Show Notes
How does a person of faith engage in a public square that feels loud, fragmented, and often exhausting?
In this special episode of the Nuance podcast, we’re flipping the script: usual host Case Thorp steps into the guest seat as he is interviewed by guest host Katie Shook.
While Nuance typically explores the intersection of faith and public life through various experts, today we dive into the personal story and “upstream” philosophy of Case himself. He opens up about his childhood in the Atlanta suburbs, his “obnoxious” days as a college activist, and how his view of public engagement shifted from political power to “faithful presence.”
Whether you’re feeling weary of cultural conflict or searching for a way to make your daily work matter for the common good, this conversation offers a hopeful, nuanced vision for the future of our shared life.
🔑 Key Topics Covered in This Episode:
The McDonald’s Fit: Case recounts a pivotal childhood memory of seeing a homeless man in the suburbs and the realization that faith must have a real-world impact outside the church walls.
Faith in the Financial World: Guest host Katie Shook discusses her role in asset management and how understanding the intersection of faith and work gives purpose to her daily professional life.
Moving Upstream of Politics: Why Case shifted from being a political science major to ministry, driven by the conviction that politics is “downstream” from culture.
Faithful Presence vs. Power: A look at the concept of “faithful presence” (via James Davison Hunter)—staying true to convictions without “lobbing bombs” at the institutions around us.
Institution Building: The importance of “the elders at the city gate”—leaders in business, law, and education who lead for the common good rather than their own bottom line.
Lessons from the Past: Case shares his new hero, Ida B. Wells, and how her “quiet, faithful persistence” as a journalist and Presbyterian changed the American consciousness.
Civility in the Church: How the “Essentials vs. Non-Essentials” framework in the EPC denomination allows for firm doctrine alongside freedom and joy in relationships.
📚 Episode Resources:
The Collaborative: wecolabor.com
For the Good of the Public Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/for-the-good-of-the-public-the-morning-five/id1604696954
The Center for Christianity and Public Life: https://www.ccpubliclife.org/
The Center for Public Justice: https://cpjustice.org/
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Episode Transcript
Katie Shook
The public square is loud, fragmented, and often exhausting. For many people of faith, it feels like a place to either dominate, withdraw from, or survive until things calm down. But for others, the public square remains a site of calling, imagination, and hopeful presence. Today’s conversation is about why faith still belongs there. My guest is Case Thorp, pastor, author, cultural convener, and founder of The Collaborative. He’s also the theologian in residence at First Presbyterian Church of Orlando, which is my home church. He has spent years thinking, writing, and building the intersection of faith work and public life. Case, welcome.
Case Thorp
Woo woo woo! Welcome to my podcast. That’s fun.
Katie Shook
Welcome to your podcast that I’m hosting today. So listeners and viewers, you may be thinking something like, wait, this is Case’s podcast he usually hosts. You’re right. We’re going to be trying something new. I am going to interview him once a month and we’re going to see where it goes.
Case Thorp
Thank you. Look, I’m just so grateful that you’re willing to do this. Y’all, Katie and I have long been friends, and I respect her walk with the Lord and her leadership in the church. We got to do Gotham Fellowship together.
Katie Shook
We did, we did. And that honestly is probably the seed of some of this, is my passion for the intersection of faith and work. Being a single person, we talk a lot about your meaning and a lot of times your meaning and your work within the church. And a lot of times it feels like that’s tied up with family. And for me, being able to talk about how it’s tied up with work is just incredible because that gives a lot of purpose to what I do every day.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Tell everybody, actually, I’m sorry, you’re driving here, but I think they’d love to know what is it that you do for a living.
Katie Shook
No, go for it. What is it that I do for work? I work in the financial services industry. I work for an asset manager, an investment company, and I work on their sales team. So I do a lot of talking to people. So this is always fun for me.
Case Thorp
Which is part of the reason why you’re doing a great job.
Katie Shook
Thank you, that’s really kind, that’s really kind. So let’s start personally. Before this became the language you used professionally, when did you first sense that faith and the public square belonged together? So was there a moment, a place, or a tension that woke that up for you? And many people associate the public square with conflict. What did you see early that made you curious rather than fearful?
Case Thorp
Well, I think back on my childhood, I grew up on the east side of Atlanta in a suburb. My Episcopalian father and Southern Baptist mother found the Methodist Church to be a good meeting ground. So I’m grateful to say there was never a time in my life that I did not know the presence of God and His grace and His mercy. I did confess faith at the age of 10 at Vacation Bible School. I love VBS.
But I very distinctly remember coming home from church one day and there was a homeless man with a sign asking for food. And as you can imagine, you don’t see much of that in the suburbs. So it caught my attention. It bothered me. It lit me up. And my parents were in the front seat. My sister may have been in the car. I don’t remember that. And I said, we’ve got to stop and get him some food.
They, in understandable fashion, were a little scared of such an idea and said, no, no, no, no, there’s city services and there’s church ministries and he’ll be fine. And I just kind of, I remember throwing a fit.
Katie Shook
Yeah, because you’re like, hey, we are the church.
Case Thorp
Right? Well, I didn’t have it quite that theologically sophisticated, but I was thinking, wait a minute, we’re Christians though, and we should do something. Now, I look back on my 10-year-old passion and zeal, and I compare it to now how I respond and minister to the homeless all around us in Orlando, because there’s quite a number more. So, we went home. And I continued to throw a fit. I wouldn’t let it go, because I was just like, our faith’s got to matter. It’s got to make an impact. It’s got to get outside the church. So finally, I wore my parents down, and my dad was like, fine. We’ll go to McDonald’s. Get in the car. So we go to McDonald’s. We get a meal. And we go back to where he was. And he was gone.
And I don’t remember who enjoyed the McDonald’s, probably me. But it just stood in my head and still stands in my heart that we’ve got to make faith real and out there and applicable. And by “out there,” I use the phrase public square because of part of the context in which I minister and the peers and friends that I have. So, yeah, that was kind of the first time I can remember getting faith outside the walls of the church. And granted, I was born and nurtured well inside the walls of the church.
Katie Shook
Yeah. So again, going with the last question, many people associate the public square with conflict. What did you see early on that made you curious rather than fearful?
Case Thorp
What made me curious about the public square rather than fearful? Well, I mean, I’m a nerd, clearly. And so I think on these philosophical levels, like what’s the purpose of something? What is its nature and activity in the world? And by those somethings, I mean government and politics. I’m a political nut. I love politics like some people love, I don’t know, football or the Hollywood scene. And so then I think about like a company and a grocery store and the school system and healthcare. I mean, that’s just kind of where my mind lives. I see, and because of my political interest, I see all the brokenness and all the problems in healthcare and the problems in education.
My dad was a small business owner and owned three Dairy Queens and two Laundry Mats, and so I saw the marketplace from behind the scenes. So I am so grateful for the church, for her love of me and nurture of me. I’m so grateful and have loved my call to serve her. We really have to think deeply, right, in seminary on the church theologically and practically and all those things.
So I’ve just gone to thinking through those other big institutions and entities in our world. And not that I’m looking to create theocracy, but I’m trying to think through our faith and being a Christian as people…like you go into financial real estate worlds, which confuse me, but I’m glad somebody understands.
Katie Shook
It confuses me some days. No, it’s the curiosity rather than the fearful. And I think the other one you can throw in there sometimes is like being exhausted by it. I feel exhausted by it sometimes and have to take breaks.
Case Thorp
Exhausted by the brokenness, especially right now, right? The immigration issue and other, you know, Washington and…
Katie Shook
Exhausted by things that need nuanced conversation, but don’t get those in a lot of places that we, that we… it’s true.
Case Thorp
Ooh, did you just say nuance? I wonder where we could get such nuanced, considerable conversation?
Katie Shook
It’s true. Yeah, you don’t get nuanced conversation in the news or online or a lot of places that you seek some of that information. So, yeah.
Case Thorp
Well, and so that actually relates, to answer your question to the formation of this podcast. COVID and George Floyd, that year of 2020 and 2021, I mean, it broke my heart to see some of the ways in which my peers were reacting to all that was going on. And it wasn’t that you couldn’t have this perspective or that to be on the left or on the right. It was the lack of theological thinking or biblical conviction that was pairing a lot of these very strongly held views. And then you pile on top of that the church opens or closes and just seeing all these different public theologies swashing around in people. They don’t have the terms for it, but we each as Christians have an orientation towards the rest of the world and the rest of culture. And some of those are, I think, healthy and some of those are quite destructive, but yet everybody else just sees, Christians acting this way or that. And so that’s why I’m like, look, it takes nuance. It takes considerable thought and reflection.
Katie Shook
Yeah, it does. So kind of related to some of this, when you say public square, what do you mean? Not in the abstract, but in a concrete way.
Case Thorp
Yeah. The Rotary Club. You know, those are going out of fashion in a way. My grandfather and my father were huge Rotarians. My grandfather was a Paul Harris fellow, which is like the super duper Rotarian. A dear friend of mine, Jason Frazier, who’s actually a big champion of The Collaborative, is very involved in Orlando Rotary.
Katie Shook
Like the Rotary Club. I love that.
Case Thorp
And he has been so kind all through the years to invite me repeatedly to come. And I’ve been a few times. And a lot of actually the long time members at First Pres Orlando are big leaders in the Orlando Rotary. And I said, Jason, thank you. But I don’t need to know any more people and I don’t need to network further. Meaning I am so blessed by a big church with lots of connections, especially when I was the mission pastor, so I didn’t have that most immediate need that Rotary I was very moved when I read that when the huge earthquake and tsunami happened in Japan maybe 10 years ago, where the tsunami wiped out the nuclear reactor, and I mean, tens of thousands were killed. It was just disastrous. And I read that Walmart was doing quicker and further distribution of relief supplies than the Japanese military at first. And you know, I don’t know the backstory to that, but my mind got to running. And I thought what I wouldn’t give to have been a fly on the wall in Bentonville, Arkansas, when the executives were sitting there going, you know what? We have the infrastructure in the network to respond to this. Doesn’t help us earn money. They probably lost money on the endeavor, but we got a bit extra to share and they kicked into high gear. I don’t know that those sitting in the room were necessarily Christ-followers, but I know that we can’t just rely on the government or military to do it all in that situation. And how many other situations are there where we need our leaders of the various institutions around that square? Think of an old European square who are leading for everybody’s sake, not just their own.
Katie Shook
So this sort of probably answers some of this question, but why does it matter theologically that faith is not only private or ecclesial, but that it’s public?
Case Thorp
Well, Jesus’ ministry was public. Jesus didn’t sit in a building and talk to his own peeps. Our lives are public. We might like to be secluded, especially for some people during an FSU football game.
Katie Shook
And I’m a lot less erratic than I used to be. Yeah, I really am.
Case Thorp
Are you? I haven’t seen a tweet from you in a while actually, on FSU football.
Katie Shook
I’ve been pulling off Twitter quite a bit. It’s been healthy for me.
Case Thorp
Yeah. I think I agree with you. Okay. See, I distract myself. What was I talking about?
Katie Shook
It’s been very healthy. That’s fine. Why is faith important in a public sense and not in private?
Case Thorp
Right, right. We live very public lives, even just going to the grocery store. And hopefully, there are studies that public life is actually on the decrease as people pull out of bowling leagues and church institutions and such, and that’s not good. That’s not good at all. So because we live public lives, well, as Christians then, what are the best ways to do that or the not so best ways, the not healthy ways to do that?
Some may disagree with this, but I have stopped trying to talk about hard issues on Facebook. It’s just not the environment. It’s not the forum. People just can’t handle it.
Katie Shook
You can’t have nuanced conversations there. Yeah. It’s part of the reason of me pulling back from Twitter.
Case Thorp
Well, there you go. And so it leads me to question, okay, well where are we talking about these things? Rather than just voting, going home and sitting in front of cable news and screaming at our own sheetrock walls.
Katie Shook
Yeah, that’s fair. It’s fair. You’ve often resisted the idea that faith in public life has to mean power or persuasion. So what is an alternate vision that you’re thinking about working from? What does that look like?
Case Thorp
Yeah. So in the 90s, I was formed post-Ronald Reagan. I mean, I’m in childhood during the Reagan era, but coupled with that era, for which I’m very grateful in respect and regard from a political perspective, with that era was the Christian rights move to organize politically. So you had the moral majority and then the Christian coalition. And let me tell you, I was a true card-carrying member of the Christian coalition. I was at Emory University in a religion major, and in my religion classes, it was interesting. Emory is 40% Jewish, and so you’d usually have a majority of Jews in the religion classes. Then Christians would be the next largest group, and a few Hindus or Muslims here and there, numbers-wise. And of the Christians, I was the only evangelical.
Everybody else would have been from a much more progressive mainline denomination perspective. And what drove me crazy was every conversation would eventually get around to the fact that all the problems or the ignorance in religion are because of evangelicals. And I’m like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. We’re supposed to be polite and politically correct and accepting. Why can we not beat up on anybody else? Not that I want to beat up on people.
But why does every group get shown respect except my group? So I literally signed up to be in the Christian coalition so that I could get the little plastic card and put it in my wallet and just, I’m so obnoxious. I would dramatically pull out my wallet and pull the card out and hold it up and say, wait a minute, and kind of call the question.
So as the years progress, I mean, we get to the Bush era. And in the first two years of Bush’s term, 2000, George W. Bush, right? My parents actually had a dog named W. Isn’t that funny? Because they regarded him that well, and they named their dog W. Anyway, 2000, 2002, Republicans, conservatives that were still so heavily aligned with the evangelical voter, had the White House, Congress, and not quite the Supreme Court. But all the dreams and agendas did not transpire in those two years. And I thought to myself, you know, if you are the group that controls the major leverages, levers of power, and it doesn’t pan out into policy or actual cultural change, what’s going on now?
There’s plenty of political reasons for this. But I have over time become fully convicted that politics is downstream from culture. The politics we exhibit, practice, is downstream from who we really are. So a lot of people look at Washington today and they may get so disgusted and point the finger, well you know what? We elected these people and we can unelect but will we?
Does our system work against us and are we going to keep it or are we going to change it? So I decided I’m not going to be a political science major, which I was in my first year of college. I actually had my ministry call, my call to ministry experience between freshman and sophomore year of college, so I shifted. But I just felt God saying, go upstream and help build the culture, meaning form people in Christ-likeness, equip them for leadership and service in the various institutions. You know, my little drop in the bucket is but a drop. I don’t pretend to think that I will turn the rudder of America’s future. However, I just think it’s a much better investment. It’s very much in call with the Scriptures and God’s expectation for us.
Katie Shook
Yeah, I think maybe talk just a little bit more about like, if it’s not being tied to power or persuasion, what’s our motivation? What’s pushing it? What’s moving it?
Case Thorp
Well, that’s where my missional evangelism kicks in. I mean, what motivates it is the Great Commission, the Great Commandment, the Great Requirement. I’ve really been thinking a lot lately about those three things and how it pans out to be the cultural mandate. You might, you know that term, “cultural mandate” from Gotham. But the Great Commission is that Matthew 28, “go therefore, make disciples of all nations.”
The great commandment is from Jesus, “love others just as I’ve loved you, love your neighbor as yourself.” And then the great requirement is from Micah, “do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.” And how do those three combined sort of focus us on the essential nature of being a Christian and living our faith out in the world and producing and designing and creating in both family and work and art, et cetera.
So that motivation, I think, comes from the call of Jesus. And yes, in some ways, yes for the conversion of individuals to profess faith in Christ, but more than that. And so the more than that, or maybe not say more, but also with that, is the way in which we as Christians are helpful contributors to a pluralistic democracy, that we are ones that are a value add, and not only a value add to a town or a state, but that we’re actually a prophetic voice calling out on behalf of the vulnerable, or that we’re bringing some moral standards to the table and pushing the needle. So I’m driving home from church two days ago, and there’s a guy who’s been on a corner in downtown Orlando for a number of days now, and he has two signs, one in one hand, one in the other. And one is the F word. And the other, I think maybe the other one changes. I’ve got to start noticing. Like one day it was ICE, one day it was Trump, one day it was Elon, it was Elon Musk. Okay, forget Trump, immigration, Elon Musk. Do we have decency laws anymore that you can hold up a sign with the F word on it and a policeman doesn’t come up and go, sir, we’re not doing that?
I mean, I’m driving my kids in carpool to school and the bumper stickers in front of us are just smut. Smut. And, you know, I’m not a T-totaler, moralistic kind of guy, I hope, but where is the baseness of society taking over and where are we as Christ- followers helping to call us to better, to more beautiful, to more good?
So that missional evangelistic call from Christ and then that push to do it both for the saving of lives but also for the flourishing of our living together.
Katie Shook
Yeah. So what happens to Christian faith when it’s removed from shared life, shared institutions, and a shared responsibility? What happens when we try to make that more private?
Case Thorp
Somalia? Yemen?
And my point there is, with all sensitivity to poverty and the difficult nature of life, they are cultures that do not have the riches of the Western tradition, which is the scriptural Sermon on the Mount tradition. Western civilization ethical thought is based on Matthew 5:7, the Sermon on the Mount. And so you see in places where that is not the norm, both in the home life, the individual life, and the work life, you’re free to make it all about me or my tribe or you lose touch with the vulnerable, you lose touch with justice, you lose touch with generosity and sharing resources. So I lift those places up because they are not places where Christianity historically has been able to shape and mold the whole culture.
Now look, slavery was a Christian culture contribution in terms of the Atlantic slave trade. So I’m not saying we’re innocent. I’m not. But on the whole, we wouldn’t have a passion for human rights if it weren’t for a Christian worldview. We wouldn’t have actually the end of slavery. Let us take note that there were a number of Christians who ended slavery.
I was just reading last night about my new hero. Her name is Ida B. Wells. Ida B. Wells. In fact, I’ve got her bust on my desk.
Here’s Ida, let’s see Ida. Do you remember from history class who Ida was?
Katie Shook
I vaguely remember the name, but couldn’t tell you exactly.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Well, I could vaguely remember the name, but I’ve been reminded and I’m actually reading a biography on her right now. She was a young woman in Memphis who was a school teacher and she was actually born, technically, as a slave. So she was born during the Civil War. But then in post-Civil War South, the South, there were a number of efforts to try to quickly help elevate the black community in education and contribution because they come from such hard situations. And she benefited from that greatly and was able to go to college. She was a school teacher and eventually began to write editorials. She was so good at it and wrote so many, she became a full time journalist, owned her own newspaper. And her great contribution to American culture was the way in which she lifted up a nation. She brought to the American consciousness the issue of lynching.
It had kind of been out there, but she really got America, kind of like Martin Luther King Jr. did, to say, this is not right and not who we are. And so she did great work in that regard. So she, I just was reading this week, she was invited to England to share and took England by storm. Here she is 30 years old, very formal, and a small-statured woman, and yet the reports are she would get up to speak and it wasn’t fireworks and boisterous, loud, commanding type speaking. It was a, she was like a rock sharing a hard and true word that just kept audiences captive. So I think about it, and she was Presbyterian. Woo-hoo, that’s what I’m actually doing a little writing on.
Point being, while there are a lot of knocks on Christians and Christian choices on the whole, by golly, we’ve brought a lot of good to the world, a lot of order, and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty because of, for instance, the free market principles of capitalism found in Scripture. So, you know, we have a lot to provide and we need to make sure that we’re still providing it. And also then that other corrective that we’re providing it for the common good, not just for ourselves. That we do make room in a pluralistic democracy for our increasing number of Muslim neighbors or Hindu neighbors as America changes demographically. Anglo-Saxons will be a minority here soon in our lifetimes for sure. And so whether we fight that like that or not, we’re still going to be following Jesus and thriving in our churche. And how do we make our country work?
Katie Shook
So I feel like many Christians feel kind of caught between a posture of like a culture war or withdrawal. I felt a lot of withdrawal myself lately. What do you, that’s not an answer obviously. So what do you envision? What do we do? How do we enter this?
Case Thorp
Yeah, well, and I appreciate that because…my formation in college and seminary, and it’s still alive today, was that in the evangelical world, the two big issues were abortion and the gay rights agenda. And I’m still against both. But that approach has had its shortcomings in the way in which it has been, a narrative has been written, especially by the progressive DC-based media cabal. Not a big fan of the media, left or right.
The witness of Christians has been compromised on the way in which we’ve gone about those two issues, I think. So therefore, how do we make sure that we’re being consistent across all sorts of social ills? What would those positions be, necessarily? And not that it’s always just one. And how, by working on those issues, are we giving testimony to the world of who Jesus is? So I have, I’m really, really passionate about the school choice movement. And I’ve been thinking lately, I’m going to get more public and more invested in that issue. And to me, it’s a civil rights issue that we’ve structured our school system such that we keep the most vulnerable stuck. And it’s not fair. It’s not right. And look, I’m not anti-public school per se, I went to public schools and private. My two older children went to Boone High School. They’re Boonies. My son will be there next year. But I recognize the benefit I have of moving into a nicer area that can get the more resourced and better public school. But the school choice situation, it makes me wonder and ask our friends that are so against it, why is Orange County on its third year of losing public school students?
Why is the school board now shutting down schools? They just announced another seven school closures because the numbers have dropped so much. And my question behind that is, why are people voting with their feet? If the system that’s trying to be defended is so amazing, why aren’t the public schools growing? So that’s a particular issue where I hope that…
And I love public school teachers. I know there are faithful Christians on the other side of this debate, but I hope in the dialogue of the debate, I hope in whatever policy or advocacy that occurs, the way in which it occurs speaks to the love of Jesus as much as the end result. And so, it’s just kind of an example of, I think, where my heart is in helping Christians do such civic work well.
Katie Shook
Instead of withdrawing, yeah. What does a faithful presence actually look like in practice every day? How do we do that?
Case Thorp
Like Ida B. Wells.
So as you remember from the Gotham Fellowship, faithful presence is a concept that is advanced by a University of Virginia scholar, James Davison Hunter. Faithful presence is sort of a posture that’s a bit different than being in your face and pushing hard with the levers of power. Faithful presence is staying true to one’s convictions. That’s the faithful part.
Not compromising on truth, not compromising on conviction, but also being present, not secluding oneself and one’s church and lobbing bombs out towards the other entities in a city, you know, throwing a bomb at the museum or at the city hall. But it’s being present and showing up, showing up with your convictions.
I have been involved in a number of community worship services over the years. So a lot of times churches will do a Thanksgiving service or a show of unity around racial issues, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and I like those because usually we are all being faithfully present in all the various streams and tribes, if you will, of Christianity, all the different denominations.
We’re not there to debate baptism or debate the authority of scripture in different ways. No, we’re there because we want to be grateful and encourage everybody else to be grateful at Thanksgiving. We’re there because racism is bad and we want to promote unity on Martin Luther King. So that’s faithful presence. It’s showing up and showing up without compromising, and you can do that. We have too many examples of either not showing up as Christians or feeling like you have to change, sell out, syncretism is that way in which religious faith merges with cultural ideals and values in an unhealthy way, or at least to me.
Katie Shook
So how do you think about influence without coercion? Like how do we do this? How do we slowly influence without being dogmatic?
Case Thorp
One relationship at a time. But, going into those relationships very self-aware and not just self, but tradition-aware. You know, what is it your church believes and why? A lot of people will opt out of hard conversations because they don’t feel so equipped. Well, get equipped, right? Quit living ignorantly and happily.
And then I think that’s where the passion I have for The Collaborative comes from. Really helping those at that top tier, the mayors and council members, the C-suite leaders of an organization, or even managers of departments, the principals at schools. Those folks that have the power, and the leadership responsibility and opportunity to truly take an organization in a certain direction or to embody certain values in that organization to impress upon them their responsibility and opportunity and call by the Lord. Because I think back to my upbringing and what if the major influencers and leaders on Wall Street, Madison Avenue and in Hollywood were Christ followers, and I’m sure there were some along the way, but they were pulling the levers of culture that were huge levers with incredible power in what they put out in the movies and television and music and how economics played out? What if there had been more of the elders in the city gate pursuing the common good? Again, not creating theocracy, not about creating Christian movies and Christian music, which on the whole is not so great. You agree with me, right? Like sometimes it’s kind of cheesy. There are some better things that are, it’s getting better. It’s getting better.
Katie Shook
Yeah, more than you know.
The only Christian music I listen to is usually country artists, old country artists singing hymns. That’s about it.
Case Thorp
Oh, look, Bill and Gloria Gaither. I love the Gaithers.
Katie Shook
Chris Christopherson, Johnny Cash singing him. That’s what I listened to.
Case Thorp
Okay. I was thinking the other day and you would, you can come with me. When Dolly goes to Glory, I want to go to her funeral.
Katie Shook
Ugh, I can’t think about that, Case, my gosh.
Case Thorp
I know, let’s don’t think about that. I’d love to meet her. I’d love to meet her. But when she does go to Glory, I want to be at that funeral. Like, I said that I was going to be at Billy Graham’s funeral, that I’ve got enough strings to pull to find my way there. And, well, apparently I didn’t. Didn’t make it.
Katie Shook
Dolly Parton, Ina Garten, are my, when they’re, when they go, it’s gonna be very upsetting for me. I love her.
Case Thorp
Ina Garten, Barefoot Contessa. Where did she get that name from?
Katie Shook
A store she bought out in the Hamptons. She bought it on a whim. Her, if you ever get a chance, read her memoir. It’s incredible. Listen to it on the audio book. It’s really great. Yeah. It’s just hopeful, happy. It’s great. I love it. Anyways, sorry.
Case Thorp
Really? Okay. Yeah. Okay, so I’m working back in my mind. Ina Garten to Dolly to the Gaithers to…
Katie Shook
Christian music in the square. That’s where we got in the square.
Case Thorp
Okay. So what if the leaders of Hollywood, Wall Street, Madison Avenue had been about the common good and our society wouldn’t be so base? I don’t think it’d be okay to stand on a city corner with a sign that has the F word on it. But it is. And so it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to be worse for my kids. My grandchildren may not have to go to school and see horrible bumper stickers.
Katie Shook
So where have you seen a quiet faithful or patient faithfulness shape public life more effectively than loud certainty?
Case Thorp
And this isn’t a plug for Presbyterians, but if you take it that way, that’s great. I just think the Calvinist tradition forms, shapes, breeds people who get what it means to go to work, to go to the voting booth, to go to your local school and be a good, decent person with morals and with care for others and with a communal attitude. And so I look at a lot of the older folks in our church who are past their income years and to think back to their presence in whatever organizations they invested in, their workplace, the soccer team, the school, and how it just created a place of goodness and beauty. Buz Ausley is a dear man. You know him.
Katie Shook
I love Buz.
Case Thorp
You’re an elder on session with Buz. That’s our board of directors, for those that don’t know Presbyterian terminology. But Buz was the head of HUD for the region, the Federal Housing and Urban Development Department. And that is a pretty influential position. I mean, he had control and influence over hundreds of millions of dollars worth of grants for housing and homeless organizations, et cetera. And he is, partly due to his military background and being a good soldier personality, but he’s a you know, solid Presbyterian where it’s not about me and I show up to do great work because by golly, that’s what my daddy would have expected and that’s what I expect of my children. And why did they?
Why did my daddy say that? Well, that’s because it’s what we do and are as Christians. I don’t want anybody to hear me think I’m trying to get us back to old white men who are, you know, not having beer on Sunday. No, no, no, no. For anybody everywhere to be faithful and pursue truth, good, and beauty because the vulnerable need it, right?
That kid whose parents aren’t telling him not to drop F bombs is driving by and seeing that sign and thinking that’s normal. And that’s not good. That’s not good. Now on the flip side of this, I loved it. On the flip side of this, when you do see progress that creates new norms, when President Obama won his election and my daughter at the time, she’s now 21, but I guess she was four when he was elected, but I guess she was probably into his second term, she’s eight, 9, 10. And she finally said one day, I just don’t get what the big idea is that a black man’s president.
And I was thrilled because she was hearing us talking about this major milestone and how this is so very different. And yet she’s like, what’s the big deal? And that’s a good fresh word for new generations. What’s the big deal? When it’s a good sign of progress.
Katie Shook
Yeah. It made a lot of progress. Yeah. So how have you learned this the hard way, when if you with loud certainty seen, you know the flip side of all of this, if you’re supposed to be if we see the most progress with quiet patient faithfulness, where have we seen examples of learning this the hard way with the loud certainty?
Case Thorp
Well, at the risk of my career and reputation, I will share a very immature moment in college. So a buddy and I started College Republicans at Emory in Atlanta, where I went to undergrad. And it’s known to be quite a progressive environment in school. And we were young and obnoxious. And we applied to be, as an organization, part of the university president’s Council on the Status of Minorities.
And our argument was, we are a political minority on campus. And so we, well, it really, really rubbed contrary to the spirit of the organization and the committee. And the purpose, the purpose was to help those voices that had not been able to be lifted up and shared in a world dominated by people just like myself, white and male.
Well, we purposefully, of course, applied in order to kind of call the question. And the president, of course, denied our application, but he required that we have a meeting with the other leaders on campus who were a part of the committee. And I imagine his hope was that we might could hear a little better and learn a little more deeply and realize the impact we were having. And people were, of course, were furious and very upset. And I remember saying, to be even more obnoxious, taking their phrase in language and saying, you know, if you had to walk a day on this campus in my shoes, you would know what it’s like to be a conservative at Emory University. Well, looking back on that, I think, you know, what did we really accomplish? We accomplished a lot of ill will and further entrenching of stereotypes.
Katie Shook
I was gonna say you lived into a stereotype a little bit.
Case Thorp
Right? Yes, it might be a funny story to tell to some, but I would have done it differently. I would do it differently today. Learned from it for sure. But you know, nobody wants stuff just thrown in their face with attitude. Nobody does. You don’t take it from your kids. You don’t want it from your spouse. You don’t want it from your friends. And so why do we feel like there’s a freedom to do that in the public square? Well, a large part of that today is because we have our politicians leaving an example in that way, and that’s a shame. But change it, stop doing it, be the example, and make more progress in the long run. More is won with sugar than vinegar. Yeah, that’s it.
Katie Shook
So a lot of public Christianity today is argumentative. And I think we need to move that more towards formation. How do you envision us doing that?
Case Thorp
Well, we need to start in the church first, in the way in which we converse.
One thing I appreciate about the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, our denomination, is that we’re very clear on the essentials. The top 10 things that aren’t debatable. We can talk about them, we can chew on them, but these are our essential commitments. And then, what are all the non-essentials? Those secondary, tertiary things that we can have a breadth of belief because we know Scripture isn’t super clear or provides a variety of options.
And I have found that to be a very helpful way of structuring doctrine and ideas because you instantly know the degree to which you need the ferocity, prophetic voice, weapons, you know, not literally, but strength to an argument. You know, we’re going to be much more clear and firm on doctrinal essential issues, the nature of Jesus, the way in which salvation happens, the authority of Scripture.
But then we’re going to have much more freedom and joy and relationship on other non-essential type issues like what should worship look like and how should one think about military service? So with that we are having some hard conversations right now in our denomination, and I led a meeting last night on a Zoom call and I was the minority voice on this particular issue.
But by golly, I smiled the whole time. I used people’s first names. I tried my best not to roll my eyes or to let that sinful self come out because I wanted people to know, look, I love you and I’m a nice guy, even though we disagree, because that’s not the norm, sadly. And afterwards, somebody sent me a text and said, man, and this guy disagrees with me. I really appreciated your attitude in that.
I just think in the church we need to practice these basic acts of civility and in tone and such. And then, you know, that comes through deep, deep prayer and shaping the heart. You know, Bret Allen, and for those of you that don’t, he’s our Minister of Family Life here at the church. And Bret is one of those few people who you can tell by their demeanor, their attitude, what they say, he has spent significant time in prayer in his life. The flow of the Spirit over the jagged edges of his heart has been ample and smoothed over those parts. And so he’s just a beautiful person to be around. And I’ve got a long way to go. But I need and want to be more formed in God’s presence and in prayer because I need it. It plays into witness and everything.
Katie Shook
All right, last question and we can keep it quick, but I think it’s important. What sustains your hope in all of this, for the square?
Case Thorp
People like you.
Katie Shook
That’s so kind.
Case Thorp
I’m serious. You know, you are a serious Christ-follower who has leaned in and taken hold of these ideas and are applying them in your life. The testimonial side to the work of The Collaborative or other things is to me the fruit of the ministry. So that does give me hope. I’m grateful to see a lot of ministries and ideas and resources being developed from this faith and work movement for the next generation. We did for a number of years biblical entrepreneurship for teenagers. YBE, Young Biblical Entrepreneur was what it was called. And my goodness, it was so cool to see them learning some of these basic principles and living them out in a very fun, structured kind of way. That gives me hope.
Katie Shook
Yeah. I was just going to mention to you, speaking of ministries tied to this, there’s a podcast I learned about, it’s called For the Good of the Public. It’s, I’m trying to remember the guy’s name. It’s Michael Wear, and he is associated with, the, I can’t remember the name of the group, but anyways, it’s a really quick podcast. I listened to it in the mornings. Go through the headlines and they bathe it in prayer. Like they start with prayer where they pray about kind of what’s going on culturally.
I’ll send it to you, Case. But yeah, speaking of ministries that come out of this, I get excited when I see that kind of stuff too. Outside of really just our Collaborative world…
Case Thorp
Well, this. yeah. Well, this is where the host says I’m going to put a link to that show in the show notes.
Katie Shook
I will put a link to that show. We should put a link to that show in the show notes. It’s the Center for Christianity and Public Faith or something like that. I’ll figure it out. But the actual podcast is called For the Good of the Public. It’s great. I love it. I start most of my mornings with it.
Case Thorp
Well, I’m definitely going to go look at that. By mentioning that center, another place that, another thing that gives me hope is the Center for Public Justice. It has a program that they invited me to be a part of where they help train young pastors in how to preach on public square issues. And not to get in the pulpit and tell you what to believe or who to vote for. But I think a lot of us are so fearful of what we see on television and how people act that we avoid teaching and preaching and discipling on these very hard things. And so this program is an attempt to help pastors wisely and fruitfully disciple and preach and help people become good citizens.
Katie Shook
Yeah, I love it. I love it. This has been so fun. It’s called the Center for Christianity and Public Life. That’s the organization.
Case Thorp
Okay, well, maybe the host will put a link to that in the show notes too. Yeah.
Katie Shook
Yes. Case, thanks for naming a way of being present that feels both grounded and humane. And for those listening, we’ll include links to Case’s writing, links to the podcast I mentioned, and the work of The Collaborative in the show notes. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it with someone who feels weary or conflicted about faith and public life. You can also leave your email at Wecolabor.com and we’ll send you Zeitgeist, our journal on faith, work and culture. And many thanks to the Stein Foundation for supporting today’s episode. I’m Katie Shook, and thanks for listening.
