the terms of faith with Mike Rusch.

[00:00:43] mike rusch.: Well, you're listening to the underview, an exploration in the shaping of our place. My name is Mike Rusch and before we go any farther in this season, I wanna make sure that we are starting from the same place. Because we are about to use some words a lot, faith, religion, theology, church, and one more ideology.

In our culture, we tend to use these words like they mean the same thing. They don't. And if we fail to be clear on our usage, we're going to lose the thread of what this season is actually about.

So let me speak to what we mean when we say them here.

faith.

[00:01:19] mike rusch.: Beginning with faith.

Faith is our orientation towards the sacred. Faith lives inside of a person. It's what you carry, your trust, your sense of something larger than yourself. Faith can be named or unnamed, loud or quiet, certain or full of questions. It is yours. It's between you and God or you and the word your tradition uses for this mystery. Faith is not something anyone can take from you. It is not something anyone else can examine. Your faith is yours. We are not here to evaluate anyone's faith. Not mine. Not yours. Not a pastor's, not a priest, not any imams, not a rabbi's, and certainly not a neighbors. That is holy ground and we're simply not walking on it.

religion. 

[00:02:03] mike rusch.: And then religion.

Religion is what tradition holds. Religion is the sacred practices, the stories that we've been told for generations, the rituals, the text, the ethics, the rhythms of a people who have organized their faith into something that can be taught to a child or passed down to a grandchild. Religion is faith made durable across time. In a place like northwest Arkansas where some families have been here for 200 years and others maybe only two years, religion carries a weight most of us only know a little of. Religion is how people hold their memory. And in this region, that memory is held in churches and synagogues and temples and mosques or meeting houses, and in the quiet practices of families whose traditions do not fit into any of those names.

We are not here to rank traditions. That is not our work.

theology.

[00:02:51] mike rusch.: And then theology.

Theology is the reasoning about faith. This is where things get really interesting because faith is interior. You carry that inside of you. But the moment you try to explain faith, defend it, systematize it, preach it, argue it, you've stepped into theology. Theology is what a tradition says about the sacred. It is public. It is written down.

It is taught in every place where a tradition trains the next generation to articulate what it believes, is preached from pulpits. It is debated, sometimes fiercely, even among believers who share the same faith. And I think it's important to name this. Theology is not the same as faith. Two people can share the same deep trust, the same faith, and come to different theological conclusions. That is not a failure of faith. That is a feature of every tradition that has been alive for a long time and has been carried by many people in many places. Theology is debatable. It's supposed to be. That's how it was built.

church.

[00:03:49] mike rusch.: And then when we talk about the church, church is what an institution does in a particular place. In this season when I say church, I mean the institution, the body of believers organized in a place making public decisions. That's the word that we find in our region is used the most because the dominant tradition in northwest Arkansas is Christianity. But the idea is bigger than just a word. A synagogue is an institution. A temple is an institution. A mosque is an institution. Every tradition has an embodied form and a place, a building, a leadership, a budget, a body of people who belong.

So when I say church through this season, here are the wider word underneath it. I'm naming the institutional form that faith and religion and theology take when they put on a roof and open a door in a specific neighborhood.

Church or synagogue or temple or mosque, it is the decisions a body of believers make together in public in a specific place. It is the building on the corner, the leader in the pulpit, the board, the budget, the property, the programs. It is where faith, religion, and theology get embodied in a community with real power. The power to welcome the power to exclude the power to bless, the power to bury, the power to speak, and the power to be silent.

It is faith made, consequential, and because it is consequential. It is also accountable. These are public institutions. Their decisions affect their members, their neighbors, their city and their state. And when we examine any of them, we are not examining anyone's faith. We are examining a set of decisions made by an institution in a place.

And that is fair work. It's honest work, and that is the work that every generation of believers has done when it has loved its institutions enough to tell the truth.

ideology.

[00:05:36] mike rusch.: And this last one, this is the word that's hardest to see clearly ideology.

Ideology is a system of political and social belief about how the world should be ordered. Ideology is public. It is political. It's about power. It is a set of ideas about who should lead, what laws should pass, whose values should shape a city or a region or a nation.

Everyone has an ideology. Everybody, liberals have one, conservatives have one. Libertarians, progressives, populists. Every person walking around with an opinion about how our shared life should be organized is carrying an ideology, whether they can name it or not.

And ideology, it's not a bad word, it's not an insult. It is the description of something real and here's a critical distinction, ideology. It's not faith. Ideology is not religion. Ideology is not theology. Ideology is not a church, a synagogue, a temple, or a mosque. And in a place like northwest Arkansas, and in our time and in our country, ideology has become very good at borrowing the language of the other four terms.

Ideology learns to speak in faith's voice. It wraps itself in religious words. It quotes scripture, it invokes God. It calls itself Christian or biblical or traditional. And when it is put on enough of that clothing, it can become almost impossible to tell apart from faith itself, especially from the inside.

When someone believes that a particular political program is God's will, when someone believes that a particular party is a Christian party, when someone believes that holding public office should require a particular religious identity, that is not faith speaking. That is ideology speaking through Faith's vocabulary.

Every tradition in every place and every era has faced the temptation of ideology, borrowing its voice, we can name that honestly. We also name that the work of telling Faith apart from ideology is the work of every tradition, every believer, every honest person who wants their trust in the sacred to remain their own. And here's a really hard element of this. The person speaking about ideology and faith almost never knows the difference because the fusion feels seamless from the inside. It feels like conviction. It feels like obedience. It feels like standing up for what is right. It doesn't feel like politics. It feels like faith, but faith and ideologies are not the same thing. They never were. Your faith is your orientation towards the sacred. Your ideology is your orientation towards political organization or political power.

Both are real. Both are yours, but they are not the same. And when we confuse them, when we let one where the others clothes, we lose the ability to tell the truth about either one. So here is how these five things shape our place.

Faith, it shapes the belonging from the inside. It asks the question, do I belong here in this place?

Religion shapes belonging across generations. It asks questions like, who are my people and what have they carried?

Theology shapes, what belonging is allowed to mean? What does our tradition actually say about who is our neighbor?

The institution, the church, the synagogue, the temple, the mosque. It shapes belonging in public. Who stands at the pulpit? Who is welcome at the table? Who is named and who is not? And ideology shapes belonging as politics. It asks questions like who counts and who does not? Who is a real citizen, a real believer, a real Ozarker, and who is not?

This season we are sitting down with faith leaders, many of them across many traditions, across the differences, and we are listening for all five of these things at once.

The faith, they carry. The religion, they are formed by .The theology they're reasoning from. The institution that they lead, and the ideology that moves through our region, through all of us, whether we can name it or not. We are not here to evaluate anyone's faith. I've said that before and I'll keep saying it.

We are here to ask honest questions about the other four.

About what religion is carried into this place, about what theology has reasoned toward and reasoned away from, and about what the church and the synagogue and the temple has decided and what it has refused to decide, and about the ideology that moves through our region and our state and our nation Right now, sometimes in our name, sometimes in God's name, sometimes in names, we do not recognize until we stop and listen carefully.

And if you carry a deep faith, we want you here. If you love your tradition, we want you as a part of these conversations. If you trust your pastor or your priest, your rabbi or imam or your teacher, we want you here.

Nothing we are doing this season requires you to let go of any of that. All we are asking is that you hold these five words separately for a little while. Faith, religion, theology, church ideology, hold them separately and listen with us. This is our collective work of discernment.

This is the underview, an exploration in the shaping of our place.