NASCAR and the Rise of Cultural Christianity

During the first televised flag-to-flag NASCAR Sprint Cup event in 1979, CBS agreed for the first time to package an invocation, national anthem, and command to start the engines. The decision to combine the opening activities proved important to both NASCAR and the network. CBS executives reported that viewer comments in the week after airing the Daytona 500 focused almost exclusively on the invocation and were overwhelmingly positive. CBS and NASCAR had tapped into the deep vein of cultural Christianity in America. The network then decided that all future broadcasts—though televising every race would come several years later—would include the invocation. Today, NASCAR's three major divisions are the only national sporting events to televise the invocation. While often generic in tone and content, many are deliberately evangelical. Preachers, however, have not always supported automobile racing.