Tornadoes are a form of weather almost uniquely found in the North America, and so capture a special place in the American imagination. Because of this relationship, Peter Thuesen's historical account of how American Christianity has responded to violent weather—especially twisters—is fascinating. Tornado God uncovers the novelty of American religion in an unexpected way. It does not simply identify anecdotes about US weather, theology, and religious practice, though it does that in abundance. Thuesen reaches deeper, arguing that “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). The tornado is therefore both American and transcendent” (6). In other words, peering at the ways Americans have interpreted the devastation of tornadoes provides a means to study how we perceive ourselves and our vision of the Divine.

Tornado God is a work of intellectual history, which shows how theologians and pastors have wrestled with violent storms for the sake of interpreting these events for their communities. Thuesen has selected a timely topic: climate change, wildfires, drought, and other recent environmental challenges have brought weather to the forefront of moral and political debates in the US. Tornado God fills a scholarly gap between theological works that investigate global weather and climate, such as Sigurd Bergmann's recent Weather, Religion, and Climate Change (New York: Routledge, 2021), and books from historians that investigate the religious dimensions of American environmentalism, such as Evan Berry's Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015) and Mark Stoll's Inherent the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). In fact, Thuesen's work is an excellent companion to the captivating global (though primarily European-focused) analysis of Wolfgang Behringer's A Cultural History of Climate (translated by Patrick Camiller, Cambridge: Polity, 2009) because Thuesen showcases the unique elements of American intellectual and religious history on the interpretation of climate and weather.

The book proceeds chronologically across five chapters. After the introduction, the first chapter gives an account of theological and scriptural background of interpretations of violent weather and the divine, from antiquity to the Reformation. The next chapter investigates colonial America, and subsequent chapters are devoted to the nineteenth century, the first half of the twentieth century, and the present (from 1965 until today). Using this chronology, Tornado God offers an unusual telling of the overarching trends of American religious history, combining some well-known theologians (e.g., Cotton Mather and Reinhold Niebuhr) with lesser-known figures.

The book is not simply trying to show the gradual progression of how Americans have sought to understand the violence and mayhem of deadly storms. Each chapter also draws on theological and religious material from the time to illustrate a specific way each period uniquely focused its intellectual energy. For example, chapter 4 discusses race, superstition, and the attempts at better explaining tornadoes. Meanwhile, the final chapter then concentrates on the dialogue between religion and science more fully, telling the story of how scientific exploration of weather challenges some forms of turning toward religion, while also opening the door to new views, such as “open theism.” This is quite different from the meteorological focus of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which highlight Divine power and the symbolic nature of nature. Of course, there are also themes that consistently span across the book, insofar as these show how American religion sustains an overarching self-identity in its intellectual evolution. For example, Theusen returns frequently to how tragedies arising from violent weather force communities to reckon with the understanding of providence, especially as communities rebuild, mourn, and attempt to find ways to lessen the impact of natural violence.

One of the greatest strengths of Tornado God is just how well Theusen has interwoven a variety of materials to construct a portrait of American religiosity in the face of violent weather. Each chapter moves back and forth from first-hand accounts of stormy local events to the reflections of those religious thinkers who attempt to place these devastating events into the ongoing intellectual tradition. Theusen's writing is lively and engaging, which further adds to the book.

Something that remains an undercurrent throughout this book is where to place the boundary between Christian theological reflection on natural events, on one hand, and the performative elements of civil religion in response to tornadoes, on the other. Addressing the role of civil religion more explicitly would have developed even further Thuesen's aim of showing how tornadoes are “both American and transcendent.” Perhaps not surprisingly, the narrative that Thuesen offers focuses on Christianity, with an emphasis on how theologians and pastors interpreted violent weather through the lens of broader themes in Christian doctrine. Thuesen uncovered statements in the form of sermons and prayers, clearly focused within the Christian community. But in many other cases, the material Thuesen points to—memorials, newspaper reporting, and the like—are part of the performance of America's unique civil religion. While not ever fully analyzed in Tornado Gods, one can draw conclusions about how natural disasters shape the practice of American civic faith, as somewhat separated from confessional Christianity. Indeed, showing how Christianity and civil religion elide in times of natural disaster bolsters one of Thuesen's main themes: weather forms a uniquely American self-identity in the face of the whirlwind.