That voice from the past, on the Paul Finebaum Show.
Grieving voices in a radio flock show the power of mass media in the lives of ordinary people
We all live with algorithms that help shape the media we consume and, thus, the content of our lives.
At the very least, the algorithms shape advertising.
Wherever I go online, information gathered from my digital shopping sends me waves of messages about walking shoes and guitars. Then again, it helps to know that my birthday falls precisely at the peak of the Baby Boom curve, which means that — during news and sports programs — the algorithms send me waves of ads about health and insurance issues.
During my lunch break the other day, the YouTube tech gods pushed me toward the video at the top of this post — “Tammy Bullard: ‘War Damn Eagle.’”
I live in the heart of “SEC, SEC, SEC” country and, from time to time, I watch YouTube features drawn from the radio-cable TV world of the omnipresent Southern sports broadcaster Paul Finebaum. Thus, it isn’t strange that a Finebaum clip showed up on my YouTube sidebar.
The key: I watched this YouTube feature before I noticed the dates for this woman’s life — 1967-2018. I just knew that I had heard her impassioned Southern-fried voice on the Finebaum show (we moved back to East Tennessee nine years ago). I instantly knew who she was.
What I heard in this video was a reality way bigger than the emotional ties that bind believers inside sports fandoms. The blitz of press coverage showed that this was more than a mere “sports story.”
People were not weeping during their calls to Finebaum, after the tragic death of Bullard and her 3-year-old granddaughter, because they were Auburn fans. You are listening to members of a community that, in some ways, resembles a church. During some of her calls to Finebaum, Bullard had shared what amounted to requests for prayer and support during hard times in her family life.
Consider the top of this Birmingham, Alabama, press report:
A woman killed in a horrific crash on U.S. 280 was the well-known Paul Finebaum Show regular caller Tammy from Clanton.
The character, cut-up and avid Auburn University football fan and “full-time granny,” 52-year-old Tammy Renae Bullard and her 3-year-old granddaughter died just before 8 a.m. Friday on U.S. 280 between Sylacauga and Childersburg. "She was a mother, a grandmother, a wife, a friend. She was a lot of things,'' said fellow Finebaum caller Rusty “I-Man” Garner. " She was just a tremendous person. It’s a shock."
Here’s a key part of that narrative, in Bullard’s own voice:
Bullard has been a die-hard Auburn fan for decades, though she was married to an Alabama fan. In a profile done on her by Style Blueprint, Bullard told the publication how she became a caller on Finebaum’s show. You can read the full profile here.
“Well one day, I was at work and I was griping about Auburn losing. My FedEx driver is an Auburn fan too, and he said, “Tammy, you have got to listen to this,” and he put it on the Finebaum show — on JOX 94.5 FM back then — and I listened to it in his truck for a few minutes, and I said, “Hey, who in the world do these people think they are? These Alabama fans ain’t got nothing, not a clue!” Well, I tell you what, that’s what made me call … “Shane from Center Point.” He made me so mad talking about Auburn the way he was talking about Auburn, and I just told my FedEx driver, “Do you know this number?” and we waited for him to say it over on the show, and I called in right then and there and responded to “Shane from Center Point.”
OK, Rational Sheep readers: Maybe you are not a sports fan. During the two decades of GetReligion, I was amazed how many readers of that news-driven website had zero connection to America’s massive sports culture. And this Substack project? We will see.
The other side of this post is that we are talking about the story of a blue-collar woman in Bible Belt, pick-up truck America.
That’s another community that doesn’t show up often — at least in accurate stores — in American news and entertainment. But also note that these folks are part of an unchurched America that is, rapidly, joining the “none of the above” niche of people who have their own brand of “spiritual life” outside of pews and traditional religious communities.
I do not know if — during the years that Bullard used the Finebaum show as a semi-church — she openly talked about religious faith. I don’t know if she asked for prayers during her times of family crisis.
But listen to the voices in that Finebaum tribute at the top of this post.
Those voices are why I felt drawn into the Bullard story — before I noticed that it was “old news.”
That kind of pain is ancient, human, news. I thought about that classic Brad Meltzer quotation: “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” I have seen that quote attributed to many other speakers and writers, of course.
I will end this meditation with a 2017 “On Religion” column in which I addressed a Southern pastor’s ties to another real-world community, one that wasn’t based on mass-media connections. The headline: “Pastor looking for God-shaped holes in the 24/7 human dramas at Waffle House.”
I’ll bet that if you visited the Waffle House in a typical SEC Country town, you would meet people who knew the story of Tammy Bullard. You might find people who wept when she died. You see, they were part of her radio church.
In every religious sanctuary, there are people who believe they've staked out pews as their very own.
The same thing happens at Waffle House, those very-Southern, 24-hour-a-day diners in 25 American states. Many of the patrons claim their own territory day after day, week after week.
The Rev. Gary Liederbach is a Waffle House regular in Madison, Ala., where he leads the One Direction Community, a circle of house churches, community meals and kid's groups targeting people who may not feel comfortable in regular churches. He's an ordained United Methodist minister, but doesn't wear that on his sleeve when using the Waffle House as his unofficial office.
One recent morning, Liederbach sat down at the diner's middle bar, where the line of side-by-side chairs almost requires diners to chat with waitresses and each other. He didn't see the empty coffee cup of a rough, 50-something regular that, as a matter of pastoral discretion, he called "Chuck."
When Chuck came back inside from smoking a cigarette, he lit into Liederbach with a loud f-bomb, blasting him for taking his seat.
"The two waitresses who were standing there almost jumped over the bar and verbally attacked Chuck," wrote the pastor, in an online reflection. "One said, 'Now you listen here you mother f***er, this man here is a f***ing man of God and if you ever talk to him like that again I will kick your f***ing @ss!' " Another added: "He's my f***ing pastor! … Show some f***ing respect!"
The waitresses exchanged high fives and one shouted an image – sort of – from a recent Bible lesson with Liederbach: "Sword of the spirit, b*tch!"
Chuck walked out.
Perhaps, the pastor thought, the waitresses needed deeper insights on St. Paul's Letter to the Ephesians, which urges believers to "put on the full armor of God," while taking up the "sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God."
Welcome to territory rarely visited by clergy, but prominent in surveys like the Pew Forum's "Religious Landscape Study." In terms of education, 41 percent of "high school or less" Americans said they "seldom" or "never" attend worship services and 48 percent said, "don't know." Also, 61 percent of those making $30,000 a year or less answered, "don't know," with 35 percent saying "seldom/never."
Waffle House is a great place to listen to blue-collar people, said Liederbach. He recommends the bar, which means sitting elbow-to-elbow. That's where "you're gonna get pushed to talk about real stuff," he said. Folks in booths usually want to be left alone.
Still, he said, lots of people are listening and paying attention.
"You have to just hang out at first, without saying much. … After a year or so, you're real. You're part of the crowd," he said. "But you hear everything at the Waffle House. That's where the stories are. … You hear people asking, 'What's going on? What's your story?' You see who tips the waitress an extra $10 if they know her family is struggling."
Waving the "pastor" flag early on just "makes everybody put out their cigarettes and start talking funny." The cuss words vanish and people in the parking lot hide their beers.
A few weeks after the blow-up, "Chuck" – smoking in the parking lot – quietly requested prayer because of a prostate cancer test. Then he started talking about Vietnam and his nightmares about killing enemy soldiers, including children and the elderly. After the war he stopped going to church, sure that God could never forgive him.
Soon after that, Chuck's son was killed, accidentally shot in the head while handling a handgun he thought wasn't loaded. The son died a few hours later.
With this wave of grief, said the weeping father, his Vietnam nightmares returned with a vengeance. Was this God's judgment?
The family has no pastor and cannot afford a funeral. Would Liederbach come to the house and say a few words over the body of his dead son?
Lots of Waffle House regulars have "real religious questions and real needs. But they're terrified of being judged," said Liederbach. "Their lives are often pretty unstable. They lose jobs a lot and their families get pretty messed up. … It took me a long time to realize that the Waffle House is their church."
Brings back good memories listening to Tammy in the car with my dad when he'd pick me up from school. She was the verbalization of what every Auburn fan felt and thought inside but who has too much self-importance to verbalize it themselves. It's bad enough to be mocked when Alabama beats the tar out of us, but it's another thing to be accused of redneckery in the process [because as everyone knows, we Auburn folk are genteel compared to the white trash up in Tuscaloosa ;)]. I was quite grieved when she passed.
In regards to the Waffle House topic, I wonder how middle class and affluent Christians can interact with folks like Chuck without treating him like a goldfish in a bowl, even if unintentionally. I'm not saying that the Methodist reverend in the article is doing that, but I often think of folks like Chris Arnade or Mark Laita with Soft White Underbelly (neither are Christians to my knowledge). I have a great deal of respect for both of their projects and do find a lot of their work interesting. But every time I watch Soft White Underbelly or flip through Dignity, there's a tinge of "look at these freaks" which I find cringe-worthy. Maybe freaks is too strong of a word, but a lot of their work seems to be consumed by people, both Christian and not, who get a sort of moral thrill out of empathizing through the medium of page and screen with those who have, through their own fault or not, messed up lives. It's an akin feeling I get when thinking about the one-week vacation missionaries who take a trip to Haiti or Nicaragua and post all over the internet about what a profound lifelong impact their mission-vacation had on them.
I juxtapose this sort of posture with my father, a tithing Baptist and a general contractor. Never been on a mission trip in his 50+ years on this earth. A good many of his subs are like those detailed in Arnade's Dignity. I grew up around them too. A lot of them have hard lives, and granted, a lot of that is due to their own actions.
I also grew up in a community where my family are the "top dogs" and in which we've been for over 200 years. Most of the families in town until recently have also been in the community for multiple generations, as well. A lot of folks in town rely on my family, both extended and immediate, for jobs and other forms of guidance, be it spiritual, familial, etc. Folks don't talk about this openly, but this peculiar situation is fast fading from American life, and ours even, in the particular, is threatening extinction. It used to be the norm, not peculiar, writ large. Both rich and poor used to interact regularly in American life. Only the truly elite were walled off from the rest of society. That's changed now with suburbs, gated communities, etc.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is my father's mission field as it were seems like a very natural one. He loves and supports those who in varying degrees are dependent on him. His love and charity and kindness and wisdom extend to those tangible people he comes into contact with everyday. Some are already in Christ, some come to Christ, others never will, but he shows them all general kindness and regard. There have been not a few lives turned around by father's Christian paternalism. Once I come into means myself, he is the model I want to base my life on.
So, again, I guess I'm asking if most Christians in the US are educated and middle class and live exclusively amongst people just like them, how can they effectively minister to the Chucks and Tammys of the world? You ever seen a white Christian kid who goes to private school try to carry on a conversation with an inner city black kid on a service trip? It's hysterical. As having gone to private school, but also living in that unique community I mentioned above, I sort of have one foot in each world.
My last thought (sorry you've now been plagued by my epistle-length comments like Mr. Dreher's comments section-- I often use comments sections to work out my own thoughts and ideas which is not conducive to my concision). The Waffle House folks know of Christ, but by and large they don't know him. They see him in the folks with pearly teeth and slick haircuts and diplomas who go to church on Sunday. They see that and either hate it or are discouraged or both. My father has pearly teeth and diplomas (the hair left long ago), but the fact that these young men work with him everyday, they see him at his best and at his worst in his relationships with them and his friends and his family. He's real to them. He's no archetype. Just as they're real to him, and they're no longer merely an archetype. Affluent Christians need to live amongst the poor again. This doesn't mean impoverish yourself, but it does mean living in more uncomfortable places for the sake of ministry. It is right and good that God has bestowed wealth on you and that you use it for your family. Be the gentleman (in the archaic sense of the word) and use it to support those who may not now be able to support themselves. See them everyday, and they will see you. By necessity, they will see Christ in you. Because right now, a lot of them only see your wealth and status. Don't let those good things be the bush that hides the flame of life.
Beautiful. Poignant. Powerful. Funny. Thank you.