy. That nature is basically blind to the recipient of either its blessings or its curses. And this had huge implications for the way Americans thought about their own experience. I mean Niebuhr said we can’t assume in effect that nature is on our side. In fact, very often it is not. It is from that, that Niebuhr developed all sorts of related conclusions about American destiny and chosenness. In the in the 20th century as Niebuhr reconsiders this old colonial providential view of American chosenness, he realizes what he calls the radical implications of this passage. And so it’s the first in of a number of 20th century reflections I think on how difficult God’s providence really is to understand. Whereas previous thinkers in the American experience often assumed that the interpretations of providence was relatively easy.
CHRIS: That reminds me of the story, I’m going back here in time when Benjamin Franklin and the invention of the lightning rod and how people saw that when there was big storm that hit Boston, which had the most lightning rods. Can you elaborate on that story briefly, that really shows how Americans in the colonial period saw things, with regard to science now, this was a scientific thing, the lightning rod.
PETER: Sure, there was this controversy in the mid-1700s over lightning rods. Many people conclude that lightning rods brought down God’s wrath, that they were tempting fate (well, but not in an atheistic sense) – they were angering God by attempting to protect people from God’s wrath and deflect the power of the lightning. So people like Benjamin Franklin and others were engaged in this debate. I mean it was the same sort of debate that occurred interestingly over smallpox inoculation. Is that a presumptuous thing for people to do to try to protect themselves against illness if illness is seen as a providential punishment for some wrongdoing? So some of the colonial clergy had to step up and defend the practice of inoculation. I mean Cotton Mather did. Jonathan Edwards did. Jonathan Edwards took an inoculation for smallpox right after becoming president of the College of New Jersey – Princeton – and it killed him. So it’s a sad story in Edwards’ case. And yet, he was trying to defend modern science as something that was in keeping with a religious and pious view of the world. And yet, you know, on the popular level a lot of people felt that inoculation was dangerous because it interfered with God’s providential purposes.
CHRIS: And, did you notice, so you also would also look at, you know, sermons of local churches, right. You were looking at intellectual theologians, you were looking at newspaper editors and letter writers, and you were looking at local church sermons, right?
PETER: Well, one thing I think is that in the context of a sermon, in the context of a religious service, the burden, the recuring burden on clergy has always been to find a way to comfort. And so the question that is interesting to trace is, how did the clergy rise to that challenge, and did they make the same arguments in the17th or 18th century as they make in the 20th century. One thing that I see over time is that by the 20th century there are many more clergy willing to say “we don’t think that God is involved in the tornado at all”, and that becomes a way to comfort. Whereas the colonial clergy, as I suggested in talking about Cotton Mather, would have been much more averse to making such a statement. Even though they were aware of secondary causes in nature, they feared if you stressed that angle too much that you would be on a slippery slope to atheism. Whereas in the 20th century, clergy increasingly I think resort to pretty much an outright denial that God is involved in deadly weather and twisters. And it’s understandable that they would use that as a way to comfort, and yet that doesn’t answer the basic questions for religious people, of how we should understand our place in the natural world if we are religious and want to maintain a theistic frame of reference.
CHRIS: Yeah, right. So even closer to us in time, Peter, is the 2013 tornado that hit Plaza Towers Elementary School in the city of Moore, which is just outside of Oklahoma City, and it killed seven children there. You write this and I’ll quote: “the geographical location of [this tornado] was significant”, being where the Bible Belt and Tornado Alley overlap, which I found very interesting to consider and think about. And I think in your book much comes out of this analysis, right, that here are two things that are overlapping, can you explain that to us, what you are talking about there and its significance?
PETER: Yes, well, Oklahoma is the focus of the much of the last part of the book and of course it is because it is tornado alley, even taking into account that climate change may be shifting tornado alley gradually eastward, Oklahoma still is the home to more violent, destructive tornadoes than anywhere else on earth. And so, residents of Oklahoma have always had a special relationship with violent weather. And it’s special for another reason, or maybe I should say it’s representative for another reason, in that evangelical Protestantism is especially important in the religious experience of that state. And so violent weather tends to be viewed through an evangelical lens, this is the Bible Belt angle. And by Bible Belt angle I mean through a Biblical lens, because of course for an evangelical Protestant the Bible is still the principal authority and principal source of comfort in wake of disaster. So this event that you mention, the 2013 Moore tornado, it was a massive F5 tornado that just literally chewed up huge sections of the town. And made a direct hit on Plaza Towers Elementary school, which I later visited a couple of years later after it had been rebuilt, and 7 children were killed, it was in the middle of school day. And so it raised the old problem of theodicy - how you explain evil or suffering with particular acuteness. And because of the evangelical influence in Oklahoma, many people commented in the press, we can’t know why God allows these things and yet we still have to have faith that God is in charge. And yet, there was also what became a well-known incident when one person in the town was interviewed by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, and he said to her at one point in the interview “do you thank God for the fact that you survived?” She hesitated a moment, “Well, I, I’m an atheist.” And it was an awkward moment for Wolf Blitzer because he was caught off guard. She was then later defended by atheist organizations for her honesty. But it put on display this long running tension in American history between viewing the weather naturalistically and something God is very much involved in. And so the Moore tornado 2013 I think put that all on display particularly powerfully.
CHRIS: Peter, before we leave this 2013 tornado event, in 2010 Oklahoma put out a poll, asking Oklahomans who the most powerful person in the state was. Share with us that anecdote, I think it is fascinating and sort of reflective of this overlap between the Bible Belt and violent weather in some ways.
PETER: Yes, well, the surprising thing was that the beloved local weatherman Gary England came in first and Jesus came in second. It is reflective of the fact that the weather is in some sense a religion in Oklahoma. At least it puts people in touch with things that they consider most important. I mean there are have been a number of local journalists who have written about this phenomenon. Holly Bailey wrote a great book in the wake of the Moore tornado in 2013. She talks some about this that and how weather watching really is a quasi-religion in Oklahoma, anytime tornadoes are in the forecast they send helicopters up so that if a tornado happens they can actually follow it and film it as it is moving across the landscape. And so there is this, even though it is mixed with fear, people are attracted to them and at the same time they fear them. To me that is the perfect emblem for the power of the divine, the divine is both attractive and fearsome at once. So that is why I love Oklahoma for a laboratory for thinking about these things.
CHRIS: So, towards the end of the book you talk quite a bit about Hurricane Katrina, not a tornado but definitely calamitous weather, and you write this, and I just want you to elaborate on your observation: I am quoting here: “While admiring [the benevolence of faith-based groups that descended upon the Gulf coast after Katrina], [historian James Hudnet-Beumler] could not shake the feeling that it was ‘some kind of Protestant penance for a societal and governmental failure….” Can you elaborate a little bit, I know you are quoting other people, but tell us a little about this and what it means in context of American’s religious understandings of violent weather?
PETER: Yes, well, I’m glad you brought up Katrina because Katrina brings in another whole dimension of this and that is the issue of, or the tension I should say, between divine control and human responsibility. And if we want to talk about perennial debates associated with the weather, that is certainly one. I mean, what is beyond human control - and so that is the side that religious people would view as the divine side, what is beyond human control versus what is within humans’ power. And Katrina is in our recent national history the most glaring example of a failure of Americans to do what is within their power to help ameliorate a disaster. And so much has been written about that, about all the structural problems that contributed to that disaster. Ted Steinberg, another historian, has written about this and basically his argument is that the old phrase “Acts of God” is misleading, because there are really no “Acts of God” in the sense that there is always going to be human involvement in disaster and human reasons for suffering. So that is something that Americans had to reckon with and they’re increasingly going to need to reckon with as disasters, hurricanes in particular, become more destructive in this new world we find ourselves in of human-induced climate change. Hurricanes are becoming more intense, they’re causing more catastrophic flooding, which raises all kinds of questions about our priorities and what we as a society owe to each other to the common good to try to minimize both loss of life and economic destruction as well.
CHRIS: Well, this has been fantastic. I just have one last question. You write on the second-to-last page of your book “…in religion the tornado is an emblem of everything that humans cannot capture.” Why did you write that and what could the implications be to me as an American and to America itself?
PETER: Yes, I do think that the tornado is a particularly powerful emblem, it’s certainly a particularly American emblem, in that the United States is home to more violent tornadoes than any other nation on earth, I mean other nations can certainly have tornadoes, but our particular geographical situation gives rise to more violent tornadoes than anywhere else on earth and so that’s why tornadoes loom so large in the American imagination. But in terms of religion, when I say that they are an emblem of everything humans cannot capture, I meant, they have throughout our history given us questions that have again and again proven unanswerable, or at least questions whose answers that have been proposed will never satisfy everyone. And I don’t expect that to change either. I don’t expect the march of modern science which has certainly gotten better and better at predicting tornadoes, ever to completely dispel the mysteries that tornadoes raise. And among those mysteries is the very basic question of how we as humans relate to the natural world and how the natural world relates to the divine world for Americans who are religious.
CHRIS: Thank you, Peter. We have been listening to Peter J. Thuesen, historian of American religion and Professor of Religion Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and author of Tornado God, published by Oxford University Press earlier this year. Thank you so much Peter for taking time to participate and for all your efforts that went in to writing the book.
PETER: Thank you, Chris, for having me.
