(RNS) – Only about 4 in 10 American voters say global warming will be “very important” when they vote for president in November, according to Yale Center for Climate Change Communication. But while polls show voters are concerned about other issues, such as inflation and immigration, the environment continues to be a major concern for voters, especially younger onesand crosses boundaries of faith and politics in ways that other issues do not.

“I think young people just want the issues that we care about, like our communities, our economy and jobs and God’s creation, to be taken seriously,” said Tori Goebel, spokeswoman for Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, which was founded in 2012 .

Goebel’s organization does not endorse candidates, but instead works to provoke more frank discussion on the subject. “We just want young people to be informed and make meaningful decisions for God’s creation. And I don’t think we could do that unless the candidates talk honestly about the issues.”

It’s a misconception to think that climate change is only a concern on the left, said Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian, scientist and author of “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.” Hayhoe, who has a track record of fostering conversations across theological and ideological differences, said the climate is a bipartisan issue.

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The majority of Americans, including many Republicans, support measures to deal with climate change, she said. “It is certainly something that we should always highlight and point out. It’s almost like a public service for all of us who are worried: There are actually more of you than you think there are.”

Climate has become a political football, she added, because stakeholders, such as CEOs of fossil fuel companies, feel the solutions threaten their bottom line.

Hayhoe, who teaches in the political science department at Texas Tech University, blames Christians who see the environment entirely in political terms, and not as a matter of biblical values ​​such as love of neighbor. “Too many people in the United States who identify as Christian (have a) creed written first by their political ideology and only a distant second by their theology,” she said. “And if the two come into conflict, they will go with ideology over theology. And my question is, are they even Christians?”

Dekila Chungyalpa, founder and director of Loka initiative at the University of Wisconsin, has spent more than two decades creating partnerships between faith groups and conservationists. She said there are economic aspects to the issue of climate change – not least how people will grow and eat under changing conditions. But, she said, “there’s also a conversation where there’s a sense of trying to find a better way to live in relation to each other, to build meaningful communities.

“There’s a longing for a sense of belonging, of community, of connection, of meaning and value that’s really healthy and that’s touched on from different parts of the political spectrum,” Chungyalpa said.

She suggested that one way to build partnerships across partisan lines might be to focus on disaster preparedness and on building resilience in the face of change, rather than on the issue in the abstract.

Karenna Gore, founder and executive director of the Center for Earth Ethics in New York, described the moment as “exciting and terrifying,” saying Republican nominee former President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement pose “a very big challenge” to the democratic tradition of American self-government. But concerned Americans, including people of faith, are capable of meeting that challenge — and of confronting the psychological toll of environmental destruction constructively, she said.

“I’ve been in churches over the last year,” said Gore, daughter of former vice president and environmental crusader Al Gore Jr., “where I’ve been moved to tears by the integrity and the depth that people bring to this very conversation, sitting with the uncertainty . Instead of approaching dialogue with a burning confidence, they say, ‘I can’t do this alone. I want to hear what others have to say, so we can actually pull it together.'”

Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidatehas not yet presented a detailed climate policy, but secular activists and climate groups seems to give her credit for leaving the 2022 ballot deadlocked for the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, a historic investment in climate mitigation efforts.

Trump, who campaigned to eliminate environmental regulations as a candidate in 2016 and 2020 and was partially successful in doing so while president, has said in his current campaign that he would roll back regulations on greenhouse gas pollution if re-elected. At the end of Augusthe promised to repeal a rule controls pollution from power plants.

Furthermore, although fossil fuel production is already at record levels under President Joe Biden, Trump has promoted the slogan “Drill, baby, drill” as a way a future administration would bring down inflation.

But Rabbi Devorah Lynn, co-chair of the Jewish Earth Alliance, an organization that helps Jewish “green” groups network with their representatives in Congress, said downvoting, for senators and representatives and minor offices, is as important as votes for president. The climate “underlies immigration, the farm bill, global conflict and health,” Lynn said. Many decisions on these issues are made by those in “Congress and all positions that we vote on during Congress, meaning state and local.”

Rationalist environmentalists and traditional faiths are not natural allies. Baptist pastor Ambrose Carroll, founder of Green the Churchan Oakland, Calif., nonprofit organization, said that for decades he has been “trying to get environmental justice people on the social justice bus.”

In doing so, Carroll, who sits on the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council of the Environmental Protection Agency, has worked to build bridges between often largely white environmental organizations and people of color, who are often most affected by problems such as air pollution, toxic waste and lack of tree cover.

Carroll said the black community is skeptical about whether, whoever is president, things will actually change for the better. Nonetheless, for his organization, which helps black congregations act and build sustainably, “it’s not what we’re against, it’s what we’re for.” The black church “may not own a lot of downtown skyscrapers, but we own a lot of church buildings. They are the greatest asset in the African-American community. So we stand up.”

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Faith leaders, whether they are in houses of worship or working full-time for climate solutions, meet many people, young and old, faithful and not, and hear how concerned average Americans are about climate change. They say the most critical converts in this fight are not voters, but those running for office, which seems to underestimate the level of concern.

“Our elected officials, at the city level, at the state level, at the county level and, of course, at the national level,” Hayhoe said, “need to hear from their constituents about how they care about this issue and how they support action on this issue.”

The only way that will happen, she added, is if voters speak out.