Flooded building and tree trunk in the muddy water of the Mekong in Si Phan Don, Laos, September 2019. Source/Photographer: Basile Morin. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Faith has always been part of the weather.
Long before emissions were measured or parts per million calculated, people prayed for rain, gave thanks for harvests, and searched for meaning in storms. Today, in a fast-warming planet, those ancient narratives still coexist with climate models and IPCC reports, quietly shaping how billions interpret what is happening to the planet, and what should be done. That moral authority makes religion a heavyweight in the climate fight. It can mobilize millions, anchor courage through catastrophe, and sanctify Earth care as a sacred duty. But it cuts both ways. It can also slow action, actively obstruct it, transforming climate denial into divine will, karmic consequence, or prophecy fulfilled.
The real battle, then, is not only over the science but over the story, which religious narrative we choose to tell ourselves about what’s burning.
Apocalypse as a climate lens
In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, apocalyptic interpretations of climate change have become a clear obstacle to climate action. A 2024 survey by PPIM UIN Jakarta found that while 76.8% of Indonesian Muslims accept that climate change is real, 58.2% also see it as a sign of the coming apocalypse. These figures reflect widespread popular interpretations within Indonesian Muslim communities, not official Islamic doctrine.
Source: https://fulcrum.sg/indonesian-muslims-and-the-apocalypse-end-of-the-road-for-effective-green-transition
That distinction matters. The survey noted that “apocalyptic believers show significantly lower pro-environmental engagement than those who attribute climate change to economic activity.” When catastrophe is seen as a divine countdown rather than a human-made crisis, the incentive to mitigate emissions fades. This fatalism is often rooted in eschatological inevitability: the belief that the end times are prophesied and unfolding as decreed. Once you accept the apocalypse as inevitable, climate change stops being a crisis to solve and becomes a prophecy to accept. Conveniently, nobody has to answer for it.
A similar pattern emerges among segments of Western evangelical Christianity. End-times theology frames ecological collapse as a necessary precursor to the Second Coming, not a crisis to prevent, but a prophecy to fulfill. Environmental stewardship gets dismissed as “polishing brass on a sinking ship,” spiritual energy better spent saving souls before final judgment. Social scientist Robin Globus Veldman found that between 2006 and 2015, leaders and pundits associated with the Christian Right actively promoted climate skepticism as the only “biblically faithful” stance. Political science research reinforces this: one study found that “citizens who strongly believe in the imminence of the Apocalypse tend to view long-term environmental protection as ultimately futile, and hence ill-advised.” When fires, floods, and storms arrive, they’re just read as divine judgment or prophetic signs.
These narratives can bring personal meaning or comfort in a destabilising world—but they also carry a dangerous falsehood: that human choices, collective action, and public policy cannot meaningfully change outcomes. Journalist Glenn Scherer (2004) articulated this in 2004, a historical formulation that still echoes today, writing that “Christian traditionalists feel that concern for the future of our planet is irrelevant, because it [the planet] has no future.” Some end-times believers may even believe that environmental destruction is to be welcomed, even hastened, as a sign of the coming Apocalypse.
“God Is in Control”: When faith limits responsibility
Another powerful thread shaping climate attitudes is the belief that God controls the weather so completely that humans cannot meaningfully harm the planet.
PRRI’s 2023 Climate Survey finds that 28% of Americans agree that “God would not allow humans to destroy the earth,” with this view strongly correlated with lower education and varying sharply by religious affiliation. About 35% of white evangelical Protestants hold this belief. Once that conviction takes hold, climate science becomes a threat. As scholar Janet Kellogg Ray observes, “For many evangelicals, suggesting that humans can change the climate is an attack on the sovereignty of God.” Accepting human-caused warming challenges core theological assumptions about divine control, making climate action feel less like policy and more like heresy.
A 2024 study published in Nature Communications experimentally confirmed this dynamic: when researchers manipulated participants’ beliefs about whether God or humans control Earth’s climate, those primed to believe in divine control showed significantly lower concern about climate change and reduced demand for scientific information. This logic travels well. In Russia, segments of the Orthodox Church and allied media have framed international climate agreements as instruments of Western domination. As scholarBoris Knorre documents, ROC ultraconservatives propagate a conspiratorial view where “the environmental policy of developed countries” aims to “impose control over developing countries and limit their sovereignty.” When climate treaties are portrayed as threats to both nation and faith, rejecting them feels righteous, no matter what the temperature records indicate.
A similar tension emerges in parts of the Muslim world, where discussions of climate adaptation and risk reduction collide with everyday religious fatalism.
Studies of disaster response in Muslim-majority countries show that religious beliefs often “increase fatalistic attitudes towards disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods,” with this fatalism contributing to a lack of disaster preparedness. After the devastating 2023 earthquakes in Turkey, researchers found that individuals with stronger religious fatalism were significantly less likely to take preparedness measures, even when fully aware of the risks. The same logic extends to slow-moving climate threats: why reinforce a village against rising seas if you believe your fate is already sealed?
During Brazil’s 2024 floods in Rio Grande do Sul, alongside the mud, displacement, and infrastructure collapse came a surge of religiously charged disinformation. On social media and encrypted messaging apps, viral posts framed the disaster as divine punishment, in some cases explicitly linking it to the presence or practices of Afro-Brazilian religions. The effect was twofold. First, responsibility shifted away from government failures, agribusiness expansion, deforestation, and inadequate urban planning, and onto already-marginalized religious minorities. Second, attempts to connect the floods to climate change were dismissed as ideological manipulation—portrayed as efforts to erase God from the explanation and replace faith with politics. A related dynamic appears in the Philippines, one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. After Super Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan devastated the Philippines in November 2013, killing over 6,000 people, religious reflections framed the typhoon surge as “a spiritual phenomenon that tests us, tempers us, and ultimately transforms us,” with theological interpretations viewing survivors’ suffering as an “unfolding of the Paschal Mystery”.
How fatalism fuels the denial machine
Natural disasters. Source: ULKIT. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Across all these contexts runs a common thread: fatalism can dissolve agency. Whether rooted in apocalyptic expectation or divine predestination, fatalism can transform climate change from a material crisis into a fixed script, something unfolding as it was always meant to. Once people internalize the idea that outcomes are already written—by God, by fate, by cosmic law—misinformation finds space to flourish. “Nothing we do will make a difference.” “This is punishment for sin.” “Foreign elites invented the hoax to control us.” These narratives resonate because they align with what people already believe about how the world works.
The appeal of this framing lies partly in its coherence. Doing nothing becomes trusting God. Accepting what unfolds becomes faith rather than resignation. While fatalism can emerge organically from theological interpretation, organized climate denial is often industrialized—spread through coordinated networks that weaponize faith-based messaging for political and economic ends. Organizations like the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation provide theological cover for climate inaction through “relevance denialism” that frames environmental science as irrelevant through religious premises. They claim environmental concern borders on idolatry, that only God controls climate, and that fossil fuel development represents divine blessing.
This messaging is not isolated. It aligns with a broader infrastructure of coordinated disinformation. The Cornwall Alliance operates within the Atlas Network, which supports nearly 600 organizations across over 100 countries with an annual budget of $28.8 million. According to De Smog investigations, leaked documents showed ExxonMobil provided “generous contributions” to Atlas Network programs, funding conferences addressing the “global warming scare” and distributing materials aimed at preventing schoolchildren from becoming “smug crusaders” for climate action. ExxonMobil provided a total of $1,082,500 to Atlas Network from 1998 onwards, with coordinated campaigns specifically targeting religious communities during key climate negotiations.
The same financial and organizational models that shaped American religious climate denial have found fertile ground across other Western democracies. In Europe, far-right parties embrace religious climate denial as part of broader populist strategies. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland frames environmentalism as a “replacement religion” threatening Christian values. In France, 21% of practicing Protestant Christians still see climate change as a natural phenomenon, showing skepticism’s persistence even among the environmentally active. They also adapted to local political and cultural tensions across the Global South. In Nigeria and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, religious leaders sometimes attribute droughts and floods to spiritual failings rather than environmental factors. When faith, politics, and profit collide, religious narratives become weapons. Wielded by powerful interests, they can stall climate action, muddy public understanding, and keep denial alive across continents.
Faith as a climate force
The story is not one-sided. The same traditions that nurture climate fatalism also contain resources to disarm it. In Indonesia, Muslim scholars and activists are reclaiming concepts like Tawakkul to argue that true trust in God comes after humans have taken action. Islamic councils have issued fatwas declaring environmental destruction forbidden, and “green pesantren” (Islamic boarding schools) are teaching eco-theology rooted in Qur’anic verses about balance and stewardship. The apocalyptic narrative is being challenged from within the faith, not from outside.
In Orthodox Christianity, figures such as Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew have framed environmental negligence as sin and called for an “ecological conversion” among believers. Official statements from various Orthodox bodies now support climate-friendly economies and energy transitions based on explicitly religious reasoning. In India, Dalit and Adivasi thinkers are developing alternative eco-spiritualities that refuse to separate caste justice from climate justice. Across continents, interfaith coalitions are using religious authority to debunk viral falsehoods, challenge fatalism, and connect climate action to familiar moral duties: protecting the poor, honouring creation, and loving one’s neighbour. The tension is no longer between “religion and science,” but between religious stories that deny responsibility and religious stories that demand it.
Which faith will get the microphone?
Religious climate influence isn’t predetermined by scripture or doctrine. The same traditions inspiring environmental stewardship can be interpreted to justify inaction or denial. What matters is which voices get amplified, by whom, and with what resources. Research shows that religious climate misinformation operates through organized networks integrating religious, political, and economic interests. These networks work especially well in faith communities because of trusted source credibility and moral authority. But strong counter-movements are growing. Interfaith alliances run fact-checking webinars, preach scientific rebuttals, and pressure platforms to demote climate falsehoods. The fight for religious authority on climate issues will grow fiercer as extreme weather accelerates and climate policies face political pressure. Whether faith becomes a force for urgent action or continued delay may determine not just emission trajectories, but the survival of communities least responsible for the crisis. By framing climate science as a false religion, environmental opponents don’t need to disprove global warming; they just need to delegitimize it as acompeting faith. Religious communities worldwide now face their own declaration: whose version of faith will speak for the future of creation? In a world where faith continues to move mountains, the question is whether it will also move emissions. The answer lies not in the distant future but in the conversations happening right now in places of worship around the globe, where the sacred and the scientific meet to determine the fate of our common home.
Additional Suggested Readings
- Veldman, R. G. (2019). “The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change.” University of California Press.
- Hayhoe, K. (2021). “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.” One Signal / Atria Books.
- Castillo, D. P. (2019). “An Ecological Theology of Liberation: Salvation and Political Ecology.” Orbis Books.
