Wasn’t it just yesterday that Evangelicals were pioneering a rediscovery of godly stewardship of the natural world? What happened? Molly Redden sorts it out for you. In short: a) the economic crash, and b) the Tea Party. This depresses me:

 The Cornwall Alliance (an influential evangelical group that bills its mission as “the Stewardship of Creation”) released a declaration that claimed the “Earth and its ecosystems … are robust, resilient, self-regulating. … Earth’s climate system is no exception.” A year later, the group put out “Resisting the Green Dragon,” a 12-part DVD series decrying the environmental movement. Scientific skepticism bled into cultural skepticism. Even among moderate evangelicals, creation care struggled against general ambivalence toward environment issues—rooted in opposition to the countercultural identity that American environmentalism gained in the 1970s. As David P. Gushee, one of the authors of the Evangelical Climate Initiative, put it: To them, “it’s Pocahontas talking to spirits in the trees,” and “flower-power.”