Before he walked into a historically Black Baptist church for the first time, Otis Pickett didn’t know how to talk to God. He had only ever prayed out of the Episcopal Church’s “Book of Common Prayer.”

But in the mid-1990s racial tension was growing in his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, and Pickett’s mother decided to take her 12-year-old son to a meeting organized to pray about the situation and work toward reconciliation. 

At the gathering they met Herman Robinson, a Black pastor who took an interest in Pickett and invited the Picketts to attend his church. That invitation led to a lasting mentorship and an infusion of purpose into Pickett’s life. 

“I’d never prayed with my own words,” Pickett recalls. “And so Herman taught me how to pray. He taught me to love God’s Word.”

Under Robinson’s preaching, Pickett also learned how to enter a personal relationship with God and gleaned a perspective on issues he had been missing until that point. Their friendship continued until Robinson’s death in 2019. From Robinson, he learned how to not only talk to God, but to talk with people about difficult issues.

Over the last year Pickett — PCA ruling elder, Covenant Seminary grad, and university historian at Clemson University — has tried to share some of what he’s learned from Robinson along with his own research and experience on his podcast, “Purpose that Prevails,” as he interviews Christian scholars about challenging issues impacting people in America today.

The podcast’s first season contained eight episodes, and each episode focused on an aspect of racial healing and what the Christian faith has to say about the topic.

For Christians who are hearing a polemic or radical, one-sided presentation on race, Pickett believes the episodes offer a more balanced take.

“We were trying to help folks be able to process the nuance and complexity of what’s in between and help people understand that there are white Southerners, Black Southerners, and other folks who are on this journey,” he says. 

Pickett wants to help listeners to process these issues “through a biblical, historical, and faith lens and not necessarily just a political lens.”

Pickett plans to continue the conversations for another season and is bringing on a co-host, former Clemson offensive lineman and coach Thomas Austin.

Birth of “Purpose That Prevails” 

The idea for the podcast originated in 2023 after Pickett received the E Pluribus Unum Eminent Scholar Award for his work on racial healing in the U.S. South. The organization asked Pickett to create a podcast in addition to some of his speaking engagements.

While he had little experience in the world of podcasts, Pickett was able to work with Next Chapter Podcast out of California on production and developing the episode content. Naturally, the podcast leans into Pickett’s educational background, but also his experiences serving in the church, including his work on the PCA Race and Ethnic Reconciliation Ad Interim Committee.

“I wanted the podcast to center around faith, my historical research, but also how that research is applied in work among Southern churches over the last two decades,” he says.

In the first year of the podcast, the interviews included people from a wide variety of backgrounds, but a common denominator was that many of the guests had faced backlash for their views.

“Many have been cast away from their denominations or from evangelical spaces broadly because they care deeply about issues of race,” Pickett says.

It was important for Pickett that the show’s guests be leading experts in their fields, but also believers. Guests included people such as Jemar Tisby, author of “The Color of Compromise”; Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today; Vernon Burton, a nationally-recognized historian; and Samuel L. Perry, a sociologist and one the nation’s leading experts on Christian Nationalism.

The podcast’s first season was well received and has more than 92,000 downloads.

Former Coach as Cohost

Now as he heads into a second season of the podcast, Pickett has added some star power behind the mic with the addition of Austin, a former Clemson All-American offensive lineman, NFL football player, and Clemson offensive line coach.

Austin is a longtime PCA member who was introduced to Reformed theology during his time as a student athlete at Clemson. When he graduated, his travels as a pro player brought him to Christ Central, a multiethnic PCA church in Charlotte, North Carolina, that was founded by Howard Brown and his wife and Kellie. The Browns are podcast guests during season 1.  

“Racial justice issues were kind of in the forefront, and so I got to experience that with those men and that congregation, which was helpful,” Austin says. 

Pickett remembered the first time he met Austin. Pickett was speaking alongside Howard Brown at CRU’s Clemson gathering and was shocked to spot Austin in the audience.

“This is one of my favorite Clemson football players of all time,” Pickett thought. “I can’t believe he’s hearing me speak.”

At the end of the night, he went up to Austin to chat, and Austin invited him to visit the football practice facility the next day.

They spent the entire day together and have remained friends ever since.

“To be his friend is just the most incredible honor,” Pickett said. “To have a chance to co-host a podcast with him is a dream come true.” 

He believes Austin will be a valuable addition to the podcast.

“I think between the two of us, we’ve got some diverse knowledge, unique abilities and skills that complement one another,” he says.

While the interviews will be fresh, the approach will remain consistent with the previous season, focusing on different topics affecting people of faith in America.

As a coach, Austin has found that many young men struggle with discussing complex topics in a highly politicized climate.

“There are some fringe groups as a result that are reaching some of those men who are looking for answers,” he says.

He hopes that he and Pickett can offer them an example of what it looks like to tackle complicated topics through an informed lens of faith. 

A Humanizing Approach

In each of his first-season episodes, Pickett asks his guests to talk about themselves and their hobbies.

“I firmly believe that if human beings just built relationships with one another and attempted to engage with one another on a human level, then we would be much better off,” he says. “If we understood each person has a story – they have a background, they have a mama, they like to eat, they like to take their dogs on walks – and we understood that about one another, we would be less inclined to denigrate one another.”

It also serves to show that the people he’s talking to are not “ivory tower intellectuals,” but individuals who want the public and the church to engage with their work. 

Austin believes understanding a person’s background helps us understand their positions, too.

“There have been times where I’ve come down on an issue, and I’ve disagreed with someone on it, but you hear their story and their family of origin, or maybe a traumatic event that happened to them, and you realize, ‘Well, there’s a reason why they land this way,’” he says.

While that knowledge doesn’t mean you have to agree, it helps us to understand people better and avoid dehumanizing rhetoric, he says.

“I don’t think you can properly disagree with somebody unless you know their story and then you can properly articulate their point of view and what their stance is,” Austin says.

In some ways, football has helped him put this truth into practice because he’s had to work with a diverse group of people from a wide spectrum of backgrounds.

”If we can do that on the football field, why can we not do that in the church?” he says. “I mean, there are primary issues that we draw the line in the sand, and then there are other issues that are secondary and tertiary issues where we can agree to disagree as believers.” 

Pickett says another major focus of the podcast is to help people understand that anger rooted in fear is never the right response.

“Let’s re-channel that [anger] into your neighborhood, into your church, into your family, into your community, and into the kingdom. And let’s figure out something we can do in our lifetime that’s going to increase the kingdom positively,” he says.

He believes it will help not only individuals, but the church as well.

“I think that’s something we need to get back in Christianity is an attractiveness, a contentedness, a joyful love of neighbor that is unshakable. When we each know our purpose and how God wants to use us, we are able to prevail and overcome difficult moments in life.”

“Purpose that Prevails” can be found online at and on standard podcast platforms.