SIOUX CENTER, Ia. — Lindsay Mouw didn’t grow up thinking of climate change as a liberal hoax; she rarely thought of it at all.

She studied hard, went to church and was more concerned with pro-life issues.

“You say the word environment around here,” Mouw said, “and they think you are the enemy.”

Mouw, 23, is from Sioux County, which CNN labeled “the land of Christ and corn.”

She recently appeared on a CNN series called the "ASPIREist" centering on millennials who are changing the world.

It was a fish-out-of-water story, a Christian conservative in evangelical country who devotes her life to combating climate change, employing God as a convincer.

Eighty-five percent of the county’s residents are church members, among the top five counties in the state, and the vast majority are Christian. Evangelical Christians have long been associated with support of the Republican party and many of its leaders who have been skeptical of human-caused climate change.

Most people in Sioux County vote for Republicans — among the highest percentage in the state in recent elections.

That’s the challenge, among others. Mouw appeared on CNN during the same week that the Trump administration announced it would not implement the Obama-era Clean Power Plan that promised to curtail carbon-dioxide emissions.

For most of her life, Mouw would have agreed with those decisions — or ignored them.

But she said her eyes were opened on a college trip overseas, where she learned that human actions are a significant cause of climate change, and that God doesn’t like us ruining his creation.

Now, she’s talking to anyone in Sioux County who will listen about climate change, including her pastor, and she is a national leader on the issue among young evangelicals.

“Evangelicals have not grasped climate change because it is influenced by politics,” said Mitch Hescox, executive director of the Evangelical Environment Network, a Pennsylvania nonprofit that advocates to protect God’s creation.

But he said that’s changing within faith communities. Three million people last year signed petitions or took part in climate advocacy actions as part of his network, up from 20,000 just eight years ago.

In Des Moines, the Iowa Interfaith Power & Light organization, whose mission is to inspire and educate people of faith to find solutions for climate change, said its network has grown in the last 11 years, starting chapters in three Iowa cities, and reaching 350 congregations across the state with its programs.

“We really look at it as a moral issue,” said Susan Hendershot Guy, the group’s executive director. “One thing we know is that all faith traditions have something profound to say about care for the Earth and care for your neighbor. And climate change impacts both of those things.”

Connecting environment to faith

Mouw doesn’t come across as a radical in her hometown of Sioux Center, population 7,500.

She’s serious and polite, raised by a church secretary and a car dealer, involved in church and numerous school activities growing up.

Mouw was studying for a career in medicine at Dordt College, a private, four-year institution dedicated to the Reformed Christian perspective in Sioux Center, where the only biology-related study-abroad program offered in spring of 2015 was in New Zealand.

When she arrived, Mouw was barraged by information about the environment. Her Sioux County Christian Republican upbringing left her in the dark about it, she said.

It was like they were talking a foreign language. Compost? Recycling? Grow your own food?

“It just seemed like a lot of extra effort,” she said. “I pushed back.”

But within a month, she began to change. She heard that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.

She began to see the connection to her faith.

The church helps poor people with missions around the world, and climate change affects the poor more than most, she discovered.

She read the Bible and kept coming back to Genesis 2:15, which says that God put man on the Earth to work it and care for it. The Hebrew word “shamar” stuck with her — it means "to protect."

She went back to Sioux Center inflamed with passion.

“I had to do this,” she said.

Mouw changed her major to environmental science, despite her parent’s initial objections. She began a campus organization called Eco Defenders, which pushed for recycling bins on campus.

It wasn’t super popular at first, she said, but it eventually increased recycling by 50 percent.

A national organization took notice.

“She had all this new information rocking her worldview, and we gave her ways to practice these new passions,” said Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, national organizer for Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. “A lot of what we are trying to do is push back against the idea that evangelicals are all politically conservative and that political conservatives don’t care about the climate. Both are untrue.”

They enlisted Mouw to ask questions of every Republican presidential candidate coming through Iowa during the 2016 Iowa Caucus campaign.

“I talked to everyone but Trump,” she said. “He wouldn’t talk to me.”

She asked them, as candidates who touted their pro-life Christianity, how they would expand that perspective to encompassing care for children throughout their lives by way of caring for the environments, the decay of which, she believes, leads to health problems.

The answers she got were universally along the same lines, she said: “We support diverse energy solutions that profit America.”

“I took from it that they didn’t want to take it seriously,” Mouw said.

Mouw joined fellow students at rallies wearing T-shirts that read, “What about climate change?” and got yelled at.

But the most difficult task was to come: facing her own community — and her own pastor — with her ideas.

Coffee and a deep conversation

Mouw was so nervous to approach her pastor on the climate change issue that she waited a year after returning from New Zealand.

Van Rathbun, her pastor at Central Reformed Church in Sioux Center, finally got the call.

“She asked me to sit down and have a cup of coffee. Three hours later, we were still conversing,” Rathbun said.

He said he challenged her to see the good things the community was already doing to help the environment.

She said she challenged him to spread the message to his congregation that humans are partly to blame for climate change, and that it’s hurting the world’s poor and destroying God’s creation.

“He’s still not there,” Mouw said.

Rathbun said he does believe climate change is happening but it’s a challenge to separate it from the politics and frame it in a spiritual and intellectual way.

While care for God’s creation is important, he said, “feeding the world is also a positive part of caring for the world.”

Sioux County is heavily agricultural. It has the highest inventory of cattle and calves in Iowa, by far.

Agriculture contributed to 9 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2015, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

And beef production is one of the leading agriculture contributors.

Mouw said farming is too sacred to even address in Sioux County. “I don’t touch it.”

She is starting with smaller steps. She tried to host talks at her church, but few showed up.

So she is trying to persuade them to quit using foam cups for coffee after services. She’s working with the city on recycling efforts.

She’s even convinced her parents to use less plastic.

“I see recycling as a first step,” she said. “I think I’ve started to make a difference.”

She wants to appeal as much to the heart as to science, since that data has been politicized.

“No one even talked about climate change in church, and some had barely heard of it. We know God loves his creation and the poor," she said. "So start small. Ride your bike. Turn off the lights. I tell them to think of it as loving your brothers and sisters around the world. Do this as part of your faith.”

It isn’t easy living with her parents to pay off student loans after her May 2016 graduation and working four part-time jobs — two as a health aide and two for environmental organizations, including a role on the Reformed Church’s social justice team on climate action.

It isn’t easy to work on climate change. She has become disheartened with politicians, who she sees as beholden to campaign contributions from oil companies.

She is newly registered as an independent and upset that some voters can’t reach across party lines on climate change, which she fervently believes shouldn’t be about party.

It can shake her faith in people, but it’s helped her grow in her relationship with God, she said.

“Climate change is sad. There is a brokenness in me now," she said. "But I believe I share this with God. I’m able to feel something that God feels.”

Mouw walks the campus prairie a block from her home, noticing the late-fall wildflowers that bloomed and now have withered as winter approaches. She feels the closest to her creator out here, even more than in church.

She just wants others in her conservative community to feel that same passion.

“I really feel God is asking me to work here,” she said.