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