In the fall of 2005, Joel Hunter, the senior pastor of a 12,000-member megachurch in central Florida, signed on to the Evangelical Climate Initiative—a landmark public statement acknowledging that human actions were causing the Earth to warm. The central message—“creation care,” as it became known—was that the biblical commandment to protect God’s creation was relevant to modern-day environmental issues. Soon, Hunter had distributed 20,000 creation care pamphlets to pastors around the country, and his parishioners were sifting through garbage to see how much trash his church produced. At the time, a slew of news articles took Hunter’s commitment as a sign that environmentalism could become an ethical rather than a political issue. “Hunter and others like him,” wrote The Washington Post, “have begun to reshape the politics around climate change.” Today, with climate change skepticism hitting a new high, the same sentiment seems laughable. Whatever happened to the evangelical-environmental alliance?

Between 2006 to 2008, creation care seemed poised to transform evangelical politics. 86 evangelical leaders initially signed the Climate Initiative in 2006—it had more than 100 endorsers by the next year. Rod Dreher, a conservative columnist for The Dallas Morning News and a frequent National Review contributor, published a widely discussed book called Crunchy Cons in 2006; its lengthy subtitle celebrated “evangelical free-range farmers” among other conservative environmental types. In 2008, 45 members of the Southern Baptist Convention signed a statement saying they had been “too timid” on the issue of climate change, Pat Robertson appeared in a commercial about environmental issues with Al Sharpton, and Mike Huckabee—initially the favorite candidate of middle-America evangelicals in 2008—spoke openly about his global warming concerns.

The popularity of creation care was also taken as a sign that evangelicals cared about the environment andthat the GOP’s stranglehold on the evangelical vote might be loosening. Amy Sullivan argued this for The New Republic in 2006, and E.J. Dionne opined in 2007 that creation care was part of a larger reformation “disentangling a great religious movement from a partisan political machine.” In The New Yorker, Frances Fitzgerald argued that creation care advocates might change the GOP “beyond the recognition of Karl Rove.” When Obama captured five points more than John Kerry of the white evangelical vote, it was seen as an additional sign of shifting allegiances.

However, in late 2008, creation care’s momentum slowed, and the evangelical-GOP alliance grew stronger. Perhaps the first sign that creation care was sputtering was the abrupt departure from the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) of its chief lobbyist, Richard Cizik, the leading force behind the Evangelical Climate Initiative. Cizik was forced out after he voiced support for civil unions between gays and lesbians, but he and his critics both traced the roots of his ouster to his strident support of environmental issues. At the time, Cizik’s departure was regarded as a mere hiccup. But, in fact, it was a sign of a backlash that would be bolstered by the rise of the Tea Party, increased scientific skepticism, and the faltering economy.

The rise of the Tea Party after 2008 was detrimental to evangelical environmentalism for two main reasons: It commanded the attention of the Republican Partyand it made room for climate change skeptics. Although it’s impossible to say if politicians instigated or reacted to the increased climate change skepticism associated with the rise of the Tea Party, by late 2009 evangelical climate skeptics were out in full force—climate change denier Senator Jim Inhofe called it “the year of the skeptic.” Tea Party senate candidates Marco Rubio, Joe Miller, Ken Buck, Christine O’Donnell, Ron Johnson, and Sharron Angle—who called manmade climate change the “mantra of the left”—all proudly advertised their climate change skepticism in the 2010 GOP primaries. Meanwhile, moderate Republican candidates, such as Illinois’s Mark Kirk, renounced their votes for cap-and-trade or were booed by Tea Party throngs for defending them. Today, polls show Tea Partiers are markedly less likely than any voter group to believe that humans were causing global warming—or that the Earth is warming at all.