Photograph by Chip Somodevilla / Getty

On a recent Sunday before dawn, Lisa Sharon Harper, a prominent evangelical activist, boarded a train from Washington, D.C., to New York City. Harper is forty-nine, and African-American, with a serene and self-assured manner. Although she had moved to D.C. seven and a half years ago, to work as the director of mobilizing for a Christian social-justice organization called Sojourners, she still considered New York her home. She missed its edgy energy, and was worn down by the political battles in Washington, which pitted her more and more aggressively against her fellow-evangelicals. On this frigid morning, she was on her way to Metro Hope, her old church in East Harlem. She couldn’t find anything like it in Washington, D.C. “It’s the South,” she told me. Black and Latinx-run evangelical churches committed to justice were scarce, she noted. Metro Hope is led by her friend José Humphreys, an erudite forty-five-year-old Afro-Latino preacher who grew up in the projects on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Harper wasn’t raised as an evangelical. Born in New York, she grew up in Philadelphia and, later, Cape May, New Jersey, where her mother, a nurse, moved in with her stepfather, a high-school principal, when Harper was eleven. One sultry evening in August, 1983, when she was fourteen, she attended a tent revival with a friend. During the altar call, when the fire-and-brimstone preacher invited people to come forward and be saved, Harper’s friend tapped her on the shoulder and asked if they could go together. “I kind of joke that I got into the Kingdom by proxy that day,” Harper told me. “But, I’ll tell you, I’ve never been the same.”

Harper is now the president of Freedom Road, a consulting group that she founded last year to train religious leaders on participating in social action. In August, 2014, eleven days after a police officer named Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, Harper travelled to Ferguson, Missouri, on behalf of Sojourners, to help evangelical leaders mobilize their followers to support protests against police brutality. Last month, she travelled to Brazil to consult with fellow evangelicals of color, working against President-elect Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right politician who is often compared to Donald Trump for his authoritarianism and misogynistic comments. (In an interview in 2014, Bolsonaro said that a fellow-legislator “doesn’t deserve to be raped” because “she’s very ugly.” This year, in the Brazilian election, he won an estimated seventy per cent of the evangelical vote.)

In the United States, evangelicalism has long been allied with political conservatism. But under Trump’s Presidency right-wing political rhetoric has become more openly racist and xenophobic. In evangelical circles, hostility toward people of color is often couched in nostalgia for the simpler days of nineteen-fifties America. “Sociologically, the principal difference between white and black evangelicals is that we believe that oppression exists,” Harper said, citing a nationwide study of Christians from 2000 called Divided by Faith. “A lot of white evangelicals don’t believe in systemic oppression, except lately, under Trump, when they’ve cast themselves as its victim.” To Harper, the 2016 election revealed the degree to which white evangelicals were “captive” to white supremacy. “They’re more white than Christian,” Harper said, echoing the words of her former boss at Sojourners, Jim Wallis, a white evangelical leader and part of a progressive push against racism within the church. At the same time, people of color are the fastest-growing demographic within evangelicalism. “Two things are contributing to this,” Robert Jones, the head of the Public Religion Research Institute and the author of “The End of White Christian America,” told me. “The first is demographic: the absolute number of whites in America is declining. But the decline is really turbocharged by young white evangelicals leaving the church.”

The growing number of evangelicals of color have begun pushing in earnest for more of a political voice in the church. In 2015, Michelle Higgins, a black evangelical leader from Ferguson, stood up at a conference in front of thousands of young Christians and called out white evangelicals for caring so much about abortion and so little about the young black men being killed by police officers. “She punched a hole in the universe when she talked,” Harper told me. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, the call for social justice within evangelicalism continued to grow. At Sojourners, Harper was involved in a public campaign called Evangelicals Against Trump, and has since taken an active role in leading the #MeToo movement in the evangelical community by helping to spearhead a campaign called Silence Is Not Spiritual. Although there’s scant evidence to suggest that the pushback Harper helps to lead is enough to threaten white-evangelical support for Trump, her ability, alongside many others, to mobilize evangelical African-American and Latinx voters may become a factor in the 2020 election.

Just after 11 A.M., Harper slipped into Metro Hope, which holds services in an unfinished gallery space inside the National Black Theatre, in East Harlem. When she entered, the congregants had started singing their first hymn. (An infant was lying in her father’s arms wearing pink noise-cancelling headphones as protection against the exuberant singing.) There were about a hundred congregants—a diverse group of working-class families and professionals, some of whom had quit their jobs since joining the church to start social-justice initiatives. A Nigerian woman named Evon Benson-Idahosa, who had left a career as a corporate lawyer to start a nonprofit group that fights the trafficking of girls in Nigeria, was leading the music.

After the hymn, Humphreys, the pastor, wearing a sports jacket and calico horn-rimmed glasses, drew on his new book, “Seeing Jesus in East Harlem,” to deliver a sermon about Jesus’ incarnation on earth. “One of the most powerful statements we will see in the Word of God, and perhaps the most overlooked, is the fact that Jesus walked,” he said, and added, “We said that before Kanye,” a reference to Kanye West’s single “Jesus Walks,” from 2004. For Humphreys, the incarnation is the belief that God inhabited a body and lived in a Zip Code, within a cultural and ethnic context. Humphreys noted that incarnation is especially difficult for those in brown bodies like his. Issues of racial injustice, such as systemic poverty and continued segregation in housing and education, plagued many members of the congregation. Their skin color sometimes led even other people of color to make assumptions. “They may even ask you funny questions, like, ‘How much time did you do?’ ” he said.

From her folding chair in the third row, Harper clapped vigorously. When Humphreys hit a particularly inspired line of his sermon, she nodded with fierce encouragement. Harper has known Humphreys for ten years and said she was proud of his development as a preacher. “He has done his homework,” she told me. He’d found a way to answer Jesus’ call to minister to “the least of these” by addressing the concerns of his community in East Harlem. “Evangelicalism has been hijacked by the religious right.” Harper said. “We come from the arm of the church that is so toxic, we understand it and we can offer a solution.”

After church, I sat with Humphreys and Harper at a chic Italian restaurant nearby—a harbinger of gentrification. Over a brunch of feta-and-spinach omelettes, they explained that the evangelical movement in America had always been rooted in a larger call to justice. During the religious revivals that swept Europe and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, being born again involved a newfound commitment to fighting societal ills, like slavery, poverty, and labor exploitation. “Evangelicalism at its roots was a faith that was vehemently jealous for the human dignity of all people,” Harper told me. But, in the nineteen-twenties, a group of Christians who called themselves fundamentalists began to worry about the rise of science and secularism in the modern world, and began rejecting secular concerns in favor of strict readings of the Bible and an emphasis on a personal relationship with God. “These older ways of thinking are clearly not just a matter of historical interest,” Frances Fitzgerald notes in her book “The Evangelicals.” “Perhaps half of evangelicals continue to reject Darwinian evolution and to claim . . . that the Bible is infallible in matters of geography, science, and history as well as in those of faith and practice.”