History book talk traces how the religious right broke with environmental stewardship

Sarah Manriquez, CLA Public Information Office
December 1, 2025
cla-pio@alaska.edu

When assistant professor of history Neall W. Pogue set out to understand how conservative evangelicals think about the natural world, he expected theology to be the main driver. Instead, he found a 20–year story of environmental care slowly overtaken by politics, ridicule, and the pull of the American free market.

Speaking at a November book talk hosted by the UAF Department of History, Pogue walked attendees through the research behind his book, The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle Between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement (Cornell University Press, 2022).

“The origins of this project began back in graduate school when I was thinking about, well, what motivates people or shapes their understanding of the natural world?” he said. “I became kind of interested in how does religious belief impact these views?”

Pogue focuses on a specific community: white, conservative evangelicals in the United States who understand the Bible as the literal word of God. “When it comes to the literal Word of God, they understand Genesis, the creation of the world, to have taken place in literal, six 24-hour days,” he explained. Those beliefs, he noted, don’t just shape private life — “they start taking these viewpoints into the ballot box to shape politics. They want to shape how America functions in the present and the future.”

Pogue reminded the audience that this is not a fringe group. Citing estimates from Christianity Today and the Public Religion Research Institute, he noted that the community is somewhere between 44 and 78 million people, with “numbers between 75% and 80% voting for the GOP ticket” in recent elections. That voting power keeps politicians coming back to institutions like Liberty University and Bob Jones University for support.

Before opposition, a theology of stewardship

The central surprise of Pogue’s research is that, for about two decades, mainstream conservative evangelical leaders promoted a theologically grounded environmental ethic.

Looking at magazines such as Christianity Today, Eternity, and Moody Monthly around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, Pogue expected to find the community suspicious of environmentalism. Instead, he found consensus. “I was kind of surprised to find that they're kind of all on the same page,” he said. “There's countless articles at this time that they're saying, what are we doing to God's Earth? Let's do something about it.”

He traced a key early voice in this movement: theologian Francis Schaeffer and his 1970 book Pollution and the Death of Man. Schaeffer, Pogue explained, articulated what came to be known as “Christian environmental stewardship.” That framework sees humanity as the pinnacle of creation, yet bound by responsibility to care for what God has made.

Summarizing Schaeffer’s economic argument, Pogue said, “Humanity cannot maximize what we can take from the environment, because we must respect it, because it is a creation of God, just like humans are.” Schaeffer, he emphasized, was “using this idea to be eco-friendly, based on theology, based on evangelicals' understanding of the Bible.”

Those ideas took root in Christian K–12 education as well. Pogue dove into Christian school curricula from major evangelical publishers like A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press. “If you want to know what a community believes, see what they're teaching their children,” he told the audience.

One widely used story, “The Land That I Love,” recast Sierra Club founder John Muir as an American hero for protecting trees on his family farm. After Muir convinces his father not to cut down a grove for money, Pogue noted, “A Beka Book says, isn't it a great thing that John Muir did this kind of stuff, and we can enjoy the national parks due to him? Isn't he an American hero?” Even late–1980s economics textbooks from these presses, he said, insisted “we can't destroy the Earth,” both because “it's not just going against what God wants us to do” and because “we don't want to destroy our own house where we live.”

A short-lived effort to act—and a backlash

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, some conservative evangelical leaders tried to turn this quiet theology into public action. Pogue highlighted Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, who helped organize a 1991 environmental seminar whose papers were collected in The Earth Is the Lord’s.

“This is one of the flyers that we have out here, Christian Ecology is good stewardship,” Pogue said, noting that organizers explicitly acknowledged climate change as “something that's real, something that we should address, and we need to get on board with this stuff.”

At the National Association of Evangelicals, political director Robert Dugan was walking a similar path. Pogue described Dugan as “a true blue… red Republican, conservative guy” who “is not gonna put his career on the line for something that he knows his people are against.” Yet by 1993, Dugan agreed to serve on the board of the newly formed Evangelical Environmental Network and began reading widely to educate himself on environmental issues.

What he found, Pogue said, was a blizzard of conflicting messages: evangelical magazines urging stewardship on one side, and secular conservative think tanks on the other portraying environmentalism as a global conspiracy. Publications from groups like the John Birch Society framed environmentalists as agents of “a one-world order” bent on destroying the U.S. economy.

“We start getting environmentalists being accused of being Earth worshippers,” Pogue explained. “By about 1992, Jerry Falwell, one of the first things that he starts doing is making fun of Earth Worshippers, that they're… chaining themselves to trees, that they're actually worshipping the earth, and how silly is that?”

The social cost of supporting stewardship rose quickly. Pogue described a biology club at Liberty University that planned an Earth Day event in 1990, only to be publicly mocked from the pulpit. Students who thought they were applying lessons from Christian school curricula suddenly found themselves out of step with their own community.

“There’s probably plenty of people in that community, such as the biology club, that knows that probably what they're doing is a good thing,” Pogue said. But fear of being “ignored or ostracized” inside a tight-knit church and school ecosystem made them ask, “Is it really worth me putting my career and my social life on the line for the environment?”

By 1994, the pressure was too much. “Dugan finally decides that being a part of the board of the Evangelical Environmental Network is not worth it, and he gives up on the group,” Pogue said. “Actually, in one of his letters, he says, I actually fear that I'm going to lose my friends as well as my job if I stick with this.” Land eventually reached a similar conclusion.

At nearly the same moment, A Beka’s 1993 science textbook marked a dramatic turn away from stewardship. Pogue pointed to the now-infamous poem introducing a section on global warming: “roses are red, violets are blue, they both grow better with more CO2.” The book goes on to declare, in bold type, “there has been no global warming.” Elsewhere, it reassures readers that “God will take care of us” and calls environmental concerns a “non-problem.”

“So not only do we have this conversation, this struggle between people wanting to do something and being beaten down,” Pogue concluded, “we also have the K-12 Christian school movement really taking a strong stand against it… which continues on through the 1990s to the present day.”

Politics, profit and “two religions”

During the Q&A, one audience member asked whether free-market ideology ultimately won out over stewardship inside the evangelical world. Pogue turned to historian Thomas Dunlap’s book Faith in Nature for a framework.

“In it, he talks about the origins of environmentalist thought,” Pogue said. “And he says, there's two religions out there… there is the American religion, which is make as much money as possible, this American dream rags to riches, it's our right as Americans, and the idea that's connected with that promise is money and materialism will make us happy.”

The other “religion,” in Dunlap’s framing, came with Earth Day: “this idea that I… it's not only my responsibility to care for my neighbor, but we can expand this caring through the natural world.”

Drawing also on political scientist Robert Putnam’s work, Pogue said, “we see the community here, the religious right, evangelical community, kind of falling in step with, I want my stuff, I want my material possessions.”

When an online participant asked why conservative think tanks worked so hard to derail Christian environmentalism, Pogue didn’t hesitate. “Money,” he answered. “It comes down to industry.” He described letters from conservative think tanks to groups like the National Coal Association seeking funding to send speakers to international climate negotiations to argue that “climate change is a hoax and should not be listened to.”

These efforts, he said, depend heavily on sowing doubt. “This is very effective in confusing the regular person,” Pogue explained. “Which leads to a confused populace and leads to people just saying, well, I'm done with this group.”

Another online question pressed on a broader issue: how could the religious right “stray so far from their values due to the voices and influence of so few people?” Pogue answered by zooming out to American ideals more generally, from Jefferson’s slaveholding to churches after September 11.

“I'd say people in general, we can… It's very easy for us to be buffet-style Americans or religious people, if we can identify as that,” he reflected.

“Ridicule is powerful” — but history shows other possibilities

In closing, Pogue distilled what he sees as the central lessons of The Nature of the Religious Right. “Christian environmental stewardship, the shocking thing, at least to me, was that it did exist for 20… for about 20 years,” he said. “If you're an evangelical Christian and you think, well, the environment is something that we shouldn't really support, well, the community did for about 20 years. There is a precedent there.”

He emphasized that the eventual rejection of environmentalism was driven far more by politics and pressure than by theology. “The other fascinating thing was their switch to reject the environment was really not based in theology,” he said. “It's really based in politics. It's based with these ideas of think tanks, special purpose groups. There's a lot of conspiracy theories going on.”

Above all, Pogue urged attendees to recognize how social dynamics shape what people feel free to support. “We must remember from this example that ridicule is powerful,” he said. “And it's just not within this community… we can also take a step back and kind of pay attention to it, and where else does it exist in our lives?”

For Pogue, history offers both a warning and a path forward. “One of the great things about history,” he told a journalist who once asked if there was hope for change, “it shows us what is possible.”