If the stages of a social movement are emergence, coalescence, bureaucratization and decline, the reaction against the Trump evangelicals among other evangelicals is still in the emergence stage. But one significant act of coalescence took place recently at Wheaton College, where a group of 50 ethnically and denominationally diverse evangelical leaders met to discuss the sad state of their movement.

The setting was appropriate. Wheaton (my alma mater) was founded by abolitionist evangelicals in the mid-19th century. Its first president, Jonathan Blanchard, was an antislavery agitator and founder of radical newspapers. The college was a station on the Underground Railroad. Many Northern evangelical Christian leaders of that time were malcontents in the cause of human dignity.

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