Fred Luter Jr. was the first black president of the Southern Baptist Convention, elected in 2012. He is also the senior pastor of the Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans. Bob Levey / AP

Emerson’s influential 2000 book “Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America” posited that evangelicals’ concerted and sincere efforts to combat inequality “likely do more to perpetuate the racial divide than they do to tear it down.” That’s because they tend to see racism as a matter of the heart rather than one of systemic injustice. Said Cleveland, “the way evangelicals look at race, they think racism is interpersonal meanness.”

Dhati Lewis, a conference panelist and the pastor of an SBC church in Atlanta that is unusual for being genuinely integrated — he estimates it is about 60 percent black — sees the distinction between justice and reconciliation differently. “I don’t think you can truly have reconciliation without justice, but you can have justice without reconciliation,” he said in an interview. “Justice without reconciliation, we call that hell.” By contrast, he described reconciliation as supernatural, and it includes forgiveness and love, “the very essence of the gospel.”

One major focus of the conference was on integration within the church. That’s harder than it sounds; Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that “the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.” That is still largely true. According to a research group affiliated with the SBC, more than 8 in 10 congregations are dominated by one racial group. But as a goal, Sunday-morning togetherness may be easier to agree on than some of the thornier issues such as workplace discrimination, police conduct and economic inequality that often accompany discussions of race. White Southern Baptists “are political conservatives who believe less government is better,” said Barry Hankins, a historian at Baylor University and a co-author of the forthcoming book “Baptists in America.” He said that almost every black SBC leader interviewed for his 2002 book, “Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture,” supported affirmative action, while their white peers universally opposed it.

For that reason, some otherwise sympathetic observers question whether Sunday-morning integration would be sufficient to bring about real change on complex political and cultural issues. Lewis said that he remains unsatisfied with the rudimentary state of racial conversations within the evangelical church, largely because its leadership still consists of “white middle-class men who would prefer not to live in cities.”

Cleveland, the author of the 2013 book “Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces That Keep Us Apart,” pointed out one reason for cautious optimism: The style of leadership in the conservative evangelical community tends to be hierarchical, which means believers generally respect and follow their leaders. “In this case, that might actually be helpful,” she said, if leaders are making a sincere effort to address racial inequality.

Moore, one of the most prominent of those leaders, has other reasons for hope. “We’re starting to see more and more conservatives who are coming together on many of these questions and sometimes conservatives who are from very different streams,” he said in an interview in his sunny Nashville office on the final morning of the conference. “When we’re working on areas of criminal justice reform, we find we’re working with more progressive African-American communities and with libertarian groups and with social conservatives who may have different starting points for that conversation. But we all can recognize there are problems with the system.”

The final session of the ERLC conference belonged to Thabiti Anyabwile, a black pastor from Washington, D.C., who called for confession and accountability regarding racism. “When we come to racial reconciliation and the image of God, we not only have to take seriously what it means to be made in the image of God — we also have to take seriously the seriousness of sin,” he said. After the crowd sang a full-throated version of “Amazing Grace,” Moore took the stage for one final prayer. He ended with the words “Give us the power to fight.”