Blog readers are familiar with my take on the presidential candidacy of John Kasich.  I develop these ideas (and contextualize them) in my latest piece at Religion News Service.

Here is a taste:

(RNS) Republican Party leaders want John Kasich to exit the GOP primary race. The governor of Ohio is drawing too many votes away from Ted Cruz and weakening the Texas senator’s chances of stopping Donald Trump from winning the party’s nomination for president.

At the moment, Kasich is polling well in Wisconsin, the site of the next big GOP primary, on Tuesday (April 5), but he still trails Trump and Cruz by about 10 percentage points.

Whatever happens to the Kasich candidacy, his approach to presidential politics has been a breath of fresh air amid an ugly, cantankerous and divisive GOP race. This is especially the case in the way that he applies his Christian faith to matters of public policy.

Trump is winning evangelicals in large numbers by appealing to their fears. A recent report by the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that white evangelicals, more than any other religious group in the country, believe that immigration is threatening “American customs and values.”

Trump has become the champion of white evangelicals by taking a page from the playbook of the Know-Nothings, a pre-Civil War political party made up of Protestant nationalists with an anti-immigration agenda. Trump is here to defend Christian America from strangers who want to undermine it.

Read the rest here.