Of course they do. This terrain is tailor-made for them. Religion has always trafficked in narrative. That is not an insult; it is a structural observation. Every creed offers a story about the world, about suffering, about redemption, about invisible forces that govern visible consequences. As long as individuals are free to accept or reject the offering—free to kneel or to walk away—there is no quarrel. Consent is the boundary line.
The difficulty arises when the story refuses to remain a story and demands universal submission.
What we are witnessing now is not merely environmental concern, nor even policy activism. It is the elevation of a thesis into dogma. The climate narrative no longer presents itself as an argument to be weighed but as a creed to be affirmed. It does not merely invite belief; it expects confession.
The underlying mechanism is ancient. You are asked to internalize something that cannot be touched, smelled, seen, or otherwise apprehended by ordinary human senses. You cannot encounter “global mean temperature anomaly” in your garden. You cannot personally inspect atmospheric radiative forcing with your fingertips. What you are given instead are models, projections, abstractions—vast interpretive constructs that require imagination as their entry ticket.
And imagination, when fused with fear, is a potent solvent of skepticism.
Belief becomes the currency. Not cautious provisional acceptance. Not technical assent with room for doubt. Belief. The kind that asks you to suspend persistent questions because the questions themselves are treated as moral defects.
We are told this is pure rationality. Settled. Unassailable. Beyond dispute. Yet the scaffolding is anything but simple. The data sets are sprawling and heterogeneous—surface stations, satellite proxies, historical reconstructions—stitched together across decades with layers of adjustments, interpolations, statistical treatments, and embedded assumptions. Complex systems are reduced to models, models are tuned, uncertainties are bracketed, and probabilities are translated into headlines.
This does not make it fraudulent. It makes it complicated. And complication is precisely where humility should reside.
Instead, what we observe is rhetorical inflation. A hodgepodge of measurements and inferences, blended with conjecture about future behavior, seasoned liberally with expert opinion, and plated as moral imperative. The presentation is less “here is what we tentatively understand” and more “here is what must be believed.”
And belief, in this context, is binary. You either accept the entire architecture wholesale—no inconvenient footnotes, no heretical caveats—or you are cast outside the perimeter of respectable society.
That is where the religious parallel ceases to be metaphorical and becomes structural.
Traditional churches are intimately familiar with this choreography. Deviate from scripture and you risk damnation. Question the doctrine and you are summoned for correction. Persist in dissent and you may find yourself ostracized. The mechanics are well-worn: orthodoxy, heresy, repentance, excommunication.
Now substitute carbon for original sin.
The sinner drives a combustion engine. The penitent offsets. The devout reduce, recycle, evangelize. The clergy appear not in robes but in lab coats and conference lanyards. The sermons are delivered at summits rather than pulpits. The apocalyptic imagery is updated—no longer brimstone and sulfur, but rising seas and burning forests. The emotional architecture, however, is eerily familiar.
There is, of course, a crucial difference between theology and physics. Physics, at its best, invites relentless interrogation. It thrives on falsifiability. It grows stronger when attacked with disciplined skepticism. A scientific claim that cannot survive hostile examination deserves to perish.
Yet the public performance of climate discourse often feels allergic to that principle. Question the scale of impact, the cost-benefit calculus, the reliability of long-range projections, and the response is rarely “let us examine the evidence together.” More often it is moral indictment. You are labeled irresponsible, anti-science, dangerous.
This is not how robust inquiry behaves. This is how orthodoxy defends territory.
And territory is precisely what is at stake. Not merely atmospheric chemistry, but authority. Not merely emissions trajectories, but social alignment. The creed demands behavioral conformity—how you travel, what you eat, how you heat your home, what you are permitted to question in polite company.
Again, concern for the environment is not the issue. Rational stewardship is a hallmark of any functioning civilization. The issue is coercive unanimity masquerading as intellectual inevitability.
When a narrative insists that it cannot be explained in plain terms without collapsing into slogans; when it cannot withstand granular scrutiny without retreating into appeals to consensus; when dissent triggers social penalties rather than counterarguments—you are no longer in the realm of open discourse. You are inside a belief system guarding its perimeter.
And the irony is almost too symmetrical to ignore. The imagery of climate catastrophe often leans heavily on infernal metaphors: hellish heat, firestorms, apocalypse. Deviate from the scripture of sustainability and you are promised a planetary damnation of biblical proportions.
A meeting with the lord of hell, indeed—only now the sulfur smells faintly of carbon credits.
None of this means the climate is static. It never has been. None of it means human activity exerts zero influence. Industrial civilization alters landscapes, chemistry, ecosystems. To deny that would be absurd. But acknowledging influence is not the same as canonizing a singular explanatory framework and anathematizing all deviation from it.
Complex systems deserve complex debate.
Instead, what we too often receive is catechism. Repeat after me. Trust the models. Silence your doubts. Confess your footprint. Adjust your life accordingly.
If people freely choose to align with that creed, so be it. Adults are entitled to their convictions. But when policy, finance, education, and social standing become contingent on ritual affirmation of a singular narrative, the comparison to organized religion is no longer rhetorical flourish. It is diagnostic.
Every civilization tells stories to itself. Some stories illuminate reality. Others simplify it beyond recognition. The wise response is neither blind faith nor reflexive denial, but disciplined scrutiny.
Because once belief replaces inquiry, you are no longer managing carbon.
You are managing heresy.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/02/most-christian-leaders-accept-climate-science/