I spoke with Susannah Crockford, an anthropologist of religion, about her new book, A Perturbed System: Religion and Climate Change from the End of a World (University of Chicago Press, 2026). Drawing on multi-year, multi-sited ethnographic work, Crockford identifies a suite of Protestant theological motifs—prophecy, mediation, sacrifice, original sin, cult, messiah, and apocalypse—that pervade contemporary climate discourses, for better and for worse.
Very few of the climate activists, scientists, and skeptics Crockford observed and interviewed understood themselves to speak and work in theological registers. Yet A Perturbed System illuminates the subtle and sometimes unexpected ways climate discourses reproduce the same religious frameworks that precipitated climate change in the first place.
Our conversation, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, touched upon the longstanding ties between Protestantism, colonialism, and imperialism; different methodological approaches to understanding the confluence of theology and climate politics; and the stubborn hope that people will do the right thing if they simply “believe” in climate change.
Emily Theus: This book is the result of multiple years of ethnography in many different locations. At what point did you understand your work in terms of the theological motifs you identify across the chapters? Were you expecting to find all these theological motifs as you undertook this ethnographic work, or was there a moment when they started to emerge?
Susannah Crockford: I started off thinking, in social scientific terms, I’m going to study social responses to climate change. I identified various groups of people who are responding in different ways, starting with activists, scientists, and climate skeptics. Then I broadened out to other groups, such as workers in the oil and gas industry in Louisiana and ecosystems economists. When I started to think about the book, I thought I was going to organize the chapters around emotions or affects.
Then I had this moment where I was transcribing the interviews, and I noticed religious ideas and concepts—including apocalypse and sacrifice—kept recurring. And I realized these religious concepts were the actual chapters. One piece of feedback I got on the first draft of the book was to be more specific about what I meant by “religion.” My ethnography was rooted in Northern Europe and the United States, which are largely Protestant countries. Not exclusively, of course. But the actual concepts I found are mostly Protestant.
I began to link these Protestant theological motifs to climate change through colonialism and industrialism. These are the three long-term historical drivers of climate change in terms of how we think about the Earth, resources, and our interactions with other species.
Other social scientists like Andreas Malm have talked about colonialism and climate change, and of course the connection between climate change and industrialism is obvious. But much less has been said about Protestantism. I am making an argument about how colonialism, industrialism, and Protestantism have long cultural histories where they’re connected and emerging together. The outcome of that is what we are experiencing in the atmospheric disturbances of climate change, but also things like mass extinction and biodiversity loss.
As a theologian, I found it interesting how the theological motifs you identify within climate discourses are often modulations on what we might think of as the “traditional” version of those motifs. For example, you talk about how climate scientists get placed in the structural role of prophets, which creates a fraught relationship with values given their disciplinary commitments to (at least purported) objectivity.
Generally, when I think of biblical prophets, they don’t have fraught relationships with values. What they are doing is values! I would love to hear you say more about the disjunction between the more “traditional” theological concept and the way that it appears within climate discourses.
What I’m doing when I’m identifying these theological motifs is descriptive, whereas when theologians think about these concepts, what they’re doing is normative. They’re saying theological concepts ought to be understood like this. For example, if we look at Isaiah, we see that prophets do this, that, and the other.
Part of the disjunction is just that I’m not trained as a theologian. Part of it is that I am describing how peopleare using these concepts in public discourse, in everyday conversation, and on social media. I am not talking about ideal types.
Take the example of a prophet. Old Testament prophets say, These are our values, and you have left them. They are being specifically normative and calling on people to return to their values.
That’s not what a climate scientist is trying to do. Across the board, when I interviewed climate scientists and asked them what they thought the role of a scientist is, they would say, “to provide accurate information.” It is not value determined. Values don’t matter to them, or they think values shouldn’t matter. Others should decide what to do with that information. But that hasn’t happened.
Scientists get two basic responses from policymakers, both pernicious. One is the denial that you see in places like the United States and Russia and Eastern Europe, where they think climate change is a hoax that scientists are making up for research money. The other response they get from politicians, especially in Europe, is, Yes, we agree with you. We will absolutely address this. And then they don’t. Instead, they keep expanding oil production, issuing new oil and gas leases.
You can feel the palpable frustration from climate scientists. They say, We are telling you the truth, so why don’t you believe us? That frustration is where this positioning as prophets comes in.
The structural position of the prophet also relates to the existential consequences of climate change. This isn’t like CFCs, where you address a problem with the ozone layer by getting rid of a particular chemical. The problem with climate change is that the substances which power the global economy are creating the problem. It’s more than just pollution: it is embedded in the structure of the economy, and it’s embedded in geopolitical relations.
Oil, gas and coal are implicated in the way our political systems work. Some people have argued that capitalism couldn’t survive actual, effective climate mitigation, and that’s why it hasn’t happened. Instead, we are told that we have to just adapt, because ending global carbon-based capitalism is unrealistic.
That creates an awkward position for scientists who mostly don’t want to be political. And yet they’re the main people with the power to say, This is real, and you should do something about it.
I feel like that disjunction [between normative and descriptive theological motifs] is productive, because it speaks to the difference between what ought to happen in theory and what is actually happening.
Early in the book you write that you think apocalypticism is a “failure of imagination” (28). More broadly, you say that this Protestant religious framework both constrains and enables climate discourses. Could you tell me a little bit more about where you identify constraints versus where you see theological motifs enabling some useful aspect of climate discourses? To pose a blunter question: If you could get people to stop relying on one or some of these theological motifs, which would you dump?
You mentioned apocalypse. I think the way people like Catherine Keller talk about apocalypse can be incredibly productive and useful and could enable ways of thinking about how to get over that sense that we can’t get out of the current system. Normatively, I think, apocalypse could be an incredibly productive concept for thinking through alternative futures.
Descriptively, that’s not what happens. When people start thinking about climate change as the end of the world, they end up backing themselves into corners. They assume near-term human extinction. That means I should stop paying into my pension fund. That means I should quit my job and go live somewhere else.
This way of thinking undermines any sense of a collective future because you already know when it’s all going to end. Which runs against the theological concept of apocalypse: you don’t know when the apocalypse is going to happen because that’s not for humans to know. That’s why it’s important to think across these two levels with theological concepts: how can it be useful? But also, how is it used?
Which ones would I just get rid of? Original sin, or the idea that human nature is such that we are inevitably going to use up our resources. I want to throw that in the bin entirely, because it’s not true. There is no singular, unitary human nature. There is nothing that we are inevitably going to do or be, and there are lots of different ways that humans can live.
Climate change and environmental destruction are not cases of all humans inevitably using as many resources as they possibly can. It’s a few humans taking advantage of both the planet and also other humans. Talking about original sin ignores the massive disparities between those whouse a lot of carbon and those who use very little and yet feel the impacts of climate change much worse.
Interesting. As a theologian, I would diagnose that way of talking about human nature as confusing a condition of finitude with a condition of sin. But that goes back to the question: In what register are we thinking about these theological motifs?
There was one part in the chapter on mediation that I found particularly illuminating and also humorous. You mention how climate activists get frustrated with news outlets reporting on their efforts with headlines like, These climate activists are trying to save the world! Because the activists themselves would never make that claim.
I work on questions of narrative and climate change, and, several times a year, some publication runs a piece asking, “Will climate fiction save the world?” One of my favorite eco-fiction authors, Jeff VanderMeer, wrote a piece for Esquire a little while ago complaining about it. That salvation framework is so pervasive in climate discourse. I would like to see it go away, if I could pick one.
It’s interesting that you mentioned Jeff VanderMeer, because this research started in a project that was funded to investigate whether narrative, including eco-fiction like his books, can change the way people think about and behave around the climate crisis. My immediate answer was: No. Narrative doesn’t work that way.
I also have such strong skepticism about that idea! I always wonder if we are talking about real people or just imagining machines who will do the right thing if they think the right way.
Exactly. It’s the information deficit hypothesis: All we have to do is tell people the correct information, and then they will behave the way we want them to behave. But it’s so much more complicated than that.
I find that frustrating in part because Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction has definitely influenced my own work, but that influence is so diffuse. Of course, narrative has effects on the world, but in strange and indirect ways.
There is an interesting parallel here with protest. In evaluating the success of activist movements, people often ask whether they caused policy change. If you look at something like the [climate-related] school strikes, even in countries like Belgium where they were big, the strikes didn’t achieve their aims. But political science research shows that even when movements don’t achieve their aims, they change the people who join them. It changes their dispositions.
I think maybe literature and narrative are similar. You can’t say, Read this book and it will fix the climate crisis. But it changes you. Again, not in all cases, but it can spark an interior journey.
