Digital sermons and divine warnings: Bangladeshi Islamic preachers’ framing of the 2025 Southern California Wildfires

This study investigates how Bangladeshi Islamic preachers interpreted the 2025 Southern California wildfires in YouTube sermons to understand how climate events are re-framed through religious and geopolitical discourses in the Global South. It employs the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine how meaning is constructed transnationally around the wildfires. The findings show that preachers did not frame the event as a natural disaster but framed it as divine punishment visited upon the United States for perceived Western immorality and its foreign policy, particularly its support for Israel’s war in Gaza. The preachers combined theological reasoning, political grievance, and cultural critique in their interpretation of a climate event using emotionally charged narratives. In doing so, they reject the dominant techno-scientific explanation of climate events. The paper argues that religious sermons in the Global South context function as sites of environmental meaning-making, and thus a “totalizing narrative” is constructed, where environmental phenomena are interpreted through the lens of broader moral and geopolitical frameworks. The study contributes to environmental communication by showing how religious actors in the Global South reframe climate events in their preaching and how affective and politicized climate discourse circulate transnationally.