Ohio’s governor John Kasich certainly won't be president, nor even receive the Republican party’s nomination in 2016. But if Kasich does throw his hat into the increasingly packed Republican primary ring (as some sources suggest he intends to do), the long-term outcome for American politics could be even better than a hypothetical win. This is because, unlike his Republican competitors, Kasich takes Christian politics very seriously.
Within the lore of conservative Christian politics, there is a line of questionable thinking regarding state-funded welfare that is far more recent than its proliferators make it seem. The story goes like this. While Jesus Christ undoubtedly promoted (if not commanded) charity and generosity toward the less-fortunate, He never said that the state should be the vehicle of these virtues. Further, the tale continues, because taxes are involuntary and welfare is funded with tax revenue, welfare doesn’t count as morally meaningful charity, which is what Jesus intended to inspire with His preaching on the poor. Thus, we are led to conclude, support for poor and vulnerable people should be transmitted voluntarily through the community, thanks to the good graces of generous individuals. Echoes of this reasoning resound in the anti-welfare rhetoric of Republican frontrunners from Rand Paul to Rick Perry.
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For Kasich, the fact that the state has an obligation to care for the vulnerable is nothing more than an outgrowth of this Christian message. So far, that position has been tough for fellow right-wingers to contravene.
Perhaps this is because Kasich’s reading of the Gospel is natural and intuitive. He derives a powerful ethical interest in caring for the poor from passages that inarguably display as much. For Christian conservatives who value Biblical literalism, such seemingly unmediated reading of the Bible should offer an obvious political guide. But caring for the poor and ordering society to support all members to a level of basic dignity are not free-market measures, and thus Kasich’s simple-hearted reading of Matthew 25 appears to have won him few friends among Republican elites. For this reason, his chances of pulling off any national wins are slim-to-none.
Kasich should still run. His sturdy brand of Christian politics belongs in a nation that has, for the greater part of the last century, drowned in rhetoric that paints Christianity and capitalism as natural allies, despite all evidence to the contrary. If Kasich runs in the primaries, his opponents will have to reckon with his Christianity in debates and campaign speeches to compete for the coveted religious right. The more that free-market apologists nursing Christian side interests try to explain the illusive continuity between their economics and their faith, the more, I suspect, that tenuous linkage will unravel. If nothing else, Kasich stands poised to puncture longstanding assumptions that connect anti-welfare capitalist interests to the votes of well-meaning Christians. Exposing the gap between free market economics and straightforward Christian politics may serve genuine Christian politics better than a Kasich presidency itself.
