John Kasich may be “the most electable representative of the moderate wing of the Republican Party,” or he may be “a RINO … desperate to curry favor with moderates, establishment donors, and the media,” depending on what profile you’re reading. But after the Ohio governor and likely Republican presidential candidate’s appearance at the Faith & Freedom Coalition gathering in Washington Friday, Kasich can lay claim to another title: the most openly religious candidate to run in the GOP primaries at least since Mike Huckabee’s 2008 campaign and perhaps going all the way back to Pat Robertson in 1988.
The problem is, Kasich’s deep religiosity might not appeal to the most deeply religious conservatives.
Ohio Christian University president Mark Smith introduced Kasich Friday as a man who “has worked from principle, Matthew 25, in reaching out to the poor.” Kasich then delivered what the Washington Examiner’s David Drucker called the “most religious speech from a candidate I’ve heard, including Ted Cruz at Liberty [University].” Kasich’s address, which could fairly be called on sermon, focused on his own religious re-awakening in his mid-30s.
Kasich had been a Catholic altar boy in his youth, and a serious one. “Probably 90 percent of Catholic boys at some point wanted to be a priest,” friend David Cercone told the Cleveland Plain Dealer last year. “John wasn’t just going to be a priest, though. He was going to be the pope.” But Kasich told the Faith & Freedom audience that he drifted away from his faith and for years treated religion like “a rabbit’s foot” — that is, something to be called on whenever he needed some good luck, like before a test or an election.
By Kasich’s telling, he remained that way until Aug. 20, 1987, the day both his mother and father were killed by a drunk driver. At that moment, “a severe storm hit my life and threatened to wash me away,” Kasich said:
When that happened, and that storm hit, I wasn’t sure how I was going to survive. I reached out and I clung to all I knew, and I said God, I don’t know what’s going on here. And a minister showed up, and we talked, and he said to me, where do you stand with the Lord? As I buried my mother and father, I reflected on it, and he said to me, there’s a window of opportunity right now for you. Your hurt and your pain will disappear, but you have an opportunity to figure out who you are and where you are. And I started at ground zero. Is there such a thing called God? Does God love me? Does He know my name? Will He answer me? Did Jesus really live on the earth? Was he really the son of God? And I tore it all apart. No more rabbit’s foot for me. No more rabbit’s foot. I’ve got to get to the bottom line, and either I believe it or I don’t. That was 28 years ago. For 28 years, not quite like Jacob, I’ve wrestled with it all. And the more I wrestle, the stronger I get. The more I wrestle, the stronger the foundation that I’m trying to build my house upon.
Kasich wasn’t just describing a personal crisis. He was explaining where he gets the strength that forms the foundation of the sometimes unpopular decisions he makes, like choosing to accept Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid. “The storms of life will come,” Kasich said:
It’s inevitable. How’s your house built? The Lord is there to be with you, to support you, to give you strength. Over the last 28 years, I’ve been set free. People say John Kasich, he takes positions we don’t understand it. I’ll tell you what the Lord has done for me. Confidence, strength, and worldly criticism doesn’t matter a whole lot to me. You see, I know the role that I have to play on earth — to lift people, to realize that all those who are made of the image of the Lord need to be upheld. We know we need to love our enemies. Boy, that’s a hard one. We know we have to be humble. We know we have to stand for the poor and the bereaved and the widowed. God bless those people in South Carolina. They’re playing for the larger gain, I believe, just like I am. I have a mission, and I have a role on this earth, but I’m trying to prepare myself for the world that’s yet to come.
It was not by any means a typical political speech, even to an organization called the Faith & Freedom Coalition. But just because an audience is made up largely of evangelical conservatives does not mean that the most frankly religious performance wins the day.
“His presentation was not what I expected from him,” said Janne Myrdal, the North Dakota state director for Concerned Women of America, in an email exchange. “I am, as were most of the national grassroots leaders in the room, clearly aware of every candidate’s efforts to reach this faith audience. We are not a naïve audience, and I would wager to say pretty discerning. So though all the speakers spoke clearly of faith, some did not convince, due to lack of a solid record and lack of convincing and clear vision for leadership.”
Indeed, the audience was not visibly all that enthusiastic about Kasich’s speech, as they were about some others (Ted Cruz and Scott Walker are two examples.) And while there were other reasons for a lack of fervor — Kasich has not declared his candidacy yet and hasn’t been working the campaign trail as much as some other candidates — there’s a possibility that Kasich’s overt religiosity might actually backfire before the most religiously conservative audiences.
At the heart of the matter is Matthew 25, the Bible passage Kasich has sometimes cited for his approach to social welfare policy, and particularly Medicaid expansion. In that chapter, Jesus discussed helping those in need — “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” Then Jesus said, “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”
Kasich has taken that as his basic text on the issue of Medicaid expansion and other aid programs. “Just read Matthew 25,” he said on Fox News in January. “Did you feed the hungry? Did you clothe the naked? If we’re doing things like that, to me that is conservatism.”
“You know, Matthew 25 says that it’s about how you treat the widowed, how you treat the poor, how you treat the hungry, how do you clothe those who have no clothes,” Kasich said on CNN in February. “That is a conservative position to help them get on their feet so they then can assume their rightful place in our society.”
Kasich believes what he believes so strongly that he can sometimes be a bit confrontational about it. Politico recently reported that last year, at a Koch conference in California, a GOP donor expressed her disagreement with Kasich’s Medicaid expansion “and questioned why he’d expressed the view that it was what God wanted.”
“The governor’s response was fiery,” Politico reported. “‘I don’t know about you, lady’ he said as he pointed at [her], his voice rising. ‘But when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor.'”
It’s no understatement to say that sort of thing doesn’t sit well with some evangelical conservatives. Yes, Jesus commanded his followers to care for “the least of these.” That’s what many try to do. But they don’t believe that directly translates into, say, Medicaid expansion.
“In a couple of places where he’s irritated the economic wing of the movement, he has cited, probably not conventionally, a biblical defense, or cited Christian teachings as the explanation for why he expanded Medicaid,” said Gary Bauer, president of the activist group American Values and another speaker at the Faith & Freedom event. “There are millions of people who fall into the category of religious conservatives. I hesitate to generalize too much, but having said that, generally speaking it’s fairly well understood among these voters that the biblical injunctions about helping the poor are seen as a mandate for the individual with their own resources, not talking points for big government.”
After his speech, Kasich moved to the back of the room to talk with reporters. Asked about his faith, he stressed that “the most important thing is you don’t want to try to jam anything down anybody’s throat.” But he added that, “I’ve just come to the conclusion that I’ve got a handbook for what I think is a good life. It’s been handed to me by the Lord — not to me personally, but the world. And I just think it works pretty well.”
I asked Kasich how far that went. If faith guided a president’s approach to social welfare programs, what might it mean for seemingly non-related issues, like the debt ceiling or the Trans-Pacific Partnership? “First of all, I don’t turn to Matthew to figure out what my views are,” Kasich explained. “I’m just saying to you that my faith talks about things like the widowed, the poor, the disenfranchised. It’s kind of something that is part of you. But I don’t like, OK, let me open the Bible and figure out what I’m going to do today. It doesn’t work that way.”
“What my faith does for me, I hope,” Kasich continued, “is give me strength. It allows me to have patience, it helps me to love my enemies, it helps me to care more about other people, to be more empathetic towards other people. That’s what it’s about to me. And I’m thrilled that we are helping people in our state who have lived in the shadows for far too long, not only in Ohio but in America, and they need to be brought out. And I’m going to continue to do what I can to do that.”
If he chooses to run, Kasich will have many more opportunities to make his faith-based case to Republican audiences in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and perhaps beyond. And the GOP’s religious conservatives can decide whether the most frankly religious candidate in the field will get their vote.
