Mitch Hescox wouldn’t call himself an environmentalist. “I’m a Christian,” he said. “I came to this because I’m a Christian.”

“This” is his work to engage the 40,000 evangelical Christian churches in the United States in environmental action as president and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN). It might seem like an odd community to target – the most recent survey suggests only 28% of American evangelicals believe in climate change. But to Hescox, there’s no contradiction between being an Evangelical Christian and caring about climate change. Rather, he stresses that the two are intrinsically related. It just comes down to how you talk about it.

Many evangelicals are critical of environmentalism. They believe it puts the value of the environment above the needs of humans. In light of this skepticism, Hescox has helped pioneer the concept of Creation Care. Practicing Creation Care, according to the EEN’s definition, means caring for all of God’s creation by stopping and preventing all activities that are harmful to the environment and the humans who inhabit it.

Even Hescox wasn’t always on board. Before joining the EEN, he spent 18 years as the pastor of a local church – and the fourteen years before that working in the coal power industry. His job took him around the world and exposed him to the real human and environmental costs of the industry. He saw children choking on polluted air and realized that the people most impacted by pollution were the poor. All of this convinced Hescox that environmental problems were the cause of some of the largest justice issues in the world.

“If you talk about that [Christians] are supposed to care about what God owns and care for the least of these,” Hescox stresses, “there’s no way that any person of faith should not be committed to Creation Care.” In this context, Creation Care is fundamentally an act of loving God.

That leads the EEN to some unexpected positions. The EEN supports a carbon tax. They advocate for everyone to make reductions in plastic waste, however small, because “the journey of repentance begins with a single step.”  They’re gathering signatures and bodies to march in support of clean energy. And they do this knowing that many evangelicals believe the environment is traditionally a liberal cause.

But the EEN, a self-described conservative organization, urges people not to think of climate change as a liberal or a conservative issue. The EEN, like Hescox, eschews the environmentalism label, preferring to frame issues in ways foreign to many mainstream environmentalists.

“People have different things that motivate them,” he explained. “We studied what would reach most of our community, which is more conservative. We want to target the things that will get a response and open up people’s hearts and minds.”

He paused and then added, “I’ve said to a lot of progressives, let me and people like me reach into the conservative community with our values.  Let’s help people come to terms with working on climate change in a way that resonates with them.”

For the EEN, the winning formula has been a focus on the impact of environmental problems like climate change and pollution on human health close to home, framed through a familiar evangelical lens. Simply put, they want to make climate change a pro-life issue.

The crux of it is this: if you value life beginning in the womb, you can’t stop valuing it when the baby is born. Pollution, the EEN argues, harms all life, from the unborn in the womb to the elderly. To be truly pro-life, you should value a clean earth for all children and all future children.

It’s a powerful argument. The EEN has already gotten 45,000 Evangelicals to sign on to their current Pro-Life Clean Energy Campaign, which aims to get six states to commit to 100% renewable energy by 2030. The eventual goal is have half a million pro-life Christians lobbying their elected officials to support clean energy in the name of life.

This is all part of Hescox’s goal to reach beyond the kind of activism that has people just “opening up their wallets and giving money” and move towards one that changes people’s way of life. He’s convinced that the way to do this is to make an issue local and personal. “The more local you make an issue, the easier it is to open up people’s hearts to other kinds of news.”

“Clean energy jobs are soaring,” Hescox exclaimed. “Talk about that!”

Just as the EEN uses familiar pro-life messaging to engage evangelicals, they invoke conservative economic language highlighting personal responsibility and deregulation to make the clean energy pitch to local business owners and politicians. But instead of talking about deregulation in terms of getting rid of environmental protections, the EEN talks about “freeing communities and businesses from regulations that prevent [them] from joining together” to create and sell clean energy.

The EEN’s approach is paying dividends. The Creation Care movement is growing rapidly, and more and more people are getting on board. “Not only is the faith community seeing advantages, so are the business owners,” Hescox explained. His time working in the coal industry exposed him to the huge economic costs of centralized fossil fuel grids, and he became convinced of the economic power of local, sustainable energy. Beyond getting regular citizens involved, reaching the political and business community has been a central mission during his time at the EEN.

This messaging might sound strange to liberals, but it makes sense to conservatives. “Communicate in ways that people can hear and they’ll come on board,” Hescox emphasized. “I think that’s what we’re doing.”

And he’s right. The EEN works to get people on board by targeting people with messages they’ll relate to, even if it’s not the same message that will convince their neighbor. By using language and concepts familiar to conservative, evangelical communities, they’re able to reach a significant number of people who might initially be skeptical of climate action. The Creation Care movement might make people who aren’t religious uncomfortable. But the point of it isn’t to reach everyone – and Hescox thinks that’s okay. Other people can work on their own, and at the end of the day, it’ll all come together, whether or not you call yourself an environmentalist or practice Creation Care.

“My standard illustration,” Hescox reflects, “is that to raise the action on climate change, we’re not yet at a big tent moment where we raise one tent and everyone fits underneath it. We need a lot of smaller tents raised up by individual values. And if we raise enough tents using the values of different communities, we’ll have enough tents to make a big tent – except it won’t be one tent, it’ll be a lot of little tents touching at the edges.”