Moore, in a 2009 op-ed for the right-wing site WorldNetDaily, did refute the 97 percent of peer-reviewed scientists who say greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, industrialized farming and deforestation are warming the planet and changing the climate. Moore argued against the Obama administration’s support for a bill that would have created a national cap-and-trade program to limit carbon emissions.

“Not only is there no constitutional authority for Congress to regulate carbon emissions, but the premise of ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ upon which such environmental theories are based does not have the support of a scientific consensus,” Moore wrote.

“Not only do scientists disagree on ‘global warming,’ but there is little hard evidence that carbon emissions cause changes to the global climate. But it appears that Obama and his liberal administration are not really interested in what the Constitution or the scientific community have to say when it interferes with their radical agenda.”

In fact, 97 percent of peer-reviewed scientists have found that climate change is a serious threat and is at least exacerbated by humans. And there are serious flaws in the studies published by the 3 percent of scientists whose research suggests otherwise. A research review published last November found errors in the methodologies, assumptions or analyses used by in those studies that, when fixed, put the findings in line with mainstream climate scientists.

That consensus is so strong that in 2005 one of the standard-bearers of the evangelical Christian politics in which Moore enshrouds himself planned to take a stance affirming the science. That year, the National Association of Evangelicals proposed adopting a new platform called “For the Health of a Nation.” The position paper called for protecting God’s creation and embracing the government’s help in doing so. But after receiving unanimous support by the board, the 30-million-member organization voted down the proposal, kickstarting a campaign by fossil fuel interests to transform the doubt over global warming into what Splinter, in a lengthy report published in August, succinctly described as “the word of God.”

White evangelical Christians, more than 80 percent of whom supported Trump in last November’s election, are the least likely of any U.S. religious group to believe climate change is occurring, according to 2015 data from the Pew Research Center. Just 28 percent of white evangelicals believe the planet is warming primarily due to human activity, compared with 56 percent of black Protestants and 41 percent of white mainline Protestants who say the opposite. Roughly 37 percent of white evangelicals don’t believe the climate is changing at all.

This is a demographic Moore, who attends the Gallant First Baptist Church near his home, seems likely to tap. Alabama has the highest percentage of Baptists after Tennessee, with 31 percent of residents in the state, according to Pew’s 2014 Religious Landscape study. In December, The Baptist Press, the official media arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, published an open letter of support for Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt’s nomination amid fierce backlash over the former Oklahoma attorney general’s rejection of the scientific consensus on climate change.

“We believe that Attorney General Pruitt has been misrepresented as denying ‘settled science,’ when he has actually called for a continuing debate,” the letter wrote.

On one side of that debate is a theological argument that’s gained prominence in some corners of evangelical Christianity over the past decade. According to that interpretation, God provided fossil fuels for humans to exploit, and Christian environmentalists who believed in shifting to renewable energy were deceived by the “false doctrine” of the so-called “Green Dragon,” a demonic force that fooled people into putting the needs of the planet ahead of those of the poor.