ABSTRACT
In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the issues surrounding social deviance first came under scientific inquiry, a simplistic model derived from earlier religious treatments of the same subject dominated the field. Deviance is among the most important ways that a community prepares alternative options for itself in an uncertain world: what is today a deviant belief system or behaviour may turn out in the future to be necessary or useful to the community. The process of defining the boundaries of the religion of progress in contemporary culture is at least as complex as any of the examples just cited, if not more so, and has involved repeated movements back and forth across the boundary between overt deviance and status panic. The narrative of anthropogenic climate change, at bottom, is a story about human power and is thus congenial to believers in the myth of progress.
