“Every Wind of Doctrine”

Chapter 4 shows how twentieth-century weather disasters helped force some of the nation’s leading theologians to question old assumptions about providence and natural events. Especially at mid-century, which is usually remembered for Cold War anxieties, the weather influenced reconsiderations of providence by such thinkers as Reinhold Niebuhr, Georgia Harkness, and William Pollard, who, in different ways, broached the idea of randomness or amorality in nature. Newspaper coverage of two catastrophic events—the Tri-State Tornado of 1925 and the Palm Sunday Tornadoes of 1965—likewise revealed rising religious ambivalence on the popular level. Thus, even as some Americans were defending the time-worn belief that all things happen according to a plan, others were contemplating a world of radical uncertainty and unpredictability.

“Stormy Wind Fulfilling His Word”

Chapter 3 traces the appearance of the first truly disastrous tornadoes as the new nation pushed westward into the Mississippi Valley during the nineteenth century. These calamities fueled an apocalyptic mentality among people of various religious groups, who regarded such events as the Great Natchez Tornado of 1840 as a sign of End Time tribulations. Later in the century, however, the emerging field of meteorology contributed to a Gilded Age cult of progress that presupposed a benevolent God and assumed that tornadoes could be explained and maybe even contained. Even a disaster as enormous as the St. Louis Tornado of 1896, which destroyed much of the city, was not enough to shake the optimism of some clergy and theologians, who thought that as the scientific mysteries of tornadoes were dispelled, fears of divine wrath in the storm would cease.

“As Stubble Before the Wind”

Chapter 5 turns to Oklahoma, ground zero of the most violent tornadoes on the planet, where an evangelical Protestant culture meets the frontiers of contemporary meteorological research. Deadly tornadoes in Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City, have made particularly raw the long-festering question of whether God controls everything that happens. But Oklahomans have also had to confront the converse problem of human complicity in disasters, especially in an era of climate change. Evangelical politicians from Oklahoma have had a disproportionate influence on climate policy in the Trump administration, which has denied the looming crisis of global warming, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. At the local level, Oklahomans have also had to reckon with the challenge of disaster preparedness, especially the funding of school storm shelters, in a state that often resists governmental “intrusion.”

“Whirlwind of the Lord”

Chapter 1 interweaves the story of the 1974 Xenia, Ohio, tornado (part of the infamous Super Outbreak) with background on the pivotal role of weather in the premodern and early modern history of religions. The storm god tradition, exemplified by the biblical Yahweh and other deities from across the world’s cultures, laid the conceptual foundation for later American interpretations of the weather. Medieval and early modern theologians drew on elements of this tradition in devising their more rationalistic doctrines of providence, but in so doing they bequeathed to later generations a tangle of logical difficulties. Among these was the question of what role, if any, chance played in the weather. To John Calvin, “chance” was a pagan notion, but excluding chance exacerbated the problem of theodicy, or why a benevolent God allowed deadly storms and other natural evils.

Introduction

The Introduction opens with the story of the 1953 Worcester, Massachusetts, tornado, the deadliest in New England history, as a segue into the book’s central argument: in the tornado, Americans experience something that is at once culturally peculiar (the indigenous storm of the national imagination) and religiously primal (the sense of awe before an unpredictable and mysterious power). No nation has more violent tornadoes than the United States, where a frontier mentality, combined with an Enlightenment-born confidence in scientific progress, has perennially tempted residents to believe they can understand and master the weather. But efforts to unlock tornadoes’ secrets have exposed how little removed Americans are from their premodern ancestors in finding themselves at the mercy of the whirlwind. Americans thus encounter in the tornado something akin to what religion theorist Rudolf Otto called the numinous: an uncanny, uncontrollable, and awe-inspiring mystery.

Conclusion

The Conclusion draws on the author’s interview with leading meteorologist Howard Bluestein to explore the state of contemporary tornado science, which helped inspire modern chaos theory. Just as the weather has taken Americans to the outer limits of theology, bedeviling them with the same unanswerable questions that have nagged humans for centuries, scientists now recognize fundamental limitations on their ability to predict a tornado. Thus, even though meteorologists continue to make lifesaving advances in forecasting outbreaks of severe weather, the tornado remains a uniquely American totem—a symbol of Americans’ quest for mastery, but the embodiment of primal, unconquerable mystery.

“The Violence of Winds, and the Reasonings of Men”

Chapter 2 turns to colonial British America, surveying the flood of sermons that issued forth as clergy pondered the meaning of the New World’s violent weather. Colonial Americans inhabited a world of wonders in which natural events were interpreted as judgments or mercies from God, directed toward either individuals or the nation. In explicating these divine messages, the clergy drew on a biblical vocabulary replete with meteorological images of God’s power. The clergy also helped popularize more scholastic controversies about the relationship between the divine First Cause and secondary natural causes. These Enlightenment discussions, combined with biblical imagery, set the parameters of American understandings of providence for at least the next two centuries. Echoes of the clergy’s anxiety over the “atheism” of the Age of Reason are still heard in modern debates about whether storms are acts of God, acts of nature, or some combination of the two.