Evangelical leaders and students gathered at Samford University last week for a conference on immigration known as the G92 South Immigration Conference. According to Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Action Forum, the conference focused on the biblical approach to treatment of strangers and immigrants, and struck a new tone among evangelicals in a state ripped apart by a tough new immigration law.

Opponents of Alabama’s immigration law, known as HB 56, protest in Linn Park at a rally on Sept. 1.

“A fundamental shift is occurring among conservatives toward a new consensus on immigrants and America,” Noorani wrote in a guest column at CNN.com. “These are the early steps in a march by Americans of all political stripes fed up with partisan attacks on immigrants and immigration — a groundswell ready and willing to skewer political extremism from either side of the aisle.”

Noorani says the conference featured calls for compassion towards immigrants, including this one from Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission president Dr. Richard Land: “As Christians, we have a responsibility to obey the rule of law, not to enforce the law. And, as citizens of heaven, we also have a responsibility to feed those who are hungry without asking them for [their] immigration status.”

Read Noorani’s column here.