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God’s wrath on the jerks

God’s wrath on the jerks

Last updated on: June 24, 2026 at 4:43 pm by Fred Clark

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God’s wrath on the jerks 2026-06-24T16:43:32-04:00 Fred Clark

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We had a tornado warning here on Monday. Not a “be careful, there’s a chance this could get dangerous” tornado watch, but the all-caps alert sent to every phone warning us that a tornado had been seen in the area and telling us all to go to the basement right now.

The warning was lifted about an hour later. It was based on rotation captured on radar but, fortunately, no actual tornado touched down in the area.

Chester County in southeastern Pennsylvania is not a place that sees a lot of tornados. They’re something that can happen here, but they’re rare and extraordinary, and generally much smaller and less sustained than the kind of massive supercells that occur in “Tornado Alley.”

Tornado Alley is where most of the tornados in the United States happen. And the United States is where most of the tornados in the world happen.

By a lot. Tornados are not an exclusively American thing, but they are a predominantly American thing.

This is true for two reasons:

1. The unique geology and meteorological factors of the Great Plains of North America, where warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico collides with cooler, drier air from the Rockies.

2. God is pouring out divine wrath on America for its sins of slavery and genocide.

That second point is a joke … sort of.

I do not believe that God’s wrath at human evil and human disobedience works like that. I do not believe that God intervenes to enact collective punishment and I do not believe that God has bad aim and I do not believe that natural disasters are expressions of supernatural displeasure with our wicked ways.

But a lot of Americans do believe all of that. This is woven into the pop-theology and folk-Christianity of America. We hear this from pop-preachers and pop-prophets after every storm, every earthquake, every Hurricane, blizzard, and wildfire. They rush to the airwaves (or, these days, to Twitter and YouTube) to condemn the sins they’re sure were the provocation that caused God to send us this latest natural disaster.

And somehow those “sins” are almost always congruent with the hierarchical politics that those same popular preachers and televangelists had been promoting before the natural disaster struck. They’re always somehow certain that the most recent natural catastrophe was evidence of supernatural displeasure with uppity women, or uppity non-white folks seeking the equal protection of the law.

The particulars change from year to year, election to election, storm to storm. But the general sense is always the same, whether it’s “busing” or “women’s lib” or “gay marriage” or the latest anti-trans hysteria. This pop-theology ultimately blames all natural disasters on the 14th Amendment.

So there are two sides to my rejection of this. On the one hand, I think it’s blasphemous — accusing God of being capricious, unjust, unloving and unmerciful. It suggests that God intervenes actively in this world, but only in destructive and deadly ways. The God described and imagined by this pop-theology is not a Good God and not a God that would be worthy of worship.

On the other hand, the “sins” that these pop-theologians imagine are the cause of this divine wrath are never the sins of actual consequence and gravity that might merit such divine punishment. It’s never the sins that angered the biblical prophets — injustice, oppression, neglect of the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant, etc. Instead it’s always something like drag-queen story hour at a public library — which is, by the way, not a sin in any way, shape, or form. It’s just a fabulous way to get kids excited about reading.

This points to another big reason I am certain that the pop-theology about natural disasters as God’s punishment is wrong. We Christians believe that God is wise. We believe that God is, for lack of a better word, smarter than that.

An omniscient God would know — probably from before time and before the creation of the world, but also certainly from the abundant evidence and experience God has acquired since then from watching us humans — that we humans are too obtuse for this kind of punishment-by-natural-disaster to have any meaning for us.

It’s kind of like that scene in The Jerk, when a mad sniper picks Steve Martin’s name out of the phone book at random and decides to kill him. The sniper fires at Martin but misses, hitting some oil cans next to him. Martin is too dim to understand that the bullets were intended for him, concluding instead that “He hates these cans!”

Instead of running for cover, Martin runs around, looking for somewhere without any cans nearby. The sniper keeps shooting at him, but wherever he goes, there are more cans, reinforcing his misunderstanding of the situation and of the danger he is in.

Every televangelist and pop-preacher declaring that a natural disaster is “God’s punishment” for the sins of the 14th Amendment is just like The Jerk, foolishly convinced that God hates these cans!

God could send a tornado to destroy the house of such a preacher — and only their house, leaving the rest of the community unharmed. And God could have that tornado carve out the full text of Isaiah 1 in deep trench letters in the remnants of that house. But God knows that it wouldn’t help. That same preacher would be back on his cable TV station the next day, explaining that this extremely localized natural disaster was clearly evidence of God’s wrath over a Girl Scout troop welcoming a trans member three states away.

God knows there’s no point trying to “send a message” to such people via tornado or earthquake or hurricane. They have Moses and the prophets, let them listen to them. If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone sends a tornado or an earthquake.

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