The topic of climate change is neither settled nor one-sided. To those who accept it, the best scientific evidence overwhelmingly attests that anthropogenic climate change is real. But there are many who reject that evidence and dismiss any claim about ongoing climate change as not only untrue, but as a great evil.  In the mounting scholarly and popular calls to understand the “religious dimensions” of climate change, it’s nearly axiomatic that religion “has a part to play” in shaping responses to climate change. But as in other areas, there’s often an apologetic suggestion that hegemonic patterns – e.g., acceptance of anthropogenic climate change and commitment to counter it – are self-evidently tied to “traditional” religious values, while opposition to such patterns or denial of climate change is “cultural,” “political,” or otherwise somehow not really religious. That is, the (explicit or implicit) focus of much of this writing is more on what the public responses from groups and leaders some of us call religious ought to be than what they are.

Whatever the science might say, the social importance of anthropogenic climate change isn’t determined by its observable effects but by political contestation. Or, as Colin Hay has noted, “crises are constituted in and through narrative.” Different climate change narratives can serve different socially formative interests. Starting from this constructivist position, this paper discusses evangelical Protestant examples from Chick Publications, RaptureReady.com, and Resisting the Green Dragon, showing how contemporary climate change discourse itself is positioned as a Satanic or anti-Christian crisis, narrated as part of a battle between good and evil, and is ultimately part of larger, long-term concerns about evangelical power and social reproduction. Having raised some problems with assuming that climate change can be understood as a universal truth and that it is, in and of itself, self-evidently a crisis, the paper concludes with a discussion about ways of framing what is primed to be a long-running scholarly engagement with “religion and climate change,” arguing that before we ask what so-called religious actors’ responses to climate change are, we should first understand how they respond to the claim that climate change is happening and is a crisis to begin with.