Is Climate Change A Religion? Transcript

John Robson:

Is God himself a climate alarmist? If so, as many claim to believe or even know, it would be even more convincing than if 97% of scientists were. If there were indeed an 11^th Commandment, “Thou shalt sequester carbon”, or if people who spewed greenhouse gases were regularly turned into pillars of salt, it would command attention and rightly so. And many climate alarmists, frequently waxing wroth, do invoke the Almighty, some vague spirituality, or The Force, as if the matter were incontrovertible. But in the spirit of Matthew 7:21-23, we intend to check, especially as many invoking religion to cast “deniers” into the outer darkness react with indignation should it dare set foot in the public square on any other topic.

Now, before diving into the topic of whether global warming is a religion, I do want to clarify that I don’t think asking the question amounts to an implied insult. Especially as you may well have heard an argument along these lines: The climate movement is like a religion, all religions are ridiculous, therefore belief in climate change is ridiculous. But religion is not ridiculous.

It’s what happens when humans try to grapple with the most important, albeit often uncertain, questions we encounter in life. And while any given religion may be wrong, and indeed to the extent that religions differ on key points some at least must be wrong, and while many doctrines seem strange and some certainly are, too many thoughtful people over the ages have believed in God for religion per se to be ridiculous.

It is not absurd to ask why we are here, do we have moral duties, have we got immortal souls. On the contrary, it would be obtuse not to ask those kinds of questions. And it’s far from obvious that those who reject any possible satisfying answer, or even dismiss the questions, can give explanations of life, the universe and everything that aren’t far more absurd. Including those who substituted secular movements that take on the trappings of religion but cannot possibly give meaningful answers to those questions, like atheist Bolshevism awarding posthumous Orders of Lenin.

On the other hand, those who argue that the climate movement is like a cult, that many of its devotees exhibit some of the behaviour that gives religion a bad name, do have a point. Certainly they have public rituals that seem to be more about us-versus-them than actually doing good in the world.

They have a special creed that they insist we must believe or face public humiliation and excommunication.

Many of them are relentless in persecuting suspected heresies, and heretics, and ruining their lives.

And they have a moral code that piles endless layers of guilt on everything you do, down to the tiniest details of your life, instead of inspiring you to be better.

And when a religion gets sufficiently narrow, intolerant and contorted, it becomes a cult. And yes, climate alarmists do seem to be getting more and more unhinged in public.

So, we decided to see what’s going on. For the Climate Discussion Nexus, I’m John Robson, and this is a CDN Fact Check on whether climate alarmism has become a religion… and not in a good way.

Many climate alarmists are aware that they sound religious. And up to a point they even do it on purpose. For instance Climate Depot alerts us that in 2023 Time Magazine wrote of “The Case For Making Earth Day a Religious Holiday”. Which is treatment you’d struggle to get them to extend to Christmas. And sure enough, the piece was written by “two of us environmentalists – one of us nominally Jewish, the other a recovering Catholic”. So they’re not themselves religious. But they want you to worship the Gaia earth thingy if it will make you do what they want.

Not that climate activists need a whole new religion. A lot of leaders of the old religions are proving more than happy to be enlisted in the new cause. Not long ago we saw Pope Leo XIV get in on the act by blessing a big ice cube because, uh, Greenland, or something.

Now, whatever else he may be, Leo is sincerely convinced of the truth of the Roman Catholic faith as he understands it. Including that God made humans stewards of creation. But the same is not true of media outlets that cheerfully ran headlines like Euronews.green’s “Pope Leo XIV celebrates first ‘green Mass’ after calling out greed that fuels climate injustice”.

And the New York Times was also very happy that in September the Pope said: “Extreme natural phenomena caused by climate changes provoked by human activity are growing in intensity and frequency.”

So, the press digs the Pope. But only sometimes, mainly when he’s talking about things he doesn’t know about such as, well, Greenland ice, on which, frankly, we do not believe the Pope is well-informed. By contrast he is well informed on Catholic moral teaching. And yet the Times would howl in outrage if he started insisting to them that abortion is murder, people should not have sex outside of marriage (even if we’re alone) or anything else of that sort. They only care if what he says, no matter how muddled or ill-informed, reinforces opinions they want to promote anyway, in which case they’re all in favour of Papal authority.

Thus NBC, noting that Leo was generally more careful than his predecessor Francis, insisted that “many Vatican watchers have nonetheless been impressed with his ability to deliver powerful messages — particularly on issues such as climate change, artificial intelligence, poverty and immigration — albeit in a subtler way than the man he replaced.” But then it said, “For all the warm reviews, some Vatican watchers have sounded a note of caution: Leo has yet to stake out concrete positions, let alone sharp critiques, on any major issue.” But of course Pope Leo holds concrete positions based on 2,000 years of established Church doctrine on all manner of issues including, again, sexual morality. NBC just doesn’t seem to know it, though it kept mentioning his views on “climate change” and “whether Israel had committed genocide in Gaza”. Just never mind marriage.

Likewise, the Times went on that his remarks on climate “will be closely watched, as they are intended to mark the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si, a groundbreaking papal document written by his predecessor, Francis, that essentially updated the Catholic Church’s teachings to specifically address climate change.”

Well, no. It offered an opinion on how those teachings might apply to climate change, if that Pope or this one had his facts right, which they don’t. (And they are not… all together now… “climate scientists”.) Just as they are not economists, and don’t know whether solar power really is efficient, or whether filling green fields with solar panels actually helps nature.

So, when it comes to accepting Papal moral authority on climate, the press is just pretending. And they know it.

Indeed, at least partly for that reason some climate activists are talking as if what we really need is a whole new religion and then try to play a modern Moses bringing down the 10 Suggestions from Mount Postmodern. Which brings us back to that Times article about making Earth Day a religious holiday, because the piece went on to say: “One day out of 365 to mark the entire planet is too far a cry from the reverence and recognition owed the beleaguered planetary basis for our entire existence, for all known life. So, what would an earth-reverent belief system look like with Earth Day at its center?”

Well, it would be earth-reverent, for one thing. But nobody really worships the Earth. And that’s the fundamental flaw with trying to invent a faith based on ideas no one believes, purely for instrumental purposes. As they write:

“The Jewish Torah wraps around the year nicely from one Simchat Torah to the next, when we complete the annual reading of the story and start over again all in the same service, creating the feeling of a hermetic year. What if a book like that existed for the Earth? What if it were replete with hymns to this world of the living? What if it contained the stories of the prophets of natural earth knowledge – Darwin and Carson, Galileo and Humboldt?”

To which we reply, and what if grandma had wheels? In that case, she’d be a trolley bus. But she doesn’t, she isn’t, that book doesn’t exist, and crucially they couldn’t write it if they tried. The whole thing is make-believe. And mushy:

“Are we proposing a whole new religion? We’re not quite sure.”

Now there’s an uncertain trumpet, a voice mumbling in the wilderness. But the idea keeps appearing. Consider this Washington Post headline from their “Climate Coach”:

“What if we need spiritual revival, not technology, to address climate change? Buddhism scholar Joanna Macy, who died this month, leaves behind a blueprint for overcoming climate despair and anxiety.”

OK, now try it with crime or family breakdown. No thanks. But on climate, a guy who admits that he has no religion is keen to inveigle you into it, not because he believes the doctrine is true, or will further your higher good, but to serve his policy goals. The Climate Coach says:

“Gus Speth, co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and founder of the World Resources Institute… once considered biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change to be the century’s top environmental problems. ‘I thought with 30 years of good science, we could address those problems,’ Speth recently wrote by email. ‘But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy … and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we lawyers and scientists don’t know how do that.’”

Here’s a hot tip for you, buddy: Neither does anyone else. Religions aren’t patent medicines and you can’t cook one up in your kitchen, or revive one that has ceased to persuade because it would serve some short-term purpose. Ask Julian the Apostate.

When a faith appears that changes the world, it starts with a blinding revelation, or an empty tomb, not with a sociology seminar or a political meeting. Try to force it and what you get is just a gooey syncretism with no real theological content, just guff about the Earth being alive and everything being one, man. And a lot of pretend reverence.

The same people who would faint dead away if they saw the Ten Commandments in a public school, though possibly not a pentagram, (and sorry, here I have to interrupt myself to note that Heatmap just celebrated Christmas 2025 by calling Bethlehem “the West Bank city south of Jerusalem in which Christians believe Jesus was born” as if there were any genuine historical dispute on that point), so, these people who would faint if they saw the Ten Commandments in a school insist that:

“To Florida’s Miccosukee Tribe, the lands around Alligator Alcatraz are sacred” [from the email; the story doesn’t use that headline]

Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone, in that or any other tribe or outside of them, who still sincerely holds the pantheistic shamanistic beliefs of their distant ancestors or, in fact, has any accurate idea what those beliefs even were.

And I might add here that if Gaia is angry, she’s clearly also powerless, since as many people have pointed out, deaths from natural disasters have plummeted over the past century, and in the first half of 2025 they hit an all-time low. Which is not exactly the sort of thing that happened when Jehovah blew His stack, now is it?

So as I say, if you try to invent a religion to serve a political goal, all you get is saccharine celebrity syncretism like this story from the New York Times:

“The actor Rainn Wilson, who is best known for playing the character Dwight Schrute in the sitcom ‘The Office,’ has been active in the environmental movement for years. But it wasn’t until he participated in a bonfire ceremony earlier this year with King Charles and a group of Indigenous elders at Highgrove Gardens in Britain that he realized something was missing from the public dialogue about climate change.”

Yeah. Like common sense or diverse views. Or arguably even just a brain. The piece goes on:

“In a guest essay for Times Opinion, Wilson argues that, ‘to transform our relationship with our planet in this time of climate crisis, we need to value nature as profoundly sacred. Spiritual, even.’”

Oooh, sacred and even spiritual. Deep, man. The wisdom of Hollywood is second only to its sincerity. But the big problem is this: if we don’t value nature as profoundly sacred on its own merits, we can’t do so on grounds of utility, because the hallmark of actual religions is that, for better or worse, their believers believe them. And there is no substitute.

Trendy liberal giant social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, an atheist who thinks religion is instrumentally useful, wrote recently that, “I approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence.”

But it’s no good. Once you “see through” religion, you identify it as a trick of the genes or the memes to help us flourish, even if it’s one whose effects you value, you can’t believe in it any more. And it stops working.

So just as people occasionally realize that, if we acted as though we believed in Christianity, it might help combat social breakdown, but don’t realize only people who actually believe in it can act as if they believed in it, however imperfectly, you can’t pretend to think Earth is sacred then expect to treat it as holy. This whole thing is as fake as the “Guardian Spirit Dragon-Jaguar” that Communist China presented to COP30 which nobody believes in… though some people did notice its uncanny resemblance to, um, Satan.

OK then. If a new religion isn’t the answer, why not just bring back some old one? As long as it’s not Christianity. Thus Canada’s government happily blathers about the noble savage that:

“Indigenous Peoples have a strong connection to the natural world, and their leadership is key in tackling climate change. That is why Canada is committed to working in true partnership with Indigenous Peoples for inclusive and collaborative climate action.”

Again the problem is, none of it is true, and no one believes it anymore. When my ancestors were hopping about covered in woad, or storming across the North Sea to perform gruesome human sacrifices for bloodthirsty Norse gods, like the “blood eagle” (I promise you don’t want to know), they paid a lot of attention to the weather but they were not into inclusive and collaborative climate action, or inclusiveness of any other kind.

Their idea of multiculturalism was to rape and slaughter anyone not in their tribe with equal ferocity. And I guarantee you that the same is equally true of your ancestors, no matter where they lived, or when.

It is also demonstrably false, though it’s very trendy, to claim that Indigenous Peopleses around the world had, or have, identical views on key matters just because they live where their distant ancestors did, or where their ancestors wiped out some other locals before Europeans showed up and started writing down who was where.

Thus Grist magazine interviewed a woman who says

“In our historical retelling of our islands, it is where ravens found a clam shell and pulled humans out of the clam shell.”

But she doesn’t believe it and neither do you. This gooey mess is just like neopaganism except nobody actually believes it.

Some Christians honestly think they have a personal relationship with Jesus. Nobody today actually thinks they have a genuinely personal, two-way relationship with “Mother Earth”. Yet in an exquisitely woke press release Parks Canada gushed that “The cultures and identities of Indigenous peoples are rooted in the land, and honouring connections to place is an important element to reconciliation.”

Once again the usual cookie-cutter noble-savage cant about “returning this sacred stone to an area where buffalo still roam.” Sacred stone. Which not one person worships.

Nobody believes this stuff, even when they furrow their brows and pretend to. The BBC, in reporting on an Australian climate-related court case, included

“The court also heard that the [Torre Strait] islands are home to a ‘distinctive customary culture known as Ailan Kastom’, where the residents have a ‘unique spiritual and physical connection’ to the islands and waters.” … In his submission to the court, Uncle Pabai described the deep spiritual connection he and other locals have with the waters and land, especially the cemeteries. ‘Talking to my ancestors is a big part of my culture,’ he wrote. ‘If Boigu was gone, or I had to leave it, because it was underwater, I will be nothing.’”

Unless of course he went right on checking his social media.

Or consider the Dakota Access Pipeline protests back in 2016. The CBC, which would never have covered the Catholic doctrine of “transubstantiation” regarding Christ’s real presence in the eucharist sympathetically, ran a “news” story headlined:

“‘We must kill the black snake’: Prophecy and prayer motivate Standing Rock movement/ Indigenous leaders say effort to oppose Dakota Access pipeline rooted in power of prayer”.

And if you’re wondering what that “We must kill the black snake” is all about, supposedly there’s this ancient Lakota prophecy about a black snake slithering over the land desecrating sacred sites and destroying the Earth. Conveniently, the protestors now claim that the snake is highways, and then recently pipelines.

“That belief is why hundreds of people have gathered since April to pray in camps along the Missouri River.”

No it’s not. After all, they had to drive on the highways to get to the place where they could protest them, and they weren’t worried that the snake was going to swallow them. They also weren’t on the Road to Damascus. People gathered there because they think CO2 is cooking the planet, and they were simply using the snake legend, and the aboriginals, for publicity, as they would use Luke’s gospel if it seemed politically useful.

Another giveaway that climate-activism-as-a-religion is flimflam is the way outfits like The New York Times, which have no use for American evangelicals, suddenly swoon whenever one of them comes around on climate change. Climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe has played up her evangelical credentials to great effect this way:

“The reason I became a climate scientist was from the heart – I was planning to become an astrophysicist. Being a Christian, I believe that if we take the Bible seriously we’d be at the front of the line, demanding action.”

Well, maybe we would. But we wouldn’t be trading in pantheism and giant black snakes, now would we?

What makes this whole effort unserious, and definitively non-religious, is that it’s all about pretending to believe in some higher spiritual world in order to get material success in this world. Consider the words of Sir Keir Starmer, currently bidding fair to be the worst prime minister in British history, on the appointment of Dame Sarah Mullally as first female Archbishop of Canterbury:

“The Church of England is of profound importance to this country. Its churches, cathedrals, schools, and charities are part of the fabric of our communities. The Archbishop of Canterbury will play a key role in our national life.”

There’s not one word about whether what the Church says, or once said, is actually true. It’s all about social utility. And interestingly, a recent poll found that Americans were a lot more likely (53% to 34%) to think that religion is socially useful than that it’s not. But as noted earlier, there’s a world of difference between thinking it’s useful because it’s true, and thinking it’s useful despite being a bunch of silly mumbo-jumbo.

As for Leo XIV trying to prove that the Anglicans aren’t the only flaky church, not everyone was as scornful as the Babylon Bee with its “Pope Activates Ice Powers, Builds Ice Palace While Singing In Sparkly Blue Dress”. But as Newsweek did concede, “Multiple people have spoken out against Pope Leo blessing a block of ice during a global church summit on climate change, with one calling it part of a ‘weird pagan Earth-worshipping hippy ritual.’” So, believers are not impressed, and those who are impressed do not believe.

The upshot is that a lot of people are out there telling you God, Gaia, or some spiritual force-thingy says somewhere-or-other that they’re right about everything and you are dirty, heretical, haram unbeliever. It has all the nastier aspects of religion, including sanctimony. And none of the redeeming ones including faith, hope or charity founded on Truth.

So yes, God wants us to care for creation. After all, He created it. And the creatures, including us. But he also gave us brains, so that we could seek truth and adhere to it, from science to theology.

There is a logical order to these things. You have to start with what you believe is true, and see what it compels you to do if it is true; you can’t start with what you want everyone else to do, and then invent some flaky myths that you think will dupe them into doing it. If you really believe there’s a higher power that deserves our obedience, then as Jesus said in Matthew’s gospel:

“your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

Instead these climate alarmists are posing on an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. But they stole them.

For the Climate Discussion Nexus I’m John Robson, and that’s our look at whether climate change is, or ever could be, a religion. And the short answer is no, but it’s looking a lot like a cult.