Local writer and theologian L.D. Russell explores his devotion to NASCAR.
By Taylor Sisk
Staff Writer
One of L.D. Russell’s earliest memories is of the smell of grease on his granddad’s coveralls. A mechanic by trade and Fireball Roberts fan by inclination, it was Russell’s grandfather who took him, at age 8, to his very first stock car race.
A Hillsborough resident, freelance writer and instructor of religious studies at Elon University, Russell has written a very fine new book called Godspeed: Racing is My Religion, in which he explores NASCAR’s place in the South and, now, in the nation at large, and his own complicated history with the sport. Russell is a believer, but certainly not an unquestioning one. Â
The Citizen sat down with Russell recently, as the rumble of an Orange County Social Club early evening began to build, to discuss Earnhardt, Esau and NASCAR’s roots right here in this community.
The first order of business, though, was to take a little Russell-administered NASCAR quiz, just to prove our cred. And though we pretty much flagged it, we were able to name all four of NASCAR’s top three all-time winningest drivers (there’s a tie for third). Answers at the end of this story.
Carrboro Citizen: So you talk in your book about how we darned near had a major speedway right here in Orange County – Occoneechee Speedway, in Hillsborough – but that some local church-lady types did it in. Tell us about that.
L.D. Russell: Well, it was very much a divisive issue between godly people and hell raisers. The church people did not like racing – and to hear them tell it, it was because the track was encouraging young people to drink and then drive way too fast. But I think part of what was bothering them – if you read between the lines of what they said – was that the track was attracting far more people on the Lord’s day, if you will, than the churches were. So there was some competition between those two groups. And the local conservative church people really gave Bill France Sr. – who started the track, and really started NASCAR; his family still runs the business – a very hard time about the track, and finally succeeded in running him off.
CC: France wasn’t a man to run scared, right? But if he saw there was no money to be had …
Russell: Exactly. He saw the limitations in the area and moved to Alabama.
CC: So we might have had Talladega right up there in Hillsborough?
Russell: Yes. And the thought of that really keeps me awake some nights. To have that track in our backyard – I mean, it would be a horror on the highways if you weren’t interested in the race. But the boon to the local economy would have been tremendous.
CC: How would this area be different?
Russell: Well, Hillsborough would not be the quaint little town it is today.
CC: What kind of numbers do you think we’re talking, dollar-wise?
Russell: Oh, millions a year, if they had two races a year there and say 100,000 fans for a weekend. It would just be incredible.
CC: Quite a few Hog Days.
Russell: Let me compare North Wilkesboro, where there was a track that was shut down in favor of one of these larger tracks in another part of the country. When it was closed, it was devastating to the local economy, because many of the local businesses – restaurants, hotels – would make so much of their annual income in the two weekends when the NASCAR race was held there. I couldn’t give you a number. But to drive through North Wilkesboro now, it’s just become a ghost town, really.
CC: Describe for us the central premise of your book.
Russell: Well, as far as I can tell, it’s two-pronged. First of all, I went in looking for the role of religion in this particular sport, because it does come out of a Bible Belt background.
And the chapter called “Speed Demons and Daredevils†traces the history of this slowly changing relationship between racing and religion – which now, if you watch a NASCAR race, there’s a prayer before every race. Many of the drivers are avowedly Christian – religious, but more specifically Christian, and more specifically Protestant …
CC: And more specifically Baptist.
Russell: Thank you very much; absolutely. Southern Baptist. NASCAR works very hard on its family image, and it’s really incorporated with conservative religious values. The beginning of a race is really one of the weirdest cultural rituals I’ve ever seen mixed together: They have a prayer, they sing the National Anthem and then they have a military flyover.
J.D. Russell. Photo Courtesy of Amy Hart
CC: It’s a very finely wound relationship with Christianity that you describe in your book. I mean, just as they endorse their other products, they’re endorsing religion.
Russell: Yep. In the book, I talk about how the first chaplain of the sport basically said “I’m going to sell God, just like they sell Pennzoil and Pepsi Cola.†So the religion becomes a kind of commodity.
CC: It’s also interesting how stock car racing evolved from the way it once was perceived by the church-going community of, for example, northern Orange County, to the gee-whiz-Jeff Gordon era.
Russell: At its very roots, [racing] was a rebellious subculture. [The original stock car drivers] were the bootleggers who souped up their ’49 De Sotos to outrun the revenuers in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina… And as time went on and the sport grew in popularity, and it began to attractive different people, then you began to get drivers like Darrell Waltrip … all the way up to Jeff Gordon, who are very religious people. And I don’t see any self-awareness on their part of the ironic relationship – at the very best, an ironic relationship – between their Christian religion and “let’s make as much money and build the biggest houses and have the fanciest cars and own jet planes as we can.†That strikes me as very ironic. Because my understanding of Christianity, in its own roots, is quite the opposite of that – much more a communal religion, without an emphasis on money.
So in terms of traditional religion, [these are the kinds of questions] that I mainly explore in the book. But I was really looking for something deeper, because the kind of religion that interests me the most is not the ritualistic sort, it’s more mystical. What is it that people get out of religion? Not just Christians, but Buddhists and Hinduists and Taoists … what are they getting out of this?
Anytime you talk about a mystical religious experience, it shifts over into the inevitable – that which can’t be described in words, which I talk about in the book. So I felt like Don Quixote at first, trying to get into words what it is that I thought about it. But I don’t think it’s just me. I think there is something that draws people to this sport, and it isn’t specifically what we would think of when we talk about something religious. To me the gut of what draws people to religion – and a lot of evangelical Christians to religion, who are all about the personal experience and being saved and having Jesus as their Lord and Savior and being able to talk to God and feel his presence – is this being-shaken-to-one’s-bones, revolutionary, life-changing experience, where you see things different, you feel things different, you experience life on a deeper level somehow. And that’s the part I didn’t understand going in, and what I started figuring out as I went.
CC: You begin and end your book with Dale Earnhardt’s death. You were, and are, a huge Earnhardt fan. It’s interesting, your discussion both of how his death helped define for you racing’s dance with religion and how that death really launched NASCAR to the next level in public popularity. Talk about that.
Russell: I think it has a lot to do with the fact that nobody really knows what the hell is going on, understands what life is. We’re all looking for that, at whatever level, in everything we do. Why did I get up this morning? Why am I going to live in a world that’s going to kill me – when death waits on every one of us, every minute of every day. And it looks to me – NASCAR does, and all these extreme sports all the way back to the gladiators – like an attempt to enact the moment of death in hopes of gaining some kind of clue about what life is, what might wait beyond, and in hopes of finding some kind of encouragement about, “Why do I want to keep living when I know I’m going to die?†And, “Is my life utterly futile because it’s going to end?†And if you get that victorious feeling – whatever it is that brings that to you – whether it’s making money or sex or drinking or racing or sitting in a church and hearing a sermon and feeling like your life’s been enriched – that seems to me to be the real carrot at the end of the stick.
CC: That trip to the track truly is a bone-rattling experience.
Russell: It’s a pilgrimage for me, to try to figure out what happened to me when I was 16 and had what I identified as my first religious experience, and looking at these two things in my life that mean so much to me – as I went through the writing, I realized just how intertwined they are. And I get a lot of the same things out of both of them – which is that being-lifted-out-of-one’s weariness, you know? Being given some kind of reason not to just say, “This life is hard; I’m outta here.†Something to look forward to.
L.D. Russell will be signing copies of Godspeed: Racing Is My Religion on July 6 from 6-9 p.m. at Artmongerz, 610 S. Elm Street in Greensboro.
And the three all-time winningest drivers are: “The King,†of course: Richard Petty, followed by David Pearson, Bobby Allison and Darrell Waltrip.