(RNS) — In his speech to senior military leaders on Sept. 30, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth took a well-worn page out of the climate skeptic’s playbook: He framed climate change research, policy and activism as a “religion.” More specifically, he declared there was “no more climate change worship” in the Department of War.
Hegseth has been calling concern with climate change a “religion” for a while. He’s far from alone. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced a wave of sweeping environmental deregulations back in March, exclaiming, “we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.” (Zeldin likes the rhetoric.)
Similar remarks were made during the first Trump administration. In 2016, Kathleen Hartnett White, a nominee to head the Council on Environmental Quality, called belief in climate change a “kind of paganism.” William Happer, a physicist and frequent adviser to President Donald Trump in 2017, called climate scientists “a glassy-eyed cult.” More recently, former Trump economic adviser and Heritage Foundation fellow Stephen Moore asserted that “climate change is not a science, it’s a religion.”
The popularity of this rhetoric makes sense. If you want cover for rolling back climate initiatives, few one-liners do as much work as calling them religious.
Anti-environmentalists and climate skeptics have been calling environmentalists “religious” and “fanatical” for decades. In 1971, Richard John Neuhaus published “In Defense of People: Ecology and the Seduction of Radicalism,” a book that described strands of the environmental movement as devotional, absolutist and under the delusion of a sacred mission.
Fast forward to 2003, when Michael Crichton — yes, that Michael Crichton — called environmentalism the religion “we all need to get rid of.” Two years later, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe called “man-induced global warming … an article of religious faith.” (He’s the one who used the snowball to “disprove” climate change 10 years later.) Meanwhile, the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a right-wing evangelical anti-environmentalist think tank, has regularly used the same slogan.
In 2017, its “Resisting the Green Dragon” campaign went live, which called environmentalism a false religion. (On how American evangelicals pivoted from environmental curiosity in the 1980s to animosity in the ’90s, see Neall W. Pogue’s “The Nature of the Religious Right” and Robin Veldman’s “The Gospel of Climate Skepticism.”) Likewise, throughout the 2000s and 2010s, journalists such as Bret Stephens and Congress-people like Lamar Smith invoked the climate-religion comparison.
But why does this rhetoric work? On one level, it is a familiar way to frame environmentalists as fanatical and dogmatic while positioning their critics as reasonable and realistic. After Zeldin mentioned climate religion, for example, he pivoted to discussing how his policies will save trillions in taxes, reignite American manufacturing and unleash “America’s full potential” while still protecting human and environmental health.
This sloganeering invites us to imagine anyone who wants to constrain our reliance on fossil fuels as opposed to a balanced approach to economics, energy and human well-being. From this angle, it just makes sense to drill, baby, drill and to roll back such principles as the endangerment finding, which states that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.
Yet on another level, the idea of fighting a climate religion appeals to a narrative that has circulated widely among conservative evangelicals going back at least to the 1970s. In that story, secular humanists and others on the left have their own kind of religion, one bent on displacing Christianity. This narrative feeds what religion scholar Veldman calls the “embattled mentality” among many on the religious right. Drawing on her research among evangelicals in Georgia, Veldman argues that evangelical climate skepticism is significantly connected to how environmentalists and, more recently, climate advocates are associated with these forces of Christian displacement.
The idea of fighting a climate religion plays into these replacement anxieties. This dynamic is powerfully symbolized by evangelicals like Inhofe when they invoke their faith to counter climate science. For some right-wing Christians, the struggle against climate-based reforms is part of a larger holy war. That is something Hegseth, also an evangelical, makes explicit in “American Crusade,” which frames the U.S. as besieged by secular leftists, including environmentalists.
As Lisa Sideris has observed, the rhetoric of climate religion is a long-standing strategy to discredit both religion and science while obscuring the very real causes and effects of human-caused climate change in the present and future. So when skeptics use this slogan we get Orwellian doublespeak. The relevant paganism here is the cult of carbon and capital and its curious marriage to strands of conservative Christianity. Skeptics investing in and defunding research on catastrophic global warming are trying to claim in effect, “We’re not the fanatics, you are!”
The rhetorical trick is old, but what is new is the Department of War using it to mask the rolling back of climate initiatives at the Pentagon. In his beautiful and disturbing book “The Nutmeg’s Curse,” Amitav Ghosh describes the vicious relationship between the Pentagon and climate change: On the one hand, Ghosh says, the U.S. military has been one of the most rigorous and longest-standing students of global warming. (Among other sources, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse cited naval climate research in response to Inhofe’s snowball.)
On the other hand, the military is a massive consumer of fossil fuels and concrete, to say nothing of land degradation, ecocide and pollution, all of which drives climate change and environmental injustice. That relationship alone is shocking: The U.S. military is significantly contributing to the very global crises it is preparing for and responding to (in the forms of, say, climate migration and resource wars).
But with respect to climate skepticism, I used to find a shred of bitter consolation — and a rhetorical tool — in knowing that the military took climate change deadly seriously. Perhaps no more. The denialist rhetoric that initially served to undermine environmental regulation has migrated into the language of the security state itself.
(Colin Weaver is a postdoctoral teaching fellow at the University of Chicago Divinity School. A version of this article originally appeared in Sightings, a publication of the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the divinity school. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
