WEISS: When we spoke last month at the Times Center, you mentioned several White House policies that were cheered by the evangelical community: the Embassy move to Jerusalem; the scuttling of the Iran deal; the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. I can’t think of a major Trump policy that has gotten even close to this much pushback from evangelical leaders as his border policy has in the past few days. When Franklin Graham is criticizing a Republican president, something unusual is happening, is it not? What do you think it is about this policy specifically that is causing that?

REED: For the vast majority of evangelicals, the pushback is not against President Trump, but against the larger tragedy of a broken and immoral immigration system. This is a system he did not create but has inherited. For those who have been paying attention, evangelicals have been working to reform immigration for years based on the principles of their faith, which call on us to show compassion and care for the alien and foreigner. But we also believe in the rule of law and securing the border. Some on the left love our compassion for immigrants but are not as keen on our desire to secure the border and enforce the law. We believe you have to do both.

My hope is we can affect the debate in a positive way. Look at the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. Evangelicals made their voices heard on DACA, arguing that children should not be punished for the crime of a parent who brought them to this country illegally. To President Trump’s great credit, he offered permanent legal residence and even an eventual path to citizenship for roughly two million DACA-eligible young people — not just the 675,000 who had formally registered to remain in the country under DACA. Now, Mr. Trump also wanted funding for the border wall, which Democrats rejected. My view is that was a good trade, and they should have taken it.

WEISS: Speaking of trades, it seems to me that conservative evangelicals made a very clear political one: We’ll ignore the personal scandals and character of this candidate because he’ll deliver us what matters in terms of policy. Do you feel, a year and a half in, that this trade has been worthwhile? In the past few weeks The Times has run several articles about increasing unease, at least among some evangelicals — the protests this month at the Southern Baptist Convention during Vice President Mike Pence’s speech come to mind — with this administration. Tempest in a teapot or a harbinger of something bigger?

REED: Evangelicals confronted a less than perfect choice in 2016, as they frankly do in almost every election, and they acted as responsible citizens in voting not for the lesser evil but for the greater good.

There is a lot of revisionist history about the last presidential election. Recall that Hillary Clinton was under F.B.I. investigation for most of the campaign, and lied about sending and receiving classified material on her personal email server as secretary of state. A large majority of voters said she was not honest or trustworthy. When you combine those devastating critiques of her character issues with where she stood on abortion, the Iran nuclear deal, Obamacare and a host of other issues, she was simply unacceptable to evangelical voters. (Her failure to build a bridge to those voters of faith and discuss in a personal way her own Methodist faith was one of the great missed opportunities of her campaign.)

By contrast, Mr. Trump was strongly pro-life and released a list of conservative judges from whom he promised to select Antonin Scalia’s replacement. He pledged to defund Planned Parenthood, move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, end the harassment of churches by the I.R.S., withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal and defend religious freedom. He has kept every one of those promises.