As Nazworth notes, saying that Trump is “the lesser of two evils” is still an endorsement. “Land claims that the choice in the presidential election, 2016 and 2020, was/is a 'binary choice.' This is false. No one in America is required to vote for one of the 2 major party candidates. You can vote 3rd party, independent, or write in a candidate.”
I also note that Dr. Land failed to address the larger point about the long term damage to Christian witness, or the dangers inherent in Christians embracing moral relativism. Instead, he admits that he knew that Trump was a dangerous con-man in the primaries but that he supported him anyway in the general.
I can't help but suspect that the hyper-defensiveness of some of Trump's evangelical defenders reflects the remnants of a guilty conscience. “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul?” -Mark 8:36 For “whole world,” substitute judges, tax cuts, or any other short-term temporal political victory.
Let me give the final word here to Russell Moore, who argued that Christianity could not allow itself to be bent and warped to win elections, even important ones.
Instead, Christians must be prepared to choose between the Gospel and winning elections. If they surrendered their values in order achieve short term political successes, he said, they would end up with neither values nor political success. Too many evangelicals were confusing means with ends. “Religious liberty is a means to an end,” he said “and the end is not political.”
“A religious right that is not able to tie public action and cultural concern to a theology of Gospel and mission will die, and will deserve to die,” he said. “When Christianity is seen as a political project in search of a gospel useful enough to advance its worldly agenda, it will end up pleasing those who make politics primary, while losing those who believe the Gospel,” said Moore. “Augustine wrote the City of God in the context of Rome’s collapse, and he did not repurpose the Gospel to prop up a failing regime.”
Rather than throwing their lot in with candidates like Trump, he argued that Christians urgently needed to restore their sense of the first principles of their faith and ultimately what they needed to fight for and conserve. They had to be prepared to stand athwart the onrushing tides of the culture and politics.
More than that, it will mean a religious conservatism that sees the Church as more important than the state, the conscience as more important than the culture, and one that knows the difference between the temporal and the eternal.”
Unfortunately, that may have to wait for another year and another campaign.