On a muggy evening earlier this summer, a hundred and fifty sticky worshippers poured out of the Clef Club, in Center City, Philadelphia. On Sunday nights, the jazz club hosts the Block Church, a group of young evangelicals who planted thriving congregations in Philadelphia, in 2014, and Mesquite, Texas, in 2017. Worship involves a lot of high-energy hopping around while Christian rockers shred onstage. “There’s no wall you won’t kick down, lie you won’t tear down!” the Block worship team sang before a congregation clad in black T-shirts with white crosses, Vans, and jeans ripped out at the knees.

After the service, the earnest crowd filled a block of South Broad Street, chatting about the beginning of the Book of James, the subject of that evening’s sermon, which Pastor Joey Furjanic, who was on vacation, had delivered by recorded video. James, he’d preached, had been speaking to a scattered church, early followers of Jesus who’d left Jerusalem and were wandering around the ancient world as “immigrants and refugees.” James was telling young Christians how to put their faith into action, which the Block Church attendees were discussing. Across the street, two firefighters, occupying lawn chairs outside a firehouse, looked on at the unusually effervescent and sober group. Although such images of hipster Christians have grown familiar, the spirit among them reflected something new.

At the Block Church, black, white, and Latino evangelicals were worshipping together, which is still a rare sight. During the past decade, evangelicalism has grown more diverse: as the number of white believers has declined, the Latino evangelical population has increased dramatically.

Even so, eighty-six per cent of evangelical churches remain segregated, a statistic from the National Congregations Study at Duke University, which Robert P. Jones cites in his book “The End of White Christian America.” From a distance, evangelicalism can appear culturally monolithic—nearly eighty per cent of white evangelicals support President Trump, according to the Public Religion Research Institute—but many young evangelicals are more diverse, less nationalistic, and more heterodox in their views than older generations. Believing that being a Christian involves recognizing the sanctity of all human beings, they support Black Lives Matter and immigration reform, universal health care and reducing the number of abortions, rather than overturning Roe v. Wade.

“We are Ambassadors of Heaven first, and Americans second,” Furjanic, the head pastor of Block Church, told me. Furjanic, who is thirty-two, was born in Bristol, Pennsylvania. When he was three years old, his family moved to Orlando, and he and his parents accepted Jesus and became born-again Christians at the Faith Assembly church. He attended Southwestern University, in Dallas, where he played football and served as a youth pastor. After college, he travelled through Europe and helped out in churches before moving to upstate New York, where he met his wife. Together they moved to Illinois, and then back to Philadelphia, five years ago, to start the Block Church, “a place where social, economic, religious and political walls are torn down,” its Web site reads. For young believers at Block and elsewhere, the ubiquity of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks in their lives, among other factors, have made it more difficult to live in the kind of theological, cultural, and political isolation that previous generations once did. And, as their secular peers embrace more fluid identities in regard to sexuality and race, young evangelicals are also beginning to see such positions in shades of gray rather than in black and white. There are other factors, too, related to globalization: the exponential growth of fellow-believers in the Global South; the growing diversity of evangelicals in the U.S., driven in part by the influx of immigrants who arrive in American churches with their own dynamic faith. The result is that younger evangelicals are speaking out on issues like family separation at the border, climate change, police brutality, and immigration reform­­––causes not typically associated with the evangelical movement. In the continuing moral outrage at the border, which includes nearly six hundred children still displaced in New York City alone, many see the faces of themselves and their families.

“The pushback I see is on the God and Country idea,” Ed Stetzer, the executive director of the Billy Graham Center, at Wheaton College in Illinois, told me. “Younger evangelicals are not as ready to jump into patriotism,” he went on. “They love their country. They love their faith. They just don’t want those things inappropriately mixed.” Most of the young evangelicals I met don’t consider themselves liberal or conservative. Despite being ardently pro-life, they weren’t sure whom they’d vote for in the upcoming midterms or in the 2020 Presidential election. “I’m going to vote for whoever aligns with scripture,” Kassy Mayer, who graduated from Liberty University in May, majoring in women’s leadership, told me. “I don’t really know who that will be at this point.”

One evening this summer at the Block Church, I met Julio Colón-Laboy, a clean-cut and soft-spoken twenty-year-old who was manning a card table outside the Clef Club with a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. He had a sign-up sheet for a small discussion group, which would be reading the Book of James verse by verse together all summer.

Colón-Laboy left his post to sit on the stoop of the Jazz club, still warm at 8 P.M. from the hot June sun, and talk about the complexities and frustrations of being a young Christian. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in poverty in Philadelphia, Colón-Laboy grew up in a family that didn’t talk about God. At fourteen, suffering from severe depression, he attempted suicide, and spent a month and a half in a mental institution. When he got out, he told me, “I needed something bigger worth believing in.”

In 2014, the Block Church opened in his neighborhood, and he joined the congregation. Since then, he has graduated from high school and received a scholarship to the University of Vermont. It wasn’t easy to be an evangelical Christian up in Yankee Burlington. “When I say, ‘Hey, I’m a Christian,’ people think I have guns on me that no one can take and that I picket outside abortion clinics,” he told me. “As a young Christian who cares about social justice, it breaks my heart to be lumped in with this identity.” At the University of Vermont, Colón-Laboy is the vice-president of the Latinx Alliance. In 2017, the Trump Administration cancelled DACA, the Obama-era policy that protected undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. After a federal judge issued an injunction, students had to reapply or risk deportation. Colón-Laboy successfully lobbied the university to pay the reapplication fee of five hundred dollars per student. But he also opposes abortion rights, which makes his politics difficult to classify along traditional lines. “My activism is very personal,” he said. “I’ve talked to numerous people considering options when they’re pregnant. They come to me, saying, ‘Hey, I know you’re a Christian. Can you help me?’ ” As a result of his quiet guidance, he said, “Lots of people have had kids they wouldn’t have.”

Among younger Christians like Colón-Laboy, it isn’t unusual to oppose abortion but support immigration rights. Many are no longer willing to ally themselves categorically with either the right or the left. Instead, they challenge all kinds of ideas of identity and tribe. The separation of families at the border, however, coalesced young Christians around a new level of outrage.