The Unitarian Universalist Association passed a resolution at its general assembly in late June endorsing the Green New Deal resolution that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced in Congress five months ago. The main national organization for the egalitarian spiritual movement, which has over 1,000 churches in the U.S., vowed to “actively support the development of federal legislation to implement” the deal.

Days later, the national deliberative body of the United Church of Christ, a mainline Protestant sect with nearly 825,000 adherents and close to 4,900 congregations across the United States, also voted to endorse the Green New Deal. It called the policy framework “what is needed to preserve and restore God’s great gift of creation.”

Last week, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, a youth organization within one of Protestantism’s most traditionally conservative denominations, praised what it called the Green New Deal’s “biblical principles” and pledged to work “toward translating these…into viable, bipartisan bills.”

The announcements bring new momentum to the effort to advance a sweeping national industrial plan to eliminate planet-warming emissions and provide millions of Americans with good-paying jobs that fortify infrastructure and build renewable energy—at a moment when that plan is facing fierce opposition. The religious endorsements could give the Green New Deal appeal in conservative districts as activists urge 2020 candidates to adopt its framework.

“You’ve got everyone from the Unitarian Universalists to the young evangelicals,” said Rev. Brooks Berndt, a 42-year-old United Church of Christ minister in the Cleveland area. “That’s quite a spectrum.”

Roughly 70% of the U.S. population identifies as Christian. Throughout American history, Christian clergy have taken leading roles in progressive social movements. They championed the rights of workers and immigrants amid the nation’s chaotic 19th-century boom. During the civil rights era, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. frequently cited the Bible to highlight the immorality of racism and spent his final years crusading against laws that preserved the poverty he saw as antithetical to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

When the so-called culture war shifted to fights over evolution, abortion and LGBTQ rights, a new generation of religious hardliners with national TV platforms forged a powerful conservative voting bloc. In the mid-2000s, as the oil industry’s propaganda denying climate science became a main Republican Party line, those voters adopted a similar stance.

When the Pew Research Center polled different Christian sects in 2015 on climate change, white evangelicals were the least likely, at 28%, to recognize that the planet is warming due to human actions. That compared to 41% of white mainline Protestants, 45% of white Catholics, 56% of black Protestants and 77% of Hispanic Catholics.

Yet the number of actual Christian deniers has plummeted over the past four years as mounting natural disasters, increasingly grave scientific forecasts and a rapidly growing political movement erase doubt over the cause of planetary changes. And new research published last week shows that religious messaging on climate resonates with Christians who already understand the crisis. Providing “a better life for our children and grandchildren” came out as the top motivation among Christians and non-Christians to reduce planet-warming emissions, according to the study published in the journal Science Communication. But Christian respondents said they were also inspired by a need to “protect God’s creation.”