Conservative evangelicals have tried to counter such trends with their own publishing efforts — salvos in what a recent Christianity Today editorial called “the New Battle for the Bible.” Two years ago, Kevin DeYoung, a prominent Michigan pastor and co-leader of a national network of theologically conservative churches, published Taking God at His Word: Why the Bible is Knowable, Necessary, and Enough, and What That Means for You and Me, a book expressly intended, as he put it to me, “to help reassert for a new generation the divine inspiration and total trustworthiness of the Scriptures.”

Like many evangelical Christians, A. J. Zimmermann tells his conversion story with near-pointillistic detail. A 25-year-old recent divinity school graduate from Southern California, Zimmermann grew up in a non-religious household near Los Angeles with what he called “a lot of divorce” and an abusive stepfather. During his freshman year of high school,

there was this really cute girl in my Spanish 1 class. We started talking and she invited me to go to youth group. I had no idea what that was, but I thought, “She’s cute, maybe this will work out.” I’d never been in that context before — guitars and music and teaching about the Bible. I just kind of sat there and I was like, “Okay, I’m open to whatever’s here.” And I had this sense of love and peace come out of nowhere, and I was crying and crying, and I was just really curious about what this was.

Two days later, after learning “about Jesus and the cross and this whole salvation thing” at a second youth group meeting, Zimmermann committed his life to Christ. He became a regular churchgoer and went on to attend Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian college east of Los Angeles. (The cute girl in Spanish class wound up dating his best friend.) Zimmermann graduated with a degree in biblical studies, enrolled in Azusa Pacific’s seminary program, married a fellow student (they struck up a conversation in a café after eyeing each other reading theology books), and began working part time as a youth pastor at a local church. He now directs a training program for prospective pastors at Life Pacific College, a Pentecostal seminary in San Dimas, California.

Zimmermann’s prototypical evangelical experience is emblematic in one additional, unexpected way. Since graduating from high school, Zimmermann has undergone a revolution in his thinking about evangelicals’ foundational text, the Bible, to the extent that he no longer regards the Bible as inerrant, dictated by God, historically accurate in all of its claims or even internally consistent with itself. “The Bible holds high authority in my life,” Zimmermann told me recently. And yet, he added,

I think it’s important to remember the intent and purpose of the biblical texts. These texts were not intending to portray exact historical fact but to show how God is moving with history, alongside people […] If we understand the term inerrancy to be “without error” then no, I don’t view the Bible as inerrant […] The Scripture is not trying to be without error. It is trying to communicate the love God has for His creation.

I was introduced to Zimmermann by one of his seminary teachers, an Azusa Pacific biblical studies professor named Karen Strand Winslow, who put me in touch with several of her students after I asked her what young evangelicals think about the Bible these days. In addition to his dismissal of biblical inerrancy, Zimmermann told me he no longer believes the biblical book of Genesis is “concerned […] with young-versus-old-earth, literal days of creation stuff.” He said biblical passages appearing to condemn homosexuality are products of their time and do not necessarily apply to present-day same-sex couples “committed in a consensual relationship.” The same goes for New Testament prohibitions against women in church leadership. “We often forget that Jesus’s ministry was founded by women and that the first evangelists were women,” he added. Overall, Zimmermann said, the days when evangelicals defined themselves by their uncompromising style of biblical interpretation are over. “Before my generation […] it was like, if you don’t believe this doctrine, you’re undermining the work of Christ on the cross. [My generation is] not as okay with the simplified answers.”

Evangelical Christianity in America is in the midst of a wholesale generational, cultural, and doctrinal transformation. Confronted by a secularizing and diversifying society, evangelicals are abandoning long-held political allegiances, softening their views on sexuality, grappling with the racial divide in their churches, and rethinking their entire approach to ministry and evangelization. Underlying all of these developments is a more fundamental change in the way evangelicals understand and interpret their most cherished text, the Bible. Though evangelicals proclaim themselves — and are portrayed in most media accounts — to be univocal followers of an inerrant, plainly interpreted Bible, in fact there is widening diversity in their approach to Scripture. Like Zimmermann, a growing number of evangelicals are abandoning “the simplified answers” and seeking a richer, more nuanced, more challenging engagement with Scripture, one grounded not in aphorisms or political ideology, but in what Zimmermann called the deeper “truth of who God is.”

This quest has led many evangelicals to revise their interpretation of key biblical passages (especially those addressing sexual or social justice themes), downgrade parts of Scripture as historical anachronisms, and reject the political call to arms still sounded by a dwindling generation of conservative elders. A new evangelical theology is taking shape, one that retains the Bible as its centerpiece, but understands it very differently. Evangelicals once summarized their approach to Scripture with a staccato catchphrase: “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.” Today, especially among younger evangelicals, each part of that formula is undergoing revision. “I’ve never been in the camp of wanting to draw these hard lines,” Zimmermann told me. He went on:

My hard lines are sort of, “Just go with the basic statements of the faith.” Yes, I believe in Jesus, and if people don’t believe in Jesus, alright, there’s room for conversation there. I never want to be the one to count someone out. I don’t think that’s my job. What I’ve seen in the Scriptures is to love, and love, and love, and keep on loving until they kill you.

This is a big, variegated change, with profound consequences for evangelicals’ distinct religiosity and their often combative relationship with mainstream American society. So far, no single observer has captured the change, or its ramifications, in its entirety. But the picture is coming into focus as journalists, scholars, and evangelical leaders grapple with increasing sophistication and candor with evangelicalism’s uncertain future in a secularizing America. An array of recent publications, both online and off, portray a church taking determined steps to survive by rethinking some of its basic approaches to faith.

One of the sharpest and most recent of those accounts is a book-length immersion into the hitherto underreported world of progressive evangelicalism by Deborah Jian Lee, a religion journalist and visiting scholar at Cornell University. In Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women, and Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism, Lee tells interlocking stories of gay, black, Asian, and women Christians agitating for change in a faith tradition characterized by its doctrinal and cultural conservatism. Combining immersive reporting with brief forays into historical research, Lee profiles key activists and cites an array of sociological data showing that evangelical churches are diversifying ethnically and stratifying generationally as younger evangelicals cast aside hostility to gays and seek to end their faith’s alienation from mainstream America.

“For a long time, whatever white evangelical leaders said was theology was theology with a capital T,” Lee said when I spoke with her recently,

Today, because of the demographic shifts and because of where young evangelicals are theologically and the influx of people of color, we’re seeing that theology can come from many different places […] Theology is becoming more inclusive of the people who are within the church.

Evangelical observers do not dispute such claims. “There’s a shift as older generations are passing away and new generations are coming of age,” said Jonathan Merritt, an evangelical author and columnist for Religion News Service, whose coverage has closely tracked evangelicals’ evolving attitudes toward Scripture. He added:

You’ve seen a fracturing of the movement. You’ve got an approach now where when people want to know what the truth is about something, young Christians are still consulting the Bible. But oftentimes they’re bringing the Bible into conversations with other forms and sources of knowledge […] To see the Bible as a one-stop shop for everything, science, history, every matter of faith, and anything and everything you need to know is contained there — that’s been a perspective that’s shifted.

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