Why Young Christians Are Rejecting Fear and Reaching out to Their Muslim Neighbors
BY KEVIN SINGER
For years, researchers have warned that many evangelicals live in relational “bubbles.” Barna Research Group found that evangelical Christians are less likely than other groups to have friends of different faiths—so much so that 91 percent said their friends are “mostly similar” to them in terms of belief. That’s an important baseline. But it doesn’t tell the whole story of what’s happening among younger evangelicals, whose daily lives often include more religious diversity than their parents’ generation ever experienced.
In fact, newer data suggests a more complicated picture among younger evangelicals. In a 2022 Neighborly Faith survey of young adults (ages 18–25), 51% of young evangelicals said they interact with people of different religions/faiths often or extremely often, and 49% said those interactions are very or extremely important. In other words, cross-faith contact is relatively common for many young evangelicals, even if it isn’t always framed as a top priority.
Other research points in a similar direction. The Public Religion Research Institute found that younger white evangelicals (ages 18–39) are far more likely than those ages 40 and up to say that American Muslims are an important part of the religious community in the United States, and that they feel comfortable with public displays of Muslim culture and religious expression.
I saw this generational impulse firsthand while I was a student at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution sometimes described as the “Harvard of the Christian world.” In 2015, Wheaton became a national flashpoint when Larycia Hawkins, a professor who is African-American, announced she would wear a hijab in solidarity with Muslim women and stated that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.” Wheaton’s administration placed her on leave, and conservative media personalities quickly seized the moment. Franklin Graham declared, “Islam is a very wicked and evil religion,” and compared it to “a religion of hatred, a religion of war.” Jerry Falwell Jr. encouraged students at Liberty University to carry guns as a response to terrorism. At a fragile cultural moment, it was easy to see how fear could become a kind of discipleship.
51% of young evangelicals say they interact with people of different religions/faiths often or extremely often, and 49% say these interactions are important.
But what stood out to me in the midst of this controversy was how many young evangelicals I knew—students who cared deeply about their faith—responded not with suspicion but with a desire to understand their Muslim neighbors. Some disagreed with Hawkins’ theology while still refusing the politics of panic. Others insisted that the gospel demanded compassion, even when public discourse demanded an enemy. Their instinct wasn’t naïve; it was grounded. They simply believed that being Christian should not require being afraid of Muslims.
That instinct is increasingly common—and yet it is not always well supported. The 2022 Neighborly Faith survey found that fewer than a quarter of young evangelicals say their religious leaders encourage engagement with people of other faiths. At the same time, sizable shares report that their leaders would endorse negative views about Muslims, including agreement with statements such as “Islam is a religion of hate” or that Christians should avoid contact with Muslims. This creates a deeply formative tension: many young evangelicals are encountering religious difference in real life, but the cues they receive from leaders can still reinforce anxiety, distance, or outright hostility.
The point here is not to paint young evangelicals as either heroes or their leaders as villains. Rather, it is to recognize that their lives are being shaped by competing influences. Many are forming friendships with Muslims in classrooms, workplaces, and neighborhoods. Many are also inheriting stories—sometimes from pulpits, sometimes from partisan media ecosystems—that train them to view Islam primarily through the lens of threat.
And yet, the relational reality keeps breaking through. When young evangelicals know Muslims personally, Islam becomes less of a symbol and more of a human community. It becomes harder to accept sweeping claims about “hate” when the Muslim classmate you studied with last night stayed up late to help you understand the material. It becomes harder to fear a faith when you’ve been welcomed into someone’s home, eaten their food, met their parents, and listened to them talk about God with sincerity.
It becomes harder to accept sweeping claims about “hate” when the Muslim classmate you studied with last night stayed up late to help you understand the material.
Over the past decade, I have watched young evangelicals wrestle with what this means for their public witness. Some have been disappointed by how easily evangelical leaders and institutions have echoed the broader culture’s suspicion toward Muslims. Others have felt torn between loyalty to their tradition and grief over its failures. Many have tried to carve a third path: remaining theologically conservative while rejecting the fear-based reflexes that increasingly define “Christian politics” in the American imagination.
I’ve come to believe that this moment is not only a crisis—it is also an opportunity. The question is whether evangelical institutions will help young believers develop the moral courage and practical skills needed to live faithfully in a pluralistic society, or whether they will continue outsourcing discipleship to outrage cycles and culture-war narratives.
That conviction led me to help build Neighborly Faith. As I began to notice a growing urgency to love Muslim neighbors among evangelical students—and a small but meaningful cohort of leaders—I sensed the time was right to create concrete pathways for Christians to seize this momentum and turn good intentions into durable habits.
Neighborly Faith has done that in several ways. Through NF Forums, we convene today and tomorrow’s Christian leaders to envision the future face of evangelical faith, and to practice the kind of moral imagination that religiously diverse democracy requires. Through the Neighborly Faith Podcast, we platform conversations that help Christians pursue faith over fears and learn how to show up as neighbors rather than partisans. Through Boundless, we connect Christian college students with influential Muslim leaders in their fields to learn what it means to lead across deep difference—and to discover how relationships can strengthen, rather than dilute, conviction. And through Faith Frontiers, we bring meaningful, course-connected cross-faith conversations into classrooms so students can encounter Muslim peers and grow in empathy, courage, and clarity about their own commitments.
What I’ve learned through this work is simple: young evangelicals don’t need to abandon their faith to be good neighbors. They need models of faithful presence—leaders who can tell the truth about religious difference without turning it into a threat, and who can teach serious theology without feeding social suspicion. They need communities where love of neighbor is not treated as a political concession, but as a Christian obligation.
My inspiration for this work comes from my father, who endured insults as a child for being part of a Jewish family—an experience that left him skeptical of religion for much of his life. I have also been shaped by the hospitality and generosity I have received from my Muslim friends, as well as the bad habits I have seen percolate in evangelical communities when it comes to our approach to other faiths.
Although I’ve at times felt tempted to distance myself from my tradition, I remain committed to leaning in. That commitment is fueled in part by the promise I see in young evangelicals, who are poised to bring a fresh and hopeful presence to the public square—one that is serious about conviction and serious about neighborliness at the same time.