The objective of this paper is to test the hypothesis that the activation of abstract concepts with strong spatial metaphors influences spatial attention to compatible relations. For this reason, concepts pointing to religion (e.g. God is up, Devil is down) were taken into account as an empirical basis. The article discusses in detail two experiments: in Experiment 1 the participants were asked to perform a perceptual discrimination task on the basis of religion-oriented words (God-related, Devil-related, or religiously neutral). In Experiment 2 perceptual analyses of religious words were carried out in a font-type judgement task. General results of the proposed study indicate the attentional capture effect of conceptual metaphors as well as point to the necessity of semantic encoding of conceptual representations.