Many on the Left pushed religion out of public life, only to let a new secular creed — environmentalism — fill that space, and the results show a mix of moral certainty and elite hypocrisy.
For years, cultural progressives insisted faith should be private, arguing public life should revolve around science, reason, and secular values. In practice, that argument often targeted Christianity and other Judeo-Christian norms that shaped Western institutions, from individual rights to democratic practice.
What followed wasn’t a clean, technocratic paradise. In place of churches and Sunday sermons, a political movement grew that treats climate policy as an article of faith and moral duty, demanding uniform behavior and adherence to its catechism.
That faith now comes with policy commandments: drive less, consume differently, accept expensive lifestyle shifts to satisfy elite environmental prescriptions. The tone is familiar — rigid moral certainty paired with contempt for dissenting views — and it feels very much like a civil religion replacing traditional worship.
Today, Nancy Pelosi spoke as part of the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition on COP30 and the climate crisis and made it very clear the Left merely substituted a religion for one they didn’t like for one they did.
“Internally, we can do our maneuvering and bring our ideas to the fore,” Pelosi said. “This is a religious issue. Protect people, not polluters.”
That statement is revealing because it drops any pretense that all of this is purely technocratic. When leaders describe policy debates as religious issues, they elevate political preference into moral dogma and shut down ordinary democratic give-and-take.
The policy demands tied to that dogma can be extreme in practice: rationing energy use, reshaping diets, restricting travel, and declaring whole industries morally suspect. Supporters treat compliance as virtue, while dissent is cast as vice, and the conversation narrows to confession and penance rather than pluralist debate.
What makes this especially corrosive is the two-tiered enforcement. The people issuing moral orders rarely live under the strictest rules they promote. Wealthy political figures and well-connected elites keep their privileges — large homes, access to travel, and other comforts — even as they lecture the public on sacrifice and restraint.
That double standard fuels cynicism. When elites demand personal austerity but maintain elite lifestyles and lucrative financial activity, it undercuts the sincerity of their claims and makes the whole enterprise look performative rather than principled.
Conservatives see a deeper risk: when political movements wrap themselves in sacred language, they edge toward coercion. If climate advocacy becomes indistinguishable from a faith system, policy choices are justified by moral certainty instead of practical reasoning and empirical trade-offs.
Republicans worry that approach substitutes moralizing for governance: it elevates ideology above the messy business of compromise and leaves fewer room for individual liberty, economic growth, and innovation. That tension matters because a free society has to balance moral claims with pluralism.
Criticizing this trend isn’t a call to deny climate science; it’s a defense of deliberative politics and of the idea that policy should be argued in open markets of ideas, not imposed as catechism by self-anointed guardians. The remedy is to return debates to the realm of facts, trade-offs, and democratic accountability, not to bow to new clerics who preach from political pulpits.
That means insisting on consistent rules that apply to everyone, refusing moral grandstanding that exempts elites, and preserving the space for citizens to make their own choices without guilt-laced coercion. When policy becomes theology, liberty loses its standing and politics becomes another form of worship.
