The New Civil Religion

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Social scientific studies find that religion plays a limited role in shaping Americans’ climate attitudes. I argue that a major type of religiosity has been missed: that which is expressed in conservative media. This religiosity is not associated with religious institutions but rather takes the form of civil religion. Because the US is now religiously polarized, today’s civil religion differs from what Bellah identified in 1967: rather than serving to unify the entire country, it serves to unify the political right, setting it against what is constructed as the secular left. I show how the religious discourse Rush Limbaugh employed on his radio broadcasts exemplifies this new civil religion, and further, that he used civil religious arguments to denigrate climate action. The new civil religiosity on the right, sometimes called Christian nationalism, reduces support for climate legislation by portraying a powerful federal government as a threat to religious liberty.