Before 2006, some American evangelicals were indifferent about environmental issues, but many were hostile, denouncing "environmental wackos" and the quasi-religious language of the environmental movement. But the release of a startlingly pro-environmental document called Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action two years ago signaled the sudden emergence of a sizeable group of evangelical environmentalists. Signed by many prominent evangelicals, the call to action prompted a swift backlash from other leaders, who defended the long-standing evangelical skepticism of the environmental movement. Since then, the evangelical community has been deeply divided. Although there are hints of fissures on other social issues, none is as stark as the new debate over climate change in particular and environmentalism more generally.

So goes an increasingly common account of evangelicals' uneasy relationship with environmentalism. As a description of the present, the storyline is roughly accurate: evangelicals are indeed divided. But today's evangelical environmentalists are not a new breed. Difficult as it is to imagine now, evangelicals once seemed poised to become a potent ally to the early environmental movement. In the late 1960s, leading evangelical intellectual and pastor Francis Schaeffer gave a series of talks at the flagship evangelical college, Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, insisting that the biblical views of creation and of men and women as God's stewards should make evangelicals avid environmentalists. Evangelical churches, he argued, should take the lead in countering the environmentally degrading tendencies of modern culture.