In his speech to senior military leaders on Sept. 30, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth took a well-worn page out of the climate skeptic’s playbook: He framed climate change research, policy and activism as a “religion.” More specifically, he declared there was “no more climate change worship” in the Department of War.

Hegseth has been calling concern with climate change a “religion” for a while. He’s far from alone. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced a wave of sweeping environmental deregulations back in March, exclaiming, “we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.” (Zeldin likes the rhetoric.)

Similar remarks were made during the first Trump administration. In 2016, Kathleen Hartnett White, a nominee to head the Council on Environmental Quality, called belief in climate change a “kind of paganism.” William Happer, a physicist and frequent adviser to President Donald Trump in 2017, called climate scientists “a glassy-eyed cult.” More recently, former Trump economic adviser and Heritage Foundation fellow Stephen Moore asserted that “climate change is not a science, it’s a religion