Is climate science actually a religion? The Trump administration would like you to think so.
Earlier this year, Lee Zeldin, Trump’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced a broad attack on environmental regulations. A chief target of Zeldin’s EPA is the 16-year-old endangerment finding, based on a veritable mountain of scientific evidence that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health for current and future generations.
Although not a household term, the “endangerment finding” refers to the legal backbone of modern climate regulations under the Clean Air Act as it pertains to cars and trucks, power plants and oil and gas operations. Revoking the EPA’s authority to regulate these emissions, experts warn, will accelerate climate impacts like this summer’s extreme weather events, and worsen heat-related deaths and climate-induced spread of disease.
Recently, the agency began making good on plans to rescind the endangerment finding (a brief public comment period was extended to Sept. 22). Repealing a key piece of science-based policy normally requires amassing considerable counter-evidence — in this case, to show that greenhouse gas emissions do not cause or contribute to these dangers.
But Zeldin is sidestepping science, preferring religious language to facts. “The endangerment finding is considered the holy grail of the climate religion,” Zeldin states on the EPA’s website. “We are driving a dagger through the heart of the climate religion.”
Zeldin’s dismissal of climate change as “religion” is a smear tactic as old as the environmental movement itself. It’s also an insult to religion and religious values.
In 1962, when environmental pioneer Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring” — a painstakingly researched exposé of the risks to humans and nonhumans of indiscriminate pesticide use — industry insiders promptly caricatured her as a crusading religious fanatic. Well into this century, conservative critics of the regulatory state continue to deride Carson’s work as relevant only to practitioners of the “quasi-religion of environmentalism,” despite ever-mounting evidence of the dangers of chemicals like DDT.
So what exactly does the “religion” charge entail, and why should it carry damning weight, especially among those with conservative — even religious — values?
In Carson’s case, the epithet was gendered, aiming to discredit her as irrational, emotionally overwrought and unscientific — an infantilizing critique often leveled at Greta Thunberg today. But the allegation went further, purporting to expose Carson and those sharing her concerns as members of a mystical cult of nature, worshippers of birds and bunnies.
Here the “religion” charge becomes more puzzling and even less credible. It suggests that one must choose between moral concern for the well-being of nature and adherence to religion.
Conservative Christians who adopt an anti-regulation stance often present these as competing worldviews. The Standing for Freedom Center, an evangelical Christian initiative of Liberty University, features an article by a former senior official in the Trump administration, William Wolfe, who assails climate change as a “false gospel” bearing all the earmarks of religion:
An inner circle of prophets and proselytizers (climate scientists, activists, politicians). Persecution of “heretics” (climate deniers). Scriptures and sacred texts (reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). A theology of repentance (fossil fuels as humanity’s “original sin”). And, above all, apocalyptic expectations (an impending climate cataclysm). “The new cult of climate change demands that its adherents worship the creation instead of the Creator,” Wolfe insists.
The choice seems clear-cut. But the dichotomy is false.
To be sure, nature, like religion, is a source of meaning for many. Activities in nature lend structure to people’s lives, much as religions do, providing ritual-like engagement with something larger than oneself. Alone or in communities of like-minded people, nature lovers and church-goers alike experience moments of transport and awe. But as scholars of religion observe, the same can be said of many facets of secular culture, like organized sports or (sorry to say) shopping. Yet no one insists Americans choose between God and football.
Fortunately, humans are capable of navigating multiple sources of meaning and value, even when they do not effortlessly align. But as the record shows, environmentalism and religion do often align, to their mutual enrichment.
Rachel Carson’s “care for creation” was directly informed by her Presbyterian upbringing. Indeed, environmental history shows that religion, and particularly Christianity, created the “mental and moral world,” the civic virtues that birthed environmental conservation. Even among right-leaning Christians, many contemporary evangelicals see climate action as inseparable from “pro-life” concerns for the unborn and future generations. Climate skepticism is real, of course, but its roots are more political than religious.
Staunch opponents of regulation don’t want Americans to see that climate action and religious faith are congenial and even share core values: health and well-being, now and for the future. A safe and stable environment, with food and shelter for humans and other vulnerable creatures.
Zeldin’s dismissal of climate science as dogmatic religion looks like what it is: a timeworn tactic of name-calling in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence for commonsense climate policy.
Lisa H. Sideris is a Public Voices fellow of The OpEd Project and the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is professor and vice-chair of the Environmental Studies Program, with faculty affiliation in Religious Studies.
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