Over the last decade, many evangelical Christians have embraced the doctrine called creation care, which uses a scriptural basis to promote good stewardship of the earth and its resources. For these believers, problems like climate change threaten to greatly intensify third-world poverty, making actions to reduce global warming emissions an urgent Christian issue.

“We are convinced that evangelicals must engage this issue without any further lingering over the basic reality of the problem or humanity’s responsibility to address it,” hundreds of evangelical leaders declared in a 2006 statement on climate change.

But while a growing number of local and national nonprofit groups have formed to spread the “creation care” message, an increasingly fierce backlash against the mingling of Christianity and environmentalism has emerged from other quarters of the evangelical movement.

Leading the Christian counterargument on the environment is the Cornwall Alliance, an evangelical nonprofit that strenuously opposes action on climate change and describes the environmental movement as a “false religion” that Christians must avoid at all costs.

This December, the group released a 12-part educational video series, “Resisting the Green Dragon,” warning Christians that radical environmentalism “is striving to put America, and the world, under its destructive control.”

The video series includes appearances by Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Tom Minnery, senior vice president of Focus on the Family; and other conservative evangelical Christian leaders.

The series takes direct aim at the “creation care” movement, citing a “well-funded effort to infiltrate churches” by groups with beliefs that are “deadly to the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

“Some of what goes under the name of ‘creation care,’ even in evangelical circles, is infected by the false worldview and theology of secular and pagan religious environmentalism,” Calvin Beisner, founder of the Cornwall Alliance, said in a statement accompanying the videos.

In an e-mailed response to questions, Mr. Beisner said that “creation care” environmentalists and evangelical politicians, like Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Mike Huckabee, the former presidential candidate and Arkansas governor, who have advocated for action on climate change, probably did not understand the science behind the positions they were advancing, and were parroting alarmist views propagated by radical environmental groups and the mainstream media.

Mr. Beisner wrote that he had so far not met a single evangelical “who has been able to rehearse the most basic arguments pro and con regarding the most important physical issue” in the global warming debate, “which is climate sensitivity.”

He added, “That suggests to me that most are embracing conclusions without understanding the arguments.”

Mr. Beisner, a former professor of theology and a ruling elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, argued that the science is still unsettled on whether greenhouse gases are warming the climate and that projections of dangerous human-driven warming in the future are flawed and unreliable. But an “Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming” on the Cornwall Alliance’s Web site urges all evangelicals to accept that recent global warming is natural and that mankind is incapable of altering the climate.

“We believe Earth and its ecosystems — created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence — are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory,” the group’s declaration reads. “Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.”