There's a chicken-or-egg argument about whether the oil and gas lobby pushed the GOP to adopt anti-environment positions and the evangelicals moved in that direction with the rest of the party, or whether Christian fundamentalists were already primed to endorse those views. Schwadel's research suggests that the latter explanation can't be dismissed.

He's quick to note how religious the United States is compared to tother industrialized countries, something he says goes a long part of the way in explaining the country's attitudes toward the environment, though he doubts it's a total explanation of the phenomenon.

"Today we tend to think of [environmentalism] as a highly partisan issue and that it always was," Schwadel told me. "But the research clearly shows that it wasn't nearly as partisan especially among cultural elites and political leaders in the leaders in the 1960s and 1970s. It really started to become partisan in the 1980s or later 70s. [The Christian Right] may have played a role. It's probably not a coincidence that environmental perspectives became a lot more partisan as the Republican Party became a lot more tied to the evangelical Protestant community."

The proof of evangelicals' influence is that though there's little evidence Donald Trump himself thinks the Bible is the word of God—or has even read it all that deeply—he has put a number of biblical literalists in his cabinet, giving fundamentalists an enormous amount of power.

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson is a Seventh-Day Adventist who believes in the Second Coming of Christ and that the Bible offers a historically accurate view of ancient times. Carson—a noted climate change skeptic—thinks God created the world in six days.

Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue attends the Second Baptist Church in Warner Robins, Georgia, where his son, Jim Perdue, is the pastor. On the church's website are links to sermons about the creation of the earth by God exactly as it is told in the Bible. Perdue himself once prayed for a storm during a drought while the governor of Georgia. In 2014, he questioned the link between climate change and weather events.

Finally, and most importantly, is Scott Pruitt, a self-purported climate denier who unsuccessfully sued the EPA as Oklahoma's attorney general five times before becoming the head of the EPA under Trump. He's also a deacon at First Baptist Church in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, which Stoll says means he's almost certainly a biblical literalist.

"We believe the Bible to be 'the' Word of God," one of Pruitt's pastors, Nick Garland, told me. "To take every word of Daniel's vision or Revelation as literal then we would fail to recognize the symbolic meaning of the imagery. Where the Bible speaks—unless it is presented as symbolic— we take it as literally true."

During his tenure, Pruitt has worked to gut the EPA, and has done more to roll back environmental rules than anyone in the agency's history. He said he wants to focus on "tangible" issues like pollution rather than climate change—a phenomenon that he doesn't believe humans are a major contributor to. (When he said as much on CNBC, other employees of the EPA conducted an internal review to figure out if he'd violated a scientific integrity policy, though they concluded he did not.)

Willful disregard for the environment espoused by the very people tasked with creating it gives Stoll, the historian, "deja vu." He says it's strikingly similar to what Reagan did after he took office back in 1981. Anne Gorsuch Burford—the newly appointed Supreme Court Justice's mother—was a sagebrush rebel who got appointed to the head of the EPA and basically dismantled it before being forced to step down amid widespread accusations of mismanagement.

There was also James Watts, who often talked about his Christian faith and as secretary of the interior thought the US had too many parks and wanted to open up game refuges to oil and gas development. "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns," he once told Congress while being questioned about his views on preserving natural resources. Like Burford, he resigned after intense pressure from environmentalists.

"Politically we're in a rather different situation today, it seems to me liberalism or the environmental movement isn't as powerful as it was back in the 1980s," Stoll said. "But, one of the things that happened during the 1980s was money poured in to all the environmental organizations and new members poured in. In a way it was a boon for environmentalism—it rallied all of the complacent people."