In February, more than two thousand mourners gathered under an enormous white tent in Charlotte, North Carolina, for the funeral of the evangelist Billy Graham. The guests included President Trump, Vice-President Pence, and scores of evangelical leaders from around the world. The mood was celebratory, befitting a singular figure in American history whose ministry touched millions. But left unexpressed amid the encomiums to Graham’s life and legacy was a growing disquietude inside the evangelical movement that he had spent much of the twentieth century building. Graham helped knit together disparate parts of the Protestant church that embraced a core set of theological beliefs. But the movement’s full-throated embrace of conservative politics, which began in earnest during the early nineteen-eighties, had culminated in the 2016 Presidential election, in which eighty-one per cent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.

Many evangelical leaders, including some in attendance at Graham’s funeral, were fearful that this association with Trump now threatened the focus on personal salvation that Graham spent a lifetime preaching. After conversations with other attendees at the funeral, Doug Birdsall, the honorary chair of the Lausanne Movement, an international evangelical organization, decided to move ahead with a two-day “consultation” for evangelical leaders that he had been mulling. According to Birdsall, its aim would be to revitalize Graham’s original mission and to discuss the future of the faith.

In the e-mail invitation Birdsall sent to participants, he wrote that the meeting was “prompted by the challenges of distortions to evangelicalism that have permeated both the media and culture since the 2016 election.” He recruited Harold Smith, the president of the Christianity Today ministry, which publishes the evangelical magazine of the same name founded by Graham, in 1956; Claude Alexander, a respected pastor in North Carolina; and Philip Ryken, the president of Wheaton College, in Illinois, to help host the gathering. Jenny Yang, a vice-president with World Relief, a refugee-resettlement group, and Gabriel Salguero, the president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, were asked to co-chair. (I was invited to attend because for several years I was the managing editor of Christianity Today.) Like many other young Christians, the 2016 Presidential election left me with an acute sense of abandonment.

Birdsall’s invitation stated that the “support of ‘eighty-one per cent of self-identifying white evangelicals’ for Donald Trump is a call to self-reflection on the current condition of Evangelicalism.” Nevertheless, he insisted, “Our purpose . . . is neither political nor centered on public policy.”

Last week, more than fifty pastors, scholars, and college presidents converged on the Billy Graham Center, at Wheaton, for the meeting. Participants included the Presbyterian pastors Timothy Keller and John Ortberg, and also Mark Noll, a historian of American evangelicalism who is perhaps best known for his book “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” a critique of the movement’s anti-intellectual bent. Six church leaders from outside the U.S. were there to contribute their impressions on how American evangelicalism is perceived worldwide. More than half of the group was white.

The older participants were mostly college presidents, nonprofit executives, and an assortment of pastors. The younger participants were mostly women and leaders of color. Many attendees had publicly criticized Trump before and after the election; others were concerned less with Trump and more with the way evangelicals had come to be known as a voting bloc rather than a spiritual community. If anyone in the room tacitly supported Trump, he didn’t advertise it.

A. R. Bernard, the African-American pastor of the Christian Cultural Center, in New York, had served on Trump’s evangelical advisory council. After Charlottesville, however, Bernard formally resigned. The Reverend John Yates is the rector of the Falls Church Anglican, a Virginia church that defected from the Episcopal Church over theological differences. Vice-President Pence worships there, but Yates is not known for being overtly political. Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, a social-justice organization, has been a lonely voice of evangelical progressivism for forty-five years. Governor John Kasich, of Ohio, was invited but did not attend.

In early correspondence to participants, Birdsall wrote that part of the summit would be devoted to crafting a “pastoral letter,” a statement, to speak for Christians dismayed by the growing alignment with Trump. The goal was to disentangle the word “evangelical” from its current attachment with far-right partisan politics and refocus it on Christ and the Church. The statement was originally slated to be released before June, in advance of a meeting between a thousand evangelical leaders and President Trump. But, days before we arrived at Wheaton, Birdsall clarified to attendees that our gathering was not meant to be held in opposition to the June meeting. He pointed out that he had planned the event long before the one with Trump became public. Organizers seemed to be getting nervous that their efforts would be seen as partisan and anti-Trump. After two days of often tense conversations, it became clear that no statement would be released at all.

The first afternoon session at Wheaton began on a sombre note. “This gathering is not an occasion for celebration of evangelicalism,” Mark Labberton, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, said. “This gathering emerges instead from worry, sorrow, anger, and bewilderment—whether we are Democrats or Republicans.” That so many white evangelicals supported Trump had created a “a toxic evangelicalism” that has turned “the Gospel into Good News that is fake.” He charged that U.S. evangelicalism had been complicit in violence against people of color over centuries, and that where denunciation was needed there had only been silence.

Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, in Manhattan, was another featured speaker in the afternoon. He admitted that he wasn’t entirely sure what he thought of the gathering. In his remarks, he took a more analytical approach and noted that, as the country has become more politically polarized, so has the Church, and that broader cultural narratives had co-opted the Bible. “There’s now a red evangelicalism and a blue evangelicalism,” he said. The focus of his talk, along with that of others, was not Trump’s policies and how they affect people but the way politics have divided the Church.

Something of a generational gap seemed to emerge among the attendees over the question of whether the Church should seek to rise above contentious political questions or address them head on. With a few exceptions, the older, white cohort stressed civility and unity. What the movement needed, they said, was a gentler evangelicalism that reached across partisan aisles for the common good. Others, especially the leaders of color, stressed repentance; there could be no real unity without white evangelicals explicitly confronting the ways in which they had participated in the degradation of persons of color and women. They contended that white evangelical churches and organizations had for decades supported a political agenda that deemed unborn lives more sacred than living black lives.

The younger participants argued that what evangelicals need isn’t a kinder, gentler faith but a bolder one that speaks out against injustice and stands with the vulnerable. Gabriel Salguero denounced what he described as the movement’s “idolatry of safety.” He added, “We have to change our tone, yes. I submit that silence is a tone that speaks volumes.”