the underview.

Mike Rusch

The underview is an exploration of the shaping of our place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. The underview is a series of discussions within and about the community of Northwest Arkansas. The underview explores our collective understanding and beliefs about the place we live. These discussions will include topics that are foundational to the identity of our region, the history of our communities, the truth of conflict with the land and its people, and the current challenges and opportunities for our community.

  1. 4d ago

    the membership with Dr. Jared M. Phillips (ep 3, 33).

    The season comes home. After a reckoning with what the show found in its own region, a sociologist's definition of white Christian nationalism, and a national practitioner's answer to it, the underview returns to the ground with the one guest who has been with it since season two. Dr. Jared Phillips is a historian at the University of Arkansas, director of its new Ozark Studies program, and a sixth-generation Ozarker who farms above the Muddy Fork of the Illinois River with draft horses. He grew up in a Baptist church off Emma Street in Springdale that became one of the largest churches in the South. In season two he said something the show could not put down. The Baptists of the poor South were historically anti-power, the loudest voice at any county meeting against imposition, and the shift to seeking power is something nobody has reckoned with. This is the episode where that sentence gets its hour. Phillips interprets rather than recounts. He traces how the faith communities of a disconnected hill country once connected the place the way a railroad did, and how a region that emptied out in the fifties was refilled in the seventies by two populations, a counterculture that came for the frontier myth and a far larger wave that came looking for an America they believed still existed here. He describes the energy those newcomers brought into half-empty pews, the sermon kits that arrived with Bible verses attached, and the call to arms that fell on prepared ground. He names what happened when the money arrived and the biggest churches grew up alongside the biggest companies, and he refuses to pretend anyone has explained how that squares with the Sermon on the Mount. Then he asks the question the season has been circling. Not what this place should become, but who is allowed to ask.  https://www.theunderview.com/the-membership-with-dr-jared-m-phillips-university-arkansas-ozarks About the underview: The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/ Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the membership with Dr. Jared M. Phillips (ep 3, 33).

  2. Oct 20

    the more perfect union with Rev. Adam Russell Taylor (ep 3, 32).

    Rev. Adam Russell Taylor is president of Sojourners, the national Christian organization that has spent five decades insisting that biblical faith and social justice belong in the same sentence. His story starts with a wedding. His parents married in 1968, one year after the Supreme Court said a Black woman from segregated Louisville and a white man from outside Cleveland were allowed to marry each other, in a case that carried the name of a couple called Loving. Their son grew up convinced that America's diversity is its greatest superpower, that there have always been people who treat that superpower like kryptonite, and that the country has been locked in a tug of war from its founding over who gets included in We the people. His faith caught fire at Ebenezer Baptist, broke in Cape Town, and surrendered completely in the mist of Victoria Falls. From the Progressive National Baptist tradition that formed him, he carries one conviction above the rest. A commitment to justice and a commitment to following Jesus are interwoven and inseparable. From there the conversation goes directly at the season's hardest question. How does faith enter public life without becoming a weapon? Taylor tells the uncomfortable history of the religious right's founding, names what he underestimated when he wrote A More Perfect Union, including the patient local infrastructure the Christian nationalist movement built in places like Northwest Arkansas, and then offers the guardrails. Political, but never partisan. Principled, but never overly ideological. Engaged in our politics, but never used by our politics. Because the kingdom of God is never fully on the ballot. He puts the hope in the same place as the danger, the church, the neighborhood, the block, speaks directly to pastors trying to hold divided congregations, and names this a kairos moment, the kind of time when things grow fraudulent enough that something new can be born. Asked what wholeness means, he gives the season one of its clearest answers yet.  https://www.theunderview.com/the-more-perfect-union-with-rev-adam-russell-taylor-sojourners About the underview: The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/ Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the more perfect union with Rev. Adam Russell Taylor (ep 3, 32).

  3. Oct 13

    the christian nationalism with Dr. Andrew Whitehead (ep 3, 31).

    Arkansas ranks first in the nation in support for Christian nationalism. More than half the state qualifies as supporters or sympathizers in the Public Religion Research Institute's fifty-state study, and almost six in ten white Arkansans do. This episode sits down with the scholar whose research built the scale behind those numbers. Dr. Andrew Whitehead is a sociologist at Indiana University Indianapolis, co-director of the Association of Religion Data Archives, and author with Samuel Perry of Taking America Back for God, the first comprehensive empirical study of Christian nationalism in the United States. He is also a Christian, raised in a one-stoplight Indiana town, and his second book, American Idolatry, was written from inside the faith. In this conversation he defines what Christian nationalism is and what it is not, traces its history from a fifteenth-century papal decree through manifest destiny to the present, and explains why a framework that is actually shrinking in numbers has never been louder or better positioned. The conversation stays rooted in place. What does it mean that the framework shows up in school boards, county buildings, and the state Capitol, not just sanctuaries? What should a listener listen for in a sermon, starting with the American flag at the front of the room and the edges of the word neighbor? And what does resistance look like for people of faith? Dr. Whitehead's answer begins with a sentence anyone can say and ends with a practice of democracy he compares to a muscle. The first full conversation in the show's series on Christian nationalism, and a companion to the reckoning, the episode before it. This is not a conversation against Christianity or against America. It is a conversation about power, who has it, who wants it, and what happens to neighbors when faith becomes an instrument for taking it. Recorded with co-host Monica Kumar framing the question the series carries forward. Who really is my neighbor? https://www.theunderview.com/the-white-christian-nationalism-with-dr-andrew-l-whitehead About the underview: The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/ Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the christian nationalism with Dr. Andrew Whitehead (ep 3, 31).

  4. Oct 7

    the reckoning with Monica Kumar & Mike Rusch (ep 3, 30).

    In the first week of Season 3, before a single faith leader had been interviewed, a post appeared in a local political group warning people to listen to this podcast with discernment. It quoted the opening episode four times and named co-host Monica Kumar's work in belonging and equity as the lens that would shape what followed. A few weeks later, listeners began sending the opposite message. That the show was platforming churches. That it never asked who those churches actually welcome. That a straight white host would of course feel welcome anywhere. This episode takes both critiques in full, in the writers' own words, and answers them. It explains the method, a narrative interview with the same questions sent ahead to every guest, and why twenty five rooms would have become three if the hosts had argued instead of listened. It names the one line the show would not cross. It tells the story of a community that agreed to participate and then withdrew out of fear for its own safety, and of the largest churches in the region that did not answer the invitation. Then it plays five recordings from pulpits the show chose not to interview. They are not named. They are posted publicly by the churches themselves. They are not the worst of what was found. From there the conversation turns to the thing the season kept running into and could not avoid. White Christian nationalism, present in roughly forty percent of the faith communities surveyed, and the question of what it means for civic life, for city councils and school boards, for who belongs in Northwest Arkansas and on whose authority. This is not a conclusion. It is the turn in the road. Five sermons were played. The research points to hundreds more. The question the episode leaves open is whether this is a handful of loud voices or the groundwater, the current that runs below the surface of the place. The next set of episodes brings in people who have spent their careers studying it. Recorded in Bentonville, Arkansas. https://www.theunderview.com/the-reckoning-with-monica-kumar-mike-rusch About the underview: The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/ Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the reckoning with Monica Kumar & Mike Rusch (ep 3, 30).

  5. Sep 29

    the buddist community with Sư Cô Janna Panna (ep 3, 29).

    Episode Webpage:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-buddhist-community-with-su-co-janna-panna About the underview: The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/ Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the buddist community with Sư Cô Janna Panna (ep 3, 29).

  6. Sep 22

    the freewill baptist church with Ben Gibson (ep 3, 28).

    Pastor Ben Gibson did not grow up in a Christian home. His earliest memories are the police at the house, and then a kitchen in Colorado where his father, newly and radically saved, poured every ounce of alcohol down the drain. The whole family was baptized together in 1984. Fifteen years later, on the Saturday night before Easter, a patch of ice took his father's life, and a calling arrived that he can only describe as a compulsion. Since 2011 he has pastored Phillips Chapel Free Will Baptist Church in Springdale, the most diverse city in the Ozarks. He teaches his tradition with real care. Free grace for everybody. Congregations that answer to no hierarchy. A church that rewrote its own bylaws to match what it actually believes, traded the youth group for rooms where seventy-year-olds and toddlers pray out loud together, and scattered itself into neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. Since the lockdown lifted it has grown by roughly a quarter every year. And this is the conversation Season 3 has been circling without a guest willing to represent it until now. Gibson has preached on Christian nationalism by name from his own pulpit and claimed the term. At this table he lays the vision out with unusual candor. A nation brought back to Christ, not by force but by conversion, by discipleship, by generations of believers stepping onto school boards and city councils until the laws change and the culture changes. He also says the church was never meant to wield political power, that top-down political rescue is a pipe dream, and that he is not sure America can even be called a Christian nation. Both of those are his words, and the space between them is where this episode lives.  https://www.theunderview.com/the-free-will-baptist-church-with-ben-gibson-phillips-chapel About the underview: The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/ Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the freewill baptist church with Ben Gibson (ep 3, 28).

  7. Sep 15

    the cost with John Ray (ep 3, 27).

    ⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains adult subject matter and other content that may be disturbing to listeners, including grief and personal loss. Listener discretion is advised. John Ray landed in Elm Springs, Arkansas in 1988 for a one-year Youth With A Mission program he signed up for mostly to prove God was not real. He stayed. Almost four decades later he sits on the leadership team at Vine & Branch Church in Fayetteville, and he describes faith not as a conclusion you reach but as a practice you keep. Belong, become, believe. That is the order his church works in, and he has lived what that order costs.  In 2009 his youngest daughter was killed and everything he believed came down to the foundation. A Quaker seminary in Portland gave him something to rebuild with. Then, at the end of 2019, a leadership team split fifty fifty over the role of women in ministry and the inclusion of LGBTQ people looked at the most credentialed person in the room and told him to decide. He did not want the decision. He made it anyway, and a friend had warned him what would follow. Thirty percent leave because they disagree, and that part is clean. Another thirty leave who agree with you but do not want the mess. It was closer to forty. Three hundred people became thirty. They sold the building, bought a smaller one closer to the most diverse part of Fayetteville, and moved worship to 4:30 on Sunday afternoons for people who work the brunch shift.  This conversation is about what that cost, and about the cultural force John names without flinching. White Christian nationalism, described not as an insult but as water, the thing you swim in and cannot see, the thing that makes your life easier the more you move with it. He talks about privilege, about the pastors he sits with who have reached the same conclusions and cannot afford to say so, about deconstruction that never gets to reconstruction, and about a redemptive theology that gives a person the backbone to name darkness out loud. He would do it again a thousand times. Episode Webpage:  https://theunderview.com/the-cost-with-john-ray-vine-branch-church About the underview: The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/ Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the cost with John Ray (ep 3, 27).

  8. Sep 9

    the hindu community with Sriman Ubhaya Vedanta Venugopala Swami Gattu (ep 3, 26).

    Inside the Hindu temple of Northwest Arkansas on Regional Airport Boulevard in Bentonville, Monica Kumar leads a conversation with Sriman Ubhaya Vedanta Venugopala Swami Gattu, the temple's chief priest, whom his community calls Swamiji. Born into a family of priests in Hyderabad and trained under Sri Chinna Jeeyar Swami, he came to Tulsa in 2001 to serve a new temple there and began driving to Bentonville most weekends the following year, when the local community was perhaps a hundred and fifty families praying in each other's homes. He moved here for good in 2012, the year this building opened. The conversation opens with a Sanskrit prayer and moves through what the Vedas hold as their most basic teaching, why many teachers in his tradition set aside the word Hindu altogether, what a temple gives a community that home worship cannot, and why the sound of Om is understood to make the whole universe answer. Swamiji tells the stories behind Holi and Deepavali as his tradition tells them, describes the temple's blood drives and food collections for the wider region, and explains what he means when he says there are many paths and no conflict between them. Asked the two questions every season three guest is asked, he speaks about what his tradition teaches in a time of clashing perspectives and offers a definition of wholeness that begins with the soul and ends with how we see one another. This episode sits in the season's fourth movement, what is emerging, and asks what a place gains when a community decides to make a piece of ground holy on purpose. https://www.theunderview.com/the-hindu-community-with-sriman-ubhaya-vedanta-venugopala-swami-gattu-northwest-arkansas-bentonville About the underview: The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/ Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch

    the hindu community with Sriman Ubhaya Vedanta Venugopala Swami Gattu (ep 3, 26).
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About

The underview is an exploration of the shaping of our place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. The underview is a series of discussions within and about the community of Northwest Arkansas. The underview explores our collective understanding and beliefs about the place we live. These discussions will include topics that are foundational to the identity of our region, the history of our communities, the truth of conflict with the land and its people, and the current challenges and opportunities for our community.

Information

  • Creator
    Mike Rusch
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    124
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 the underview.
  • Show Website
    the underview.

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