Article published In: Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 16:1 (2026) ► pp.97–125

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‘Climate cults’ and ‘climate sins’

Religion metaphors and the framing of climate change in American and Canadian newspapers

 | University of British Columbia
ORCiD logo with link | University of British Columbia
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of British Columbia.

Published online: 25 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.25017.gro
Abstract
Climate change is frequently discussed by political figures and journalists that have divergent views on the validity of climate change; metaphor is often used to frame climate change and portray a particular stance on the issue. Religion metaphors used to invalidate the veracity of climate change have been documented in the United Kingdom and the United States (Atanasova, D., & Koteyko, N. (2017). Metaphors in Guardian Online and Mail Online opinion-page content on climate change: War, religion, and politics. Environmental Communication, 11(4), 452–469. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Woods, R., Fernández, A., & Coen, S. (2012). The use of religious metaphors by UK newspapers to describe and denigrate climate change. Public Understanding of Science, 21(3), 323–339. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), however, our data indicates that specific Religion metaphors are also used to validate climate change. We address: (1) Which Religion metaphors are used to frame climate change as a valid issue, or as a fraudulent secular ‘religion’; (2) How these metaphors instantiate a specific ideological stance; (3) Patterns of metaphor use by climate change skeptics and climate change advocates. Our findings show that different Religion metaphors are used to frame climate change by conservatives and liberals in the United States and Canada. Through our analysis, we clarify how the Religion frame is used to make divergent arguments concerning climate change.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Religion metaphors and their use in promoting climate skepticism
      • 1.1.1Political affiliation and climate change viewpoint
    • 1.2Conservatives and the use of Religion metaphors
  • 2.Theoretical framework
  • 3.Methods
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Conservative viewpoints
    • 4.2Liberal viewpoints
    • 4.3Ironic use of metaphor
  • 5.Analysis and discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Data Availability Statement
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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