Religion and Climate Change in the Netherlands: A Taxonomic Dataset

This dataset provides the validated taxonomy of religious, quasi-religious, and apocalyptic vocabulary used in Dutch climate change discourse on social media platforms. The taxonomy was developed through a three-stage iterative process. Stage 1 — Qualitative Discovery (March–October 2023). Research team members systematically coded social media content from 44 Dutch climate organisations across Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube, using three structured instruments: post-level coding of 35+ religious and quasi-religious concepts per post; organisation-level platform profiling; and website language analysis. This phase was conducted in collaboration with project leader Caroline Vander Stichele and postdoctoral researchers Deborah de Koning and Ömer F. Gürlesin, with support from student assistants Maartje Groeneweg and Fleur Vroege-Crijns, and intern Nikki Apeldoorn, who contributed to the systematic scanning of posts across platforms and the identification and coding of religious language in climate organisation communications. This phase produced an initial set of observed concepts organized under seven provisional macro-categories: General Religious Terms, Belief Systems, Worship and Rituals, Symbols and Texts, Moral Principles, Religious Institutions, and Apocalyptic Narratives. Stage 2 — Theory-Driven Structuring. The initial concepts were reorganized around two theoretical frameworks. Implicit Religion (Bailey 1997) directed attention to secular ecological and scientific terms that function as moral imperatives and epistemic boundary markers in climate discourse — terms such as Wetenschap (science), Klimaatrechtvaardigheid (climate justice), Duurzaamheid (sustainability), and Biodiversiteit (biodiversity), grouped under the macro-category Implicit Religie with sub-categories Natuur en ecologisme and Geloof in wetenschap en technologie. Secular Millenarianism (Landes 2000; Wessinger 2016) organized eschatological and crisis vocabulary into four sub-categories: religious apocalyptic narratives, mythological apocalyptic narratives, environmental apocalyptic narratives, and economic and social collapse narratives. The taxonomy also covers multi-tradition religious vocabulary (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, nature religions, new religious movements), each with both general and environmental ethics sub-categories, reflecting the multi-faith composition of Dutch civil society. Stage 3 — LLM-Assisted Expansion. GPT-4 (gpt-4-turbo, temperature=0.3) was used to expand each sub-category vocabulary along three simultaneous axes: etymological and morphological extension (synonyms, compound forms, inflected variants); semantic and thematic proximity (terms sharing discourse fields with seed terms in Dutch climate social media); and theory-driven relevance (terms that perform implicit-religious or millenarian functions regardless of etymological relation to seed terms). The model was provided with explicit theoretical context — Bailey's (1997) concept of implicit religious function and Landes's (2000) millenarian framework — before each expansion, enabling reasoning about category membership from both linguistic and theoretical perspectives simultaneously. Four prompt types were used: implicit religion expansion, explicit religion expansion, apocalyptic and millenarian expansion, and cross-tradition environmental ethics expansion. All GPT-4 outputs were reviewed and validated by the research team before inclusion in the final taxonomy. The full prompt templates are documented in the accompanying script taxonomy_development_process_and_prompts.py. Note: The climate compound formations (klimaatreligie, klimaatpaus, klimaatkerk, etc.) are not part of this taxonomy. They were identified through a separate inductive corpus scan and are documented in a distinct dataset: Gürlesin (2025b), Dutch Compound Climate-Related Terms Taxonomy (2023), Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.17724263. References: Bailey, E.I. (1997). Implicit Religion in Contemporary Society. Kok Pharos. — Landes, R. (2000). Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements. Routledge. — Wessinger, C. (2016). The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism. Oxford University Press.