Last month, I spoke at the historic Park Street Church in Boston, where the premier evangelist of the Second Great Awakening, Charles Finney, preached in 1831. The Billy Graham of his day, Finney called people to faith in Jesus Christ and then to enlist in the antislavery campaign. Charles Finney actually pioneered the "altar call" that Billy Graham would later make famous. Why? So he could sign up his converts for the antislavery campaign. The other famous antislavery crusader of the time, the more secular William Lloyd Garrison, delivered his first abolitionist speech here in this same church when he was only 23 years old.

On that weekday evening at Park Street, I was facing a packed church of hundreds of twenty-something evangelicals who want to be a generation of new abolitionists -- focusing on the most vulnerable people in our world today. They suspect that Jesus would likely care more about the 30,000 children who die globally each day due to totally unnecessary poverty and utterly preventable disease than he might worry about gay-marriage amendments in Ohio. This emerging generation is the leading edge of a new movement of "progressive evangelicals." For decades, I have had journalists say to me, "So, you are a progressive evangelical? Isn't that a misnomer?" Now the misnomer is becoming a movement. And the media, so far, still doesn't get it.

The young evangelicals are not alone but rather are part of a broader new and spiritually rooted progressive movement that includes the religious from many traditions, the "spiritual but not religious" and also secular youth who hunger for a moral dimension to public life.

On the road, I've also met a whole new generation of young Catholics who are discovering their own church's social teaching about "the common good," as well as seminary students in mainline Protestantism forming "beatitudes societies" to study the core teachings of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Alongside them are young black pastors who don't want to just sing the old anthems of the civil-rights movement but to make their own history for justice. Next-generation Hispanic Pentecostals and Catholics see issues like immigration as key religious and moral questions, and the sons and daughters of Asian-American immigrant Christians are not just focusing on assimilation, like their parents did, but are reaching out into their communities. All these are making the vital connection between evangelism and social justice, and they were represented that night at Park Street, where the sense of history and the possibilities of this moment were palpable.

I see parallel movements of young people eager for a "Jewish renewal" also connected to social justice, a prophetic new generation of Muslims who are standing up to extremism, and others who claim more-diverse spiritual roots or even secular convictions but who use the words "moral" and "movement" in relation to politics. I can feel the energy of a movement when I am with this new generation.

Members of this new generation are applying their faith to the greatest moral challenges of our time. When politics fails to resolve or even address the great issues, what often occurs is that social movements rise up to change politics, and the best ones historically have had spiritual foundations. Today, these issues include both global and domestic poverty, pandemic diseases that ravage the developing world, extreme violations of human rights in places like Darfur, the alarming threats of climate change, and the imperatives of "creation care," the need for a more-ethical response to the genuine threats of terrorism and a foreign policy more consistent with our best moral values.

Historians call these moments "great awakenings" -- moments when the revival of faith leads to big changes in society, such as the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, child-labor-law reform and, most famously, civil rights. That we may be on the edge of such a time again has been almost entirely missed by a media completely obsessed with the political horse race, including changing religious voting trends.

But a new faith-inspired movement for social justice may be on the way, with a younger generation of believers as its cutting edge. And however they vote this time, the mobilization of that constituency could develop the capacity that elections rarely have by themselves -- to really change politics. Several weeks ago, a brief debate erupted in this presidential season about the roles of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson and was mistakenly described as an issue of race. It was not; rather, it pointed to the complicated relationship between social movements and elected politics -- that Lyndon Johnson didn't become a civil-rights leader until Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks made him one. The media mostly missed that lesson, too, but a new generation of the faithful who speak of "movement politics" is beginning to understand it.

Jim Wallis is author of "The Great Awakening" and president of Sojourners, a Washington, D.C.-based organization whose mission is "to articulate the biblical call to social justice."