Undergraduate journals of Christian thought, publications like the Harvard Ichthus and The Logos at Yale, have also multiplied on elite campuses in recent years. When Andrew Schuman arrived at Dartmouth in 2006, he and some like-minded freshmen founded Apologia, a semiannual journal that aims “to think critically, question honestly, and link arms with anyone who searches for truth and authenticity.”

Last fall, as student activists around the country protested racism on their campuses, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas dismissed secular universities as havens for “leftist, coddled kids.” The protests proved that these schools teem with “psychotic Marxists,” declared “The Daily Caller,” a conservative website.

When conservative Christians map the culture wars, they cast secular universities to the far left periphery — the region that medieval cartographers would have marked “here be dragons.” A cottage industry of books with titles like “How to Stay Christian in College” has long warned pious 18-year-olds that college is a place where the “Prince of Deception” will set “spiritual snares.”

American evangelicals have a venerable tradition of painting the ivory tower as the bastion of unbelief and leftist ideology. As mainstream culture becomes more diverse and moves further away from traditional Christian teachings on matters like sexuality, we might expect evangelical students on elite secular campuses to feel more embattled than ever. Yet that’s not what I found when I spoke to a range of students and recent graduates.

Contrary to conservatives’ warnings about the oppressive secularism of the modern university, these students have taken advantage of their campuses’ multicultural marketplace of ideas. They have created a network of organizations and journals that engage non-Christian ideologies head-on. It’s true that many schools’ nondiscrimination policies have made life more difficult for Christian ministries that require student leaders to assent to a statement of faith. But some students have seized on this challenge as an opportunity.

Since 2010, when the Supreme Court upheld a policy at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law that requires student groups to accept all students regardless of their beliefs, several universities have stripped InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and other Christian groups of their status as recognized campus organizations. At Vanderbilt, Bowdoin and other schools, the groups lost access to campus space, student fees and activity fairs — on the grounds that requiring student leaders to affirm a statement of faith violated the schools’ “all comers” policy. “What our students have said is that it’s clear the administration doesn’t want us here,” said Greg Jao, InterVarsity’s director of campus engagement.

Yet some evangelicals have poured their energies into a different sort of Christian organization, one that has been proliferating quietly for decades at universities around the country: Christian study centers. These are not ministries, exactly, and what they do is not old-fashioned evangelism. Typically they occupy private buildings off campus and exist independently from the university, beyond the reach of nondiscrimination policies. The first study centers appeared in the 1960s and ’70s, but their numbers have mushroomed since 2000. The Consortium of Christian Study Centers counts 20 members — a small but significant number considering that many are embedded in the most prestigious universities around the country.

The centers position themselves as forums where students can hash out the tensions between their faith and the assumptions of secular academia — the same assumptions that have assailed more traditional ministries. They are, in a sense, spiritual “safe spaces” that offer cozy libraries, reading groups and public lectures, and sometimes advertise their ethos with names that honor Christian intellectuals who embraced the life of the mind (Chesterton House at Cornell is named for the English writer and lay theologian; Rivendell Institute at Yale evokes the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which many Christians read as a subtle tribute to its author’s faith).

“The overall message is that the Christian faith is a viable thing in the world we live in, that it’s possible to live faithfully and think hard about whatever topic we’re discussing,” said Jay McCabe, a staff member at the Center for Christian Study at the University of Virginia.

Undergraduate journals of Christian thought, publications like the Harvard Ichthus and The Logos at Yale, have also multiplied on elite campuses in recent years. When Andrew Schuman arrived at Dartmouth in 2006, he and some like-minded freshmen founded Apologia, a semiannual journal that aims “to think critically, question honestly, and link arms with anyone who searches for truth and authenticity.”

“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?

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