But clearly, the power of culture, perhaps the experience of gay and lesbian friends and other factors are in collision with younger evangelicals’ understanding of Scripture.

It’s not news that young people are more liberal than their elders on matters touching on sexuality and public policy — issues like same-sex marriage, adoption and so forth. But a non-partisan poll released this week charts how that split carves deeply into even the white evangelical community, the most socially conservative major group on the American religious landscape.

The poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 44 percent – nearly half – of young evangelicals between the ages of 18 to 29 favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry.

Nearly half that generation is outside the evangelical tent on that issue.

By contrast, the white evangelical community as a whole, even counting those relatively liberal young adults, is solidly opposed to same sex marriage, by slightly more than 80 percent.

That’s a generational split in conservative communities that include Southern Baptists and hundreds of independent evangelical churches that identify themselves as simply Christian.

Remember that one of foundations of evangelical life is trust in Scripture as the sole authoritative guide for living. And evangelicals locate their disapproval of homosexual living in Leviticus 18:22, 1 Cor. 6:9; and Romans 1:24-27.

The researchers don’t offer much in the way of explanatory insights, which are left to others.

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