“A lot of students who weren’t Christian were excited by its appearance,” Mr. Schuman told me. “A lot of us have spiritual questions, but we’re uncertain how to ask them. The journal draws on a millennia-old tradition of faith and reason to give a vocabulary for those questions.”

The staff and students involved in these study centers and journals position themselves not as evangelists, but as conveners of a conversation meant to grapple with the ideological divides that secular liberalism’s mantra of tolerance so often elides: How do people with clashing assumptions about what is real and good communicate and coexist?

To Philip Jeffery, a junior at Columbia, this question is at the heart of the recent wave of student activism — although he says older observers rarely seem to understand. “I keep seeing these articles about ‘coddling,’” he told me. “When you ask the question, what are the assumptions about human nature that are driving these things, you realize it’s more than people wanting a safe space to talk about trigger warnings.”

Mr. Jeffery has tried to bring those conflicting assumptions to the surface of campus debate through Columbia’s Christian journal Crown & Cross as well as his work for the Veritas Forum, an international organization that sponsors Christian speakers and interfaith dialogue on college campuses.

“The thing you’ll run into with any of the campus activists that I’ve encountered is this idea that human nature is a collection of identity categories, that I as a human being am composed of a gender identity, a sexual identity, a racial identity and so forth,” he said. “Their perception of Christians, or of religious people more generally, is: ‘O.K., these are people who have this one identity category, religion, and the religion they identify as is overstepping its bounds. It’s telling my gender or sexual identity how to act.’ The Christian response has to be: There’s something more to what a human being is than just these collective attributes.”

Most of the young evangelicals I spoke to had sympathy for the protests, and some had participated themselves. Today’s evangelical students are all over the political map. Christian groups are often among the most racially diverse on campus — 38 percent of InterVarsity members are nonwhite (another 14 percent are international students), and many local chapters are racially mixed. But they question the premises of secular identity politics, which they say is the lens that some university administrators mistakenly apply to religion.

“Vanderbilt didn’t understand religious groups,” said Tish Harrison Warren, who worked for InterVarsity at Vanderbilt before events there led her to relocate to the University of Texas. “They wanted to make us social groups, like fraternities who weirdly talk about Jesus, or service groups, or groups for the academic study of religion. But there is a proclamatory function. We are proclaiming a message to others.”