Friday, May 25, 2012

NASCAR prayers

In an academic world, scholars stake out their intellectual tuft and spend the rest of their careers tending to that spot of ground.  Not everyone follows this model, but most often if someone diverts from her chosen speciality, questions are asked about how the new interest ties into the old one.  In my case, I entered the academy studying religious cultures in the U.S.  Since most of the focus for the past twenty years has been with issues like the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of the "religious right," those subjects filled up my writing time and my bookshelves.  But I have always loved cars, particularly race cars.  Since I grew up about a mile, as the crow flies, from Richmond International Raceway, NASCAR has filled my imagination.  On occasion, I wondered if I could combined my intellectual interest with my "hobby" interest.  More often than not, someone told me that I would ruin any academic life I might have if wrote about NASCAR before I established myself as a scholar of the Civil Rights Movement, so I tinkered away on the latter and longed for the former.

One Saturday evening several years ago, while watching a Sprint Cup race, I realized that NASCAR is the only nationally televised event that shows both an innovation (prayer) and the National Anthem.  All other sporting events show the National Anthem, and even Major League Baseball has added a variation on the seventh-inning stretch during the World Series, but none of the other major sport leagues has a prayer.  What struck me that night, and has dogged some of my research agenda since then, is that in the late 1940s up through the 1970s ministers in the American South often fought against sport car racing, NASCAR in particular because of Sunday afternoon racing.  Bill France, Sr., a driving force behind NASCAR's formation and its elevation to national prominence, recognized the liability early on and had a local pastor open races at his Daytona track.  Since the mid-1980s, local pastors from the area around the event track's town have spoken an invocation before every NASCAR sanctioned event.

Last Saturday night at the start of the Sprint Cup All-Star event in Charlotte, Joe Gibbs, former NFL coaching great and team owner of Joe Gibbs Racing, did his now-annual duties of praying the invocation.  Gibbs has never been afraid to share his faith publicly, and on this night like others before, Gibbs witnessed to the saving power of Jesus Christ and the importance of the substitutionary atonement for all sinners, for himself as much as for those sitting in the stands holding their Budweiser and Miller Light cans.  The prayer is a razor-sharp version of witness tracts that Evangelicals and Fundamentalists alike leave in public bathrooms or an unsaved neighbor's house.  The event passed like so many before it --- prayer, anthem, racing, product endorsement on pit road and in victory lane --- with no fanfare or commentary.  Evangelical Protestantism's marriage to NASCAR appears seamless, but that has not always been the case and most likely isn't now.  Since NASCAR's Sprint Cup series does not race on Easter or Mother's Day, there is a cultural understanding to the invocation.  The spectators know it will be given, take off their hats and bow their heads, to ask for a safe race.  More ritual than rite, the invocation is a formality, except for those who do the praying.

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