This week’s Earth Day commemoration is the first since the United States officially adopted the falsehood that conservative evangelicals have embraced for decades: That people concerned about the environment and climate change are motivated by anti-Christian religion.

Lee Zeldin, President Donald Trump’s climate-skeptic EPA administrator, promoted the idea in a March 12 news release in which he announced “the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history.”

“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more,” said Zeldin, a Jewish Republican and former New York Congressman who says his faith informs his public service.

Zeldin said the EPA will undertake 31 historic actions that will weaken pollution regulations, cancel grants and halt studies of climate change and its causes, “fulfilling President Trump’s promise to unleash American energy, lower cost of living for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, restore the rule of law and give power back to states to make their own decisions.”

Among the cuts is a Princeton University project researching sea-level rise and coastal flooding. Trump’s EPA says the research promoted “exaggerated and implausible climate threats” and increased “climate anxiety” among young Americans, but the cuts could harm America’s agriculture, transportation and energy industries.

The EPA’s new pro-business approach upends the agency’s historic mission “to protect human health and the environment” but has the support of the Family Research Council, which said the EPA “has initiated a vast reversal of the regulatory-heavy, climate change fear-based policies of the Biden administration.”

Today, “evangelical Protestants tend to be the most likely of all major U.S. religious groups to express skeptical views” about climate change and its causes, according to a 2022 study from Pew Research Center. Some evangelicals question whether the earth is warming, while others question the scientific consensus that humans are helping cause the warming.

Things were different half a century ago. Evangelicals largely supported “environmental stewardship” of God’s creation during the 1970s and 1980s. Many were inspired by Francis Schaeffer’s book, Pollution and the Death of Man, which offered a biblical basis for environmentalism when published in January 1970, two months before the first Earth Day.

Schaeffer said believers who fail to care for creation “are living in and practicing a sub-Christianity.” He also wrote: “Christians, of all people, should not be the destroyers. We should treat nature with an overwhelming respect.”

Schaeffer, who also helped persuade evangelicals to oppose abortion, said he loved ants and trees for the same reasons he fought for unborn babies. “I do not do it for the practical or pragmatic results; I do it because it is right and because God is the Maker.”

Environmentalism once was popular among Southern Baptist leaders. In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention honored the first anniversary of Earth Day by conducting a poll of 312 pastors and 375 Sunday school teachers. Ther results: 82% of pastors and 76% of Sunday school teachers agreed that “a local Southern Baptist church should ‘lead church members to involve themselves and cooperate actively with authorities’ in attempts to solve air and water pollution problems.”

Even as late as 1991, Richard Land, then head of the SBC’s Christian Life Commission, acknowledged that “humans are changing the earth” and causing temperatures to rise. Land, citing Schaeffer, urged fellow Baptists to go beyond environmental concern to environmental action.

But within a few years, Land and other evangelical leaders reversed course, dismissing claims of global warming, condemning environmentalism as a pagan cult, and using their influence to oppose climate-friendly legislation.

The about face wasn’t theological, but ideological.

As the Christian right grew closer to the GOP, it embraced the party’s pro-energy policies and turned its back on environmental stewardship, according to Neall Pogue, a historian of “evangelical environmentalism” and the author of The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle Between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement.

Claims that environmentalists were inspired by non-Christian faiths helped convince many evangelicals that environmental concern was unbiblical and anti-Christian.

“One of the most effective arguments accused secular environmentalists of being earth worshipping extremists and participants in a conspiracy to promote New Age religions and a one world government that would destroy American capitalism,” wrote Pogue.

Pogue says evangelical leaders used their broadcasting and publishing platforms to amplify the fossil fuel lobby’s strategy: “Reposition global warming as a theory rather than fact.” They used the same tactics tobacco companies used to battle evidence that nicotine causes cancer.

The EPA’s recent budget cuts have halted grants to more than 300 faith-based groups serving disadvantaged urban communities, according to Religion News Service.

And faith leaders are pushing back against the EPA’s claim of a “climate change religion.” They say the Jewish and Christian faiths provide the basis for environmental concern and care.

“As a climate scientist and an evangelical Christian, it’s best practice to avoid conflating science and religion,” Jessica Moerman, president and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network told the National Catholic Reporter.

“It’s very clear that climate change is a scientific fact,” said Marianne Comfort of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas. “There’s no belief involved, and it’s actually our faith that leads us to consider how we respond.”

And a writer for Dayenu, “a dynamic, multi-generational movement of American Jews courageously confronting the climate crisis,” questioned EPA administrator Zeldin’s claim: “I am not at all sure what ‘climate-change religion’ is, but I do know that Judaism, the religion Zeldin and I share, values the protection of life. In a Midrash on Genesis, G-d warns Adam and Eve ‘be mindful then that you do not spoil and destroy My world — for if you spoil it, there is no one after you to repair it.’”

This article was originally published in Baptist News Global.