President Trump announced Thursday that he is withdrawing the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, alarming religious leaders here and around the globe who decried the decision as a departure from the nation’s leadership role.

Mainline Protestant denominations, including the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, denounced the president’s actions. Major Jewish, Muslim and Hindu organizations also condemned the president’s withdrawal from the agreement.

Churches aren't sanctuaries from global warming, say practitioners of many faiths who decry President Trump's withdrawal of the U.S. from an international agreement that calls upon nations to reduce their carbon footprints. Associated Press/Frank Augstein

Several Catholic leaders also denounced the move, which came just a week after Pope Francis at the Vatican personally handed the president his encyclical urging care for the planet. In the 2015 document, Francis called for an “ecological conversion,” saying Christians have misinterpreted Scripture and “must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures.”

But many evangelicals do not hold this view.

Christians are called to be both dominions over the earth and be stewards of it, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Al Mohler said on his podcast on Friday. Mohler said the secular-dominated environmental movement sees human beings as the problems to climate change. This worldview, he said, denies the purpose of creation, which was for humans to take dominion over it.

“We do have a responsibility to our planet,” Mohler said. “And we have a responsibility to our neighbor.”

He believes market forces – as opposed to the government – will create an economy for renewable energy.

While Catholics find common cause with evangelicals on many issues like abortion and their religious freedoms, many evangelical leaders remained mostly silent after Trump’s decision on Thursday.

While evangelical beliefs about whether climate change is occurring vary, the environment has not been a priority for many evangelical leaders in recent decades. Over the past decade, some leaders have taken up the issue and statements have been issued, but the environment is not usually a high concern for them and many are openly skeptical of the government’s involvement in the issue. Depending on who you ask, evangelical attitudes on climate changed tend to be shaped by a combination of politics, race, theology and beliefs about science.

“As a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us,” Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., a graduate of evangelical schools Taylor University and Wheaton College, said at a town hall last week in Coldwater, Michigan. “And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, he can take care of it.”

Half of white evangelicals say global warming is occurring, according to a 2015 survey from the Pew Research Center, but only a quarter of them say it is caused by humans. And just 24 percent say global warming is “a serious problem.”

For many conservative Christians, climate change taps into a deeper mistrust they have of science over issues like abortion and transgenderism.

A tweet from Erick Erickson, editor of the conservative website the Resurgence, earlier this week about how he doesn’t have to care about global warming set off a debate over whether faith and environmentalism overlap.

“I worship Jesus, not Mother Earth. He calls us all to be good stewards of the planet, but doesn’t mean I have to care about global warming. – Erick Erickson (EWErickson)”

Erickson on Thursday said he believes man-made climate change exists, but he doesn’t see it as a priority. He said he recycles and talks with his children about conservation, but he thinks the scientific community has been fatalistic about climate change. They remind him, he said, of the end-times preachers.

“We are adaptable and innovative enough to get out of any problem,” Erickson said.

Most of his evangelicals friends, however, do not believe climate change is real. They are deeply skeptical of scientists because they believe scientists are anti-Christian, he said.

“They see it as another political movement out to get them, one that hates big families,” Erickson said.

Skepticism of man-made global warming is high among pastors, especially younger ones, according to a 2013 poll from LifeWay Research. Just 19 percent of pastors ages 18 to 44 agree with the statement, “I believe global warming is real and man made.”

The Christian right has been actively promoting climate change skepticism, especially on Christian media, said Robin Globus Veldman, a religious studies professor at Iowa State University who is working on a book on evangelicals and climate change.

“Environmentalists were caught in the crossfire because they were positioned on the other side of the aisle and tend to be less religious,” Veldman said. “They started to be described as allied with the people who were trying to push Christianity out of the public square.”

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