Pope Francis’ much-anticipated climate change encyclical, released last week, is every bit as strong as environmentalists and other proponents of dramatic action on climate change had hoped. The pontiff affirms the scientific consensus that climate change is largely the result of human activity, calls for “urgent action” to develop renewable energy alternatives, and slams global development paradigms that create an “ecological debt” between the Global South and the wealthier North.

Many are predicting that the encyclical will be a game changer that will mobilize religious groups and galvanize lagging western nations, particularly the United States, to address climate change. And the encyclical will undoubtedly give the cause a huge moral push, especially at the upcoming international climate negotiations. But there are ominous warning signs already that a significant percentage of American Catholics — the very faith constituency that should be most receptive to the pope’s message — may turn a deaf ear to Francis. This means that not only are they unlikely to give up their SUVs, but also to support policies to address climate change or the candidates that back them.

According to an April poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, Catholics overall are about as likely as the general public to believe that the planet is warming as a result of human activity. White Catholics, however, who comprise two-thirds of all Catholics, are much more skeptical of climate change. Only about 40 percent of white Catholics believe that the earth is warming as the result of human activity or that there is a scientific consensus on the causes of climate change, versus 46 percent of all Americans and nearly 50 percent of all Catholics. The reason for the disparity among Catholics is that Hispanic Catholics are strikingly more likely than white Catholics to believe in human-induced climate change, with 61 percent saying climate change is real and the result of human activity.

White Catholics are also less concerned about climate change than most Americans, or any other religious group, according to PRRI. Overall, 29 percent of Americans say they are “very concerned” about climate change. Hispanic Catholics are the most concerned about climate change of any single religious group, with 43 percent saying they are very concerned, followed by the religiously unaffiliated at 38 percent. White Catholics are the least concerned of all Americans at 17 percent, lower even than notoriously science-rejecting white Evangelical Protestants at 18 percent.

Why are white Catholics rejecting the climate consensus even as they have become increasingly progressive on other hot-button issues like same-sex marriage? As this graph from evolutionary biologist Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education shows, it’s not a simple matter of Catholics rejecting science like Evangelicals. Rosenau plotted various religious groups’ support for environmental regulations against their support for evolution based on data from the Pew Research Center. In general, he found that “groups that support evolution also support environmental action.” Catholics, however, fall somewhere in the middle of the science and environmental regulation-supporting Jews, Buddhists, Atheists, Agnostics and liberal Protestants, and the conservative Evangelical and Black churches that largely reject both evolution and climate change regulation.

A 2013 study from Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues offers some insight in the particular Catholic rejection of climate change. They found that religious individuals with a strong belief in a free-market ideology were likely to reject “scientific findings that have potential regulatory implications, such as climate science, but not necessarily of other scientific issues.”

On the other hand, religious individuals who had both a strong belief in the free market and what they termed “conspiracist ideation” or the “tendency to endorse conspiracy theories including the specific beliefs that inconvenient scientific findings constitute a ‘hoax’,” were likely to reject the scientific consensus on a range of issues from climate change to the safety of vaccines, which explains the worldview of many Evangelicals.