Extinction Rebellion and implicit religion
How does a secular climate movement speak on social media, and does its language carry religious traits? An analysis of the X/Twitter activity of Extinction Rebellion Nederland, 2020–2023.
Background: map of the world from Muhammad ibn Mahmud Tusi’s Wonders of Creation (‘Aja’ib al-makhluqat). Walters Art Museum, W.593. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Data
- 5,165 Dutch tweets from the XR Nederland account on X/Twitter (1 January 2020 – 31 December 2023), collected with Zeeschuimer in early 2024. Context: about 700,000 Dutch climate-related tweets from 44 environmental organisations
- Analysis
- Content analysis (Berelson) and discourse analysis (Fairclough) in Atlas.ti; hashtag and vocabulary analysis; sentiment classification with the multilingual XLM-RoBERTa model (about 70% accuracy on Dutch tweets)
- Framework
- Implicit religion (Edward Bailey) and Meerten ter Borg’s approach to meaning and transcendence
- Project
- Part of the NWO project Apocalypse and Climate Change: Impact of Religious Vocabularies in the Netherlands, Tilburg University
A small share of posts, half of the attention
XR Nederland compared with the other 43 environmental organisations on X/Twitter in 2023.
XR posted about one in six climate-related messages but drew half of all impressions. Its high-profile civil disobedience campaigns explain much of the peak in September 2023, when impressions for all organisations passed 20 million.
Show data table
| XR Nederland | All 44 organisations | XR share | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Posts | 2,743 | 15,790 | 17% |
| Impressions | 55 million | 109 million | 50% |
A critical, informative tone
Sentiment of XR Nederland’s 2,743 tweets in 2023.
Most messages are neutral updates or critical of current policy; expressions of optimism are rare.
Show data table
| Sentiment | Tweets | % |
|---|---|---|
| Neutral | 1,481 | 54.0 |
| Negative | 1,040 | 37.9 |
| Positive | 222 | 8.1 |
| Total | 2,743 | 100 |
What the movement talks about
The most frequent hashtags and the most prominent terms in XR’s climate vocabulary, 2023.
- #StopFossieleSubsidiesStop fossil fuel subsidies
- #KlimaatrechtvaardigheidClimate justice
- #A12The A12 motorway blockades
- KlimaatrechtvaardigheidClimate justice
- DuurzaamheidSustainability
- WetenschapScience
Climate justice is the central frame, linking environmental demands to social and moral responsibility.
Six faces of implicit religion
Themes identified through discourse analysis of XR’s tweets.
Shared beliefs and values
Activism rests on a common set of convictions about nature and justice that function like a creed.
Transcendent ideas and forces
The planet and future generations are invoked as realities larger than the individual, giving action a higher purpose.
Commitment and devotion
Protest is framed as a moral imperative that calls for sacrifice, persistence and personal risk.
Community and collective identity
Shared actions and symbols bind activists into a community, much as rituals do for a congregation.
Meaning and purpose in life
Taking part gives activists a sense of meaning and direction in the face of the climate crisis.
Hope and overcoming uncertainty
Messages hold out the prospect of change and help activists cope with fear about the future.
Together these themes present climate activism as a sacred responsibility and bind activists into a community united by a transcendent purpose.
- Implicit religion is not confined to religious settings: it also appears in the digital discourse of a secular climate movement.
- XR Nederland frames climate action as a moral duty, blending secular environmental concern with spiritual commitment.
- With 17% of posts, XR generated half of all impressions among Dutch climate organisations in 2023.
- Its tone is mostly neutral or critical; hope is present, but optimism is not the main register.
- Six themes carry the implicit religious dimension: shared beliefs, transcendence, devotion, community, meaning and hope.
Source Gürlesin, Ö. F. (2024). Social Media, Environmental Activism and Implicit Religion: A Case Study of Extinction Rebellion. Religions, 15(12), 1458. Open access: doi.org/10.3390/rel15121458