Earlier this month, white evangelicals’ views of refugees came under fresh scrutiny as a 2018 Pew Research poll recirculated on Twitter. Asked whether the United States has a responsibility to accept refugees, white evangelicals were disproportionately likely to say no. The religiously unaffiliated (65 percent), black Protestants (63 percent), Catholics (50 percent), and white mainline Protestants (43 percent) all outpaced white evangelicals’ 25 percent identification of a responsibility to admit the displaced.

Survey results like these may feel predictable if your main exposure to white evangelicals is in the political arena, and particularly the 2016 election, when eight in 10 white voters who self-identified as evangelical Christians voted for President Trump, many citing immigration policy as a top rationale. (There are arguments of varying weight for taking that figure with a grain of salt, but even if we allow them all, the support Trump claimed in this demographic is remarkable.) Yet if, like me, you grew up in evangelicalism, this is a hard figure to face. It does not fit the faith I learned.

And I’m not the only child of evangelicalism to see this disconnect. Since 2016, “I have seen as the people who taught me to ‘go out into all the world and preach the gospel’ really couldn’t care less about our humanitarian and moral and ethical obligation to the people experiencing a global refugee crisis,” D.L. Mayfield, author of Assimilate or Go Home: Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith, told me via email.