By NEELA BANERJEE

ST. LOUIS, Missouri - Southern Baptists, as a rule, do not drink. But once a month, young congregants of the Journey, a Baptist church here, and their friends get together in the back room of a sprawling brew pub called the Schlafly Bottleworks to talk about the big questions: President Bush, faith and war, the meaning of life, and “what’s wrong with religion.”
“That’s where people are having their conversations about things that matter,” the Reverend Darrin Patrick, senior pastor and founder of the Journey, said about the talks in the bar. “We go where people are because we feel like Jesus went to the people.”
The Journey, a megachurch of mostly younger evangelicals, is representative of a new generation that refuses to put politics at the center of its faith and rejects identification with the religious right.
They say they are tired of the culture wars. They say they want to broaden the traditional evangelical anti-abortion agenda to include care for the poor, the environment, immigrants and people with H.
I.V., according to experts on younger evangelicals and the young people themselves.
“Evangelicalism is becoming somewhat less coherent as a movement or as an identity,” said Christian Smith, a sociology professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. “Younger people don’t even want the label anymore. They don’t believe the main goal of the church is to be political.”
About 17 percent of the 55 million adult evangelicals in the United States are between the ages of 18 and 29, and many are troubled by the methods of the religious right and its close ties to the Republican Party.
None of that means younger evangelicals have abandoned the core tenets of their faith, including a belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus and the literal truth of the Bible. They think abortion and homosexuality are sins.
But shifts in thinking among younger evangelicals may lead to an easing of the polarization that has defined the country’s recent political landscape, many of them said.
Within American evangelicalism more broadly, there has been some rethinking of its image and priorities. Younger evangelicals feed that new drive and are beginning to lead it. Their efforts have resonated with some older leaders, but they have also created a backlash.
Jonathan Merritt, 25, is a graduate of Liberty University, a fundamentalist Baptist school in Virginia . In March, he introduced an initiative urging Southern Baptists to do more to combat climate change.
The initiative now has about 250 signers, including pastors, university professors and the current and past presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention. But Richard Land, president of the convention’s powerful advocacy group, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, did not sign the initiative. He said his group had concerns about it that they had made known to some signers, who then rescinded their support.
On May 15, Mr. Land’s group introduced its own online petition called “We Get It!” that questions the science around global warming.
“There is so much resistance to the environmental initiative because it is a threat to the right-wing agenda that has crept into the Southern Baptist Convention,” said Dean Inserra, 27, a registered Republican and pastor of the Well, a Baptist church in Tallahassee, Florida, who signed Mr. Merritt’s initiative. “How is taking care of God’s creation a political issue- Since I am pro-life, I am pro-environment.”
Southern Baptist leaders, especially in Missouri, have criticized unconventional church outreach methods .
For Roger Moran, a lay Baptist leader in Missouri, being theologically conservative but culturally liberal could put evangelicals on the path to sin. “Any movement that undermines or takes away from the seriousness of sin, we need to pay close attention to,” Mr. Moran said.
Mr. Patrick of the Journey estimates that 60 percent of his 2,000-member congregation are Democrats. At a discussion at the brew pub about immigration, the congregation’s varied political views came out, as some members sympathized with illegal immigrants and others criticized them.
“It’s the first church I’ve been in with such opposing views,” said Johanna Richards, 22, the daughter of a Baptist minister and an immigrant outreach worker for the church.
Letitia Wong, 32, who said she favored a fence along the Mexican border to keep out illegal immigrants, added: “As much as our faith informs our political views, we aren’t united in one way of thinking. What unites us at the Journey is the power of Jesus Christ.”