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Lecture: "Climate Change is God's Punishment for the Sins of Humanity"

An Ecolinguistic Analysis of Catholic Climate Change Discourses on Instagram

In the face of ecological challenges such as climate change, religions play a significant role; as religious beliefs can inspire but also discourage environmental protection, they function as value systems that may alleviate or deteriorate environmental problems. While various disciplines have already researched religions in the context of climate change, investigating discursive representations of climate change with a linguistic approach is still a relatively new endeavour. This is however a salient target of inquiry, as people shape and organise their behaviour in many areas of life through discursive practices. Considering climate discourses in the Catholic Church, scholars predominantly give one-sided attention to the environmental messages disseminated on an institutional level. It therefore remains to be investigated how Catholic practitioners respond to this messaging and how they discursively represent climate change in relation to their faith. Focusing on the Catholic Church’s environmental communication on Instagram, this interdisciplinary study explores how Catholics respond to officially issued statements on climate change in the comments, examining how these reactions present and shape Catholic conceptions of climate change through language. To do so, I combine insights from ecotheology with an ecological approach to critical discourse analysis, ecolinguistics. Employing Arran Stibbe’s framework Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology, and the Stories We Live By, I analyse the dominant stories, i.e., widely shared ideas about the environment that determine people’s behaviour and language use. After analysing and evaluating these stories in Catholic climate change discourse, my data indicates four dominant response patterns; three of them – identity constructions of an ideal Pope who only focuses on spirituality, convictions that undermine the facticity of climate change, and backgrounding the latter to negate its urgency – are ecologically destructive, while only one story – the Catholic duty to care for the earth – is ecologically ambivalent.