The Associated Press article, "McCain Hasn’t Ignited the Passions of Evangelicals," offers a glimpse of conservative Christians' rather tepid response in a very Republican region of Iowa to Sen. John McCain's candidacy. Dave Mulder, a retired professor from Northwestern College in Orange City, remarks:
I think people here genuinely believe that George Bush and his Christian faith was very sincere.... People have said that when they talked to him, he took time to let them know how much that Christian belief meant. For McCain, I just don't think there's that same enthusiasm
After the flip: An editorial commentary--and something of a correction to the AP article--from me, who attended Northwestern College:
In the article, Sioux Center is described as "home to 17 churches, 13 of them with the word 'Reformed' in their name, a sign of a strong evangelical presence."
Indeed, 17 churches in a town of less than 7,000 citizens is a sign of a strong Christian presence of a sort, certainly. And in Sioux Center, the Christian presence does happen to be an evangelical one, all in all. But that fact springs from the generally evangelical character in this part of the US of the two main denominations in Sioux Center, not necessarily the number of houses of worship. Many churches in a town does not by definition mean a strong evangelical presence. In countless places in the Christian world, churches' proliferation or sustainability or both can indicate fractiousness or even ethnic diversity.
In Sioux Center, the presence of "Reformed" in the names of the churches denotes their alignment with either of the two denominations the sprung from the old Dutch Reformed Church: the Christian Reformed Church(CRC) and the Reformed Church in America (RCA). As a very general rule, the RCA is actually something of a mainline denomination with many progressive and relatively non-evangelical congregations, especially among the oldest of the RCA churches that tend to be in New York and New Jersey. For instance, the oldest congregation in New York City is the "West End Collegiate Church, which was originally founded when New York City was still New Amsterdam--150 years before the American Revolution. Its present building is of gorgeous Flemish-style design, its private school has an excellent reputation and is arguably the oldest in the United States, but it is not considered an evangelical congregation in accordance with the most common misuse of the word in the secular media: using "evangelical" to mean "conservative evangelical" or even "fundamentalist.