This is the purpose of the council, he said: to advise the president, even in times of crisis. “If I’m invited to a table … where I’m given the opportunity to be a voice for the voiceless, share my convictions, and share my heart, then I need to go,” he said. While journalists and evangelical critics pointed out that members of Trump’s business councils resigned in protest of his Charlottesville comments, Suarez said he didn’t understand why pastors would do the same. “Why would I abandon someone now? I wouldn’t do that to someone in my congregation,” he said. Business leaders answer to shareholders, but pastors have a calling to speak from a faith perspective. “If there was ever a time that we need to give counsel and advice,” he added, “it’s right now.”

In an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid, Bernard said he quit because he had to consider the costs of being associated with the evangelical council. “It took me 40 years to build my credibility and my reputation, and that goes away in four or eight years, if it lasts that long,” he said. “I don’t think he’s racist. I think he’s ill-advised. … His vacillation … from one position to another simply indicates to me that he never established a set of core values that guides his thinking and a moral compass.” Bernard praised the members of the evangelical advisory council as “wonderful people … who love God [and] love country,” but “I have a problem with continuing to support anything that’s going to endorse this kind of behavior that made it difficult for me, as a black person in America, to experience the fullness of American life.” Technically, Bernard is not the first evangelical adviser to quit Trump’s council: Another member, the mega-church pastor James MacDonald, tweeted last week that he resigned last October “for clarity’s sake.”

Mark Burns, another black pastor on the council, disagreed with Bernard’s reasoning. “I believe that my support for … Donald Trump lies deeply in my desire to see our faith, the Christian faith, be the center of politics again,” he said during the interview with Reid. As long as evangelical leaders have “a seat at the table,” he said, “it is our spiritual obligation to be a voice of God to the ear of the president of the United States.” And, he added, “I believe God has called me to this.”

Because they’re always on television and occasionally posting selfies from the Oval Office, the members of the advisory council have become the assumed voice of the 81 percent of white evangelicals who voted to put Trump in office. In reality, evangelicals have extremely divided views on how to approach politics. “Whatever credibility we had, we are selling that now in order to achieve and retain power and influence, which is a bargain that isn’t worth it,” said Toly. “We have to be willing to call out evil wherever it happens, and not remain silent in order to retain influence on other issues. I don’t see a lot of that happening right now.”

Even those who are steadfastly standing by Trump, like Suarez, recognize the fractures this president has caused among Christians. “We need to rebuke the partisan politics that have come into the church, and remember that before we were ever donkeys and elephants, we belonged to the lamb,” he told me. “It’s done. He is our president for the next three years, or longer. That’s not changing. Let’s come together and bring healing to our nation, because the only hope for this world is the church.”

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