To some observers, this “turn to orthodoxy” looks like the product of a generational shift. In a 2016 survey of then-current LGBT students enrolled at Episcopal seminaries, Ian Markham and Paul Moberly Mazariegos found that virtually all (92 percent) of the respondents agreed with the claim that the “creeds teach that Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead, which has traditionally meant that the tomb was empty.” One might lament that the figure isn’t 100 percent, but set against the backdrop of previous generations’ drift, it remains an encouraging sign. As Markham and Moberly Mazariegos put it, “A voting block is arriving that wants to affirm the authority of Scripture, and uphold the historic Incarnational and Trinitarian faith of the Church.” And it’s a block comprised not only of LGBT folks. During the Episcopal Church’s last General Convention, for instance, a diverse group of clergy and lay people—many of them emerging leaders in the denomination—drafted a memorial urging the Convention to “continue in the apostles’ teaching” by hewing closely to Scripture and the church’s creedal heritage. If Bishop John Shelby Spong’s doctrinal revisionism was the face of a significant strand of Boomer religion, the new face of mainline Protestantism may well be someone in a clerical collar who marches for gun control and says “I believe in the resurrection of the body” without crossing her fingers.

It’s fair to ask whether this blend of political and ethical progressivism and old-time theology is coherent, let alone sustainable. Might it be that the real dynamo of mainline Protestants’ faith is left-wing activism while belief in the resurrection is a kind of unrelated accessory, sincerely held but mostly disconnected from the rest of their convictions? No doubt that’s the case for some. Yet one of the striking things about the reactions I saw last Saturday and Sunday to Jones’s comments was how tightly many mainline Protestants intertwined their belief in the bodily resurrection with their concern for social justice.

This, for example, was how Andrew McGowan, dean of Berkeley Divinity School, the Episcopal seminary at Yale, responded to Jones: “If Easter really meant just that love is more powerful than death but Jesus didn’t rise, how’s the love-death score today?” The “today” in question was the day terrorist bombs killed hundreds of Christians in Sri Lanka. “Is it coincidental,” McGowan asked, “that liberal Protestantism grows in the soil of privilege?” Later, when President Trump took to Twitter to use Easter as an occasion to celebrate the booming economy, McGowan quipped that that’s what you get “when Easter is about niceness, spring, or even ‘love’ without a sense of how the resurrection disrupts our idols and fantasies. This empire will crumble, and if you base contentment on its falsehoods, enjoy them while you may. A different world is coming.” That’s an accusation calculated to sting a progressive constituency: to surrender belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus is to aid and abet Trumpism!

In short, if my online friends represent any bellwether, the future of mainline Protestantism will see a tight connection between radical politics and the hope of the bodily resurrection. Lose the latter, and the former will ultimately be lost too.

Theologian George Hunsinger has made the case over the years that traditional Christian theology—robustly biblical, Nicene, Chalcedonian orthodoxy—naturally issues forth a concern for the poor and the oppressed and a commitment to political change. “[T]he forced option between progressive politics and traditional faith is wrong,” says Hunsinger, citing Dorothy Day, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Óscar Romero, among others, as witnesses. Whether Hunsinger is right or wrong in his judgment, many young mainline Protestants appear to agree with him. (Were he writing today, he might point to the growing number of young Catholics who also wed their adherence to traditional theology with leftist political commitments.) Given the choice between standing with and for the marginalized and holding onto the conviction in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, they are politely refusing the choice and reminting the word “progressive” in the process. You can debate with them, as I do, which social justice causes Christians should prioritize—or else reconceive altogether. But what you shouldn’t do is assume that what Serene Jones told the Times last week represents the only future of the mainline.

I remember a moment, a few years ago, when I was reunited with a friend I had gone to college with. During our student days, my friend had migrated more and more leftward in her political and social commitments, and at the time I wondered whether she might soon decide that a robustly orthodox Christian faith was one more structure of patriarchal and racist oppression that needed to be dismantled. We lost touch after graduation, and years later, when we met up, I expected my friend to tell me she no longer had an evangelical faith. As it turned out, the opposite was true. Having lost none of her progressive political instincts, my friend had become more Christian since when I knew her. “I’ve realized,” she told me, in so many words, “that the world I’ve been working for is the world God promised when he raised Jesus from the dead. What does Nicaea have to do with Selma? Everything, it turns out!”

That friend now attends an Episcopal church. Go figure.