Apocalyptic Conspiracism: American Evangelicalism in an Age of Climate Crisis

In the USA, politically conservative and right-wing apocalyptic evangelicals hold that climate change science and Covid-19 are fabrications governed by manifest evil. How do these groups generate and distribute these truth-claims and why?

Using a sociological methodology informed by Bourdieu and Foucault, this book offers tools for scholars and students to better understand the logic of climate denial within the context of American conservative evangelicalism and apocalypticism.

Tom Albrecht and Tristan Sturm coin and employ the term apocalyptic conspiracism to analyse the increasingly powerful confluence of apocalyptic and conspiracist discourses. These dialogues create a holistic belief system, which claims that the world will profoundly change for the worse due to a global network of interconnected conspiracies. This book focuses on and expands the literature on the discursive practices of anthropogenic climate change and Covid-19 denialism. Exploring religious, apocalyptic, and conspiracist belief systems, the authors demonstrate how these affect geopolitical imaginations, the perception of global crises, as well as the environmentally relevant behaviour of American Evangelical Christians.

Tom Albrecht is Visiting Scholar in Geography at Queen’s University Belfast. His research concerns contemporary apocalyptic conspiracist discourses in digital spaces.

Tristan Sturm is Senior Lecturer in Geography at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the Director of the MA in Geopolitics and a Fellow of the Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice and was recently granted a Fellowship at the Centre for Apocalyptic and Postapocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg. He is interested in apocalyptic thought related to climate change, conspiracies, and religious movements in the USA and Israel/Palestine. He has published over 30 academic articles, in co-editor of Mapping the End Times, and has disseminated his findings in the Toronto Star, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, National Post, THE Magazine, BBC Radio 4, ITV, BBC Newsline (TV), among other media spaces.