The “climate religion” and its critics
How do religious and quasi-religious words shape the Dutch climate debate on X? An analysis of nearly 700,000 Dutch-language posts from 2023, with Nico de Groot.
Author version · article forthcomingBackground: Extinction Rebellion blockade of the A12 motorway in The Hague, 28 January 2023. Photo: Hanno Lans, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Data
- All public Dutch-language posts on X/Twitter containing klimaat (climate) in 2023, collected week by week with Zeeschuimer. After deduplication and removal of unrelated uses (“school climate”, “political climate”), 698,598 posts remain, generating about 500 million impressions.
- Analysis
- A theory-driven taxonomy of explicit religious, implicit religious and apocalyptic vocabulary, built on Bailey’s concept of implicit religion and on secular millenarianism, extended with LLM-assisted search for related terms. A regular-expression scan captured every compound word beginning with klimaat-.
- Sentiment
- Each post labelled negative, neutral or positive with the multilingual XLM-T transformer model. Validation on 500 hand-coded posts: inter-rater agreement κ = 0.73, model accuracy 70.4%, macro F1 70.2%. Sarcasm and irony remain the main source of error.
- Project
- Apocalypse and Climate Change: Impact of Religious Vocabularies in the Netherlands (NWO, 406.21.FHR.017), Tilburg School of Catholic Theology. Ethical approval: ERB-TST, January 2023.
Three moments of pressure
Number of climate posts per week, 2023. Hover over a week for posts and impressions.
The debate peaks in week 29, when global temperature records were broken, in weeks 36–37, when Extinction Rebellion blocked the A12 motorway in The Hague, and in week 45, as climate became one of the three main issues in the national election campaign. Impressions rise and fall with the number of posts. Weekly values are rounded.
Three religious registers
Most frequent terms per register, number of posts. Dutch original in brackets.
Church, scripture, doctrine
Secular words with binding moral weight
Crisis as rupture and ending
Religious meaning works on three levels at once. Explicit terms come from churches and scripture. Implicit terms such as science, climate justice and sustainability are secular words treated as binding moral imperatives. Apocalyptic terms frame climate change as rupture and ending. The implicit and apocalyptic registers are far larger than the explicit one.
Show data table
| Register | Term | Dutch | Posts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Explicit | Religion | religie | 2,706 |
| Explicit | God | God | 2,452 |
| Explicit | Pope | paus | 1,215 |
| Explicit | Islam | islam | 1,118 |
| Explicit | Holy | heilige | 436 |
| Explicit | Creation | schepping | 399 |
| Explicit | Bible | bijbel | 295 |
| Implicit | Science | wetenschap | 5,940 |
| Implicit | Climate justice | klimaatrechtvaardigheid | 4,125 |
| Implicit | Sustainability | duurzaamheid | 4,092 |
| Implicit | Biodiversity | biodiversiteit | 3,362 |
| Implicit | Justice | rechtvaardigheid | 1,497 |
| Implicit | Human rights | mensenrechten | 1,038 |
| Implicit | Nature restoration | natuurherstel | 506 |
| Apocalyptic | Fear | angst | 6,547 |
| Apocalyptic | Death | dood | 4,556 |
| Apocalyptic | Drought | droogte | 3,881 |
| Apocalyptic | Disaster | ramp | 1,880 |
| Apocalyptic | Doom | ondergang | 718 |
| Apocalyptic | Flood | zondvloed | 488 |
| Apocalyptic | Extinction | uitsterven | 371 |
A debate in a negative key
Share of negative, neutral and positive posts by register.
Six in ten posts are negative. Apocalyptic vocabulary is the most negative register (68.5%). The implicit register is the most positive (13.3%): justice, sustainability and biodiversity often appear in constructive, solution-oriented posts.
Show data table
| Register | Negative | Neutral | Positive |
|---|---|---|---|
| Explicit religious | 60.1% | 30.9% | 9.0% |
| Implicit religious | 55.4% | 31.3% | 13.3% |
| Apocalyptic | 68.5% | 25.8% | 5.7% |
| All posts | 62.2% | 29.2% | 8.6% |
The loudest label was #klimaathysterie
Most used hashtags in four clusters, same scale throughout. Dutch hashtags in English rendering (e.g. #klimaathysterie → #ClimateHysteria).
The oppositional cluster consists entirely of dismissive labels, none of which engages with scientific or policy content. It is more than twice the size of the activist cluster. These figures record how often hashtags were posted; they cannot show how far platform algorithms amplified them. Hashtags used at least 500 times; counts include co-occurring combinations.
Christian words, used mostly against climate activism
Most frequent Christian terms in climate posts, number of posts.
Institutions and offices
Texts and figures
Moral theology
Other traditions appear but remain marginal next to Christian vocabulary. A minority of posts use church, pope or creation to support climate care as care for creation. Far more use the same words to cast climate advocates as a church with its own dogma, clergy and sinners.
Show data table
| Theme | Term | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| Ecclesiology | Church | 2,592 |
| Ecclesiology | Pope | 1,215 |
| Ecclesiology | Christianity | 142 |
| Ecclesiology | Altar | 102 |
| Ecclesiology | Inquisition | 101 |
| Scripture & Christology | Jesus | 437 |
| Scripture & Christology | Prophets | 300 |
| Scripture & Christology | Bible | 295 |
| Scripture & Christology | Gospel | 123 |
| Scripture & Christology | Cross | 118 |
| Scripture & Christology | Messiah | 117 |
| Scripture & Christology | Armageddon | 114 |
| Scripture & Christology | Paradise | 102 |
| Sin, creation & moral order | Sin | 1,054 |
| Sin, creation & moral order | Holy | 452 |
| Sin, creation & moral order | Saint | 436 |
| Sin, creation & moral order | Creation | 399 |
| Sin, creation & moral order | Dogma | 202 |
| Sin, creation & moral order | Stewardship | 160 |
An insult in one word
Religious compound words built on klimaat (climate), number of posts.
Dutch joins nouns into new words. Of all klimaat- compounds, a distinct family recasts climate engagement as religion. They sit almost entirely in the negative-judgment cluster and compress an argument into a label: climate concern is faith, not evidence. The labels are also contested; one user replies that there is no “climate bible” or “climate religion”, only an abundance of scientific research.
The same words, pulled in opposite directions
Posts from the corpus, translated from Dutch and identified by anonymised IDs. Selected to show each pattern, not as a statistical sample.
“The current climate crisis was caused by humans is recognised almost unanimously by science. This makes it certainly a matter for the church; people have been given responsibility to take good care of creation.”
“The Pope embraces climate science and is done with deniers and minimizers.”
“If you believe you can fight climate warming without nature restoration, you have understood nothing of it. Follow the science or be silent on the subject.”
“Climate justice means that the bill is not disproportionately placed with lower incomes and small businesses. Let the big polluters pay.”
“Thousands and thousands of scientists worldwide are warning humanity about the extinction of humanity in the future.”
“They have been predicting the downfall of the earth from climate warming and CO2 since 1970.”
“One scientific truth (religion) by the only true scientists (priests) about climate change (flood). If you disagree, you are a science denier (heretic). You can also offset your CO2 footprint (indulgence).”
“The nickname ‘the European climate pope’ is actually perfect. Just as the pope’s truth concerns a strict belief in an unprovable claim, the existence of God vs. the idea that all climate change is caused by humans.”
“The climate church throws all acquired freedoms and social securities overboard for an unproven science.”
Two trajectories, one religious grammar
How the two sides of the debate draw on religious repertoires.
- Binding commitmentsScience, justice and sustainability are treated as settled obligations; going against the science reads as moral failure.
- Integrating fociThese terms gather values and loyalties into one moral universe with climate action at its centre.
- Intensive concern, extensive effectsPersonal conviction reaches outward into rights claims, institutional mandates and group boundaries.
- Clergy and scriptureScientists become priests, IPCC reports become a bible, carbon offsetting becomes an indulgence.
- Clerical titlesPoliticians are called “climate pope”; the movement becomes a climate church or cult.
- A double moveMany who use these labels also reject the scientific and political institutions whose rationality they claim to defend.
Neither side is formally religious. Both are structured by a religious grammar that remains culturally available in a society where institutional belief has declined.
- Dutch climate discourse on X in 2023 is dominated by negative affect: 62.2% of posts are negative.
- Climate engagement is voiced through implicit religion: science, justice and sustainability function as binding moral commitments, and apocalyptic vocabulary adds a secular millenarian horizon.
- Christian vocabulary such as church, pope and sin circulates mainly in an oppositional register, recasting climate advocacy as doctrine.
- Compounds such as klimaatreligie (2,893 posts) and klimaatpaus (1,353) condense this anti-clerical logic into single words.
- The same vocabularies that bind activists together also expose them to reinterpretation, turning the debate into a contest between competing moral authorities.
Source Gürlesin, Ö. F. and De Groot, N. (forthcoming). The “Climate Religion” and Its Critics: Religious Rhetoric and Polarization in Dutch Digital Discourse. Peer-reviewed journal article; publication details will follow. Findings shown here are from the author version. Data: Religion and Climate Change in the Netherlands (2023): A Multi-Layer Twitter Discourse Dataset Collection, Zenodo.