Spring 2020 · Vol. 49 No. 1 · pp. 96–98
Book Review
Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America
Darren Dochuk. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2019. 672 pages.
A growing number of historical studies exploring American Christianity and business have been produced in the past decade. Books about companies like Walmart, schools like Moody Bible Institute, and even the corporate invention of Christian America itself have enriched our understanding of this relationship. Darren Dochuk’s Anointed with Oil makes the argument that the relationship between oil and Christianity is key to understanding America’s global ascendency in the twentieth century. He accomplishes the pursuit of this compelling argument with clarity, exemplary research, page-turning prose, and magnificent scope.
Dochuk’s book is a “religious biography” of oil (9). In his telling, the petroleum industry was from its start divided into two types of companies, the “majors” and the “independents” (10–11). These approaches to crude also represent divergent cosmologies regarding the proper ordering of economics, religion, and America itself. This polarity drives Anointed with Oil. The majors—principally the Rockefeller family and Standard Oil, representing the “civil religion of crude”—are strong on centralized governance and social gospel philanthropy. The independents—represented by the likes of Lyman Stewart and Union Oil, or the Pew family and Sun Oil—espouse “wildcat Christianity,” which gives primacy to a {97} personal encounter with Christ through charismatic faith and missionary evangelism.
When in August 1859 Edwin Drake punched through the earth’s surface in Pennsylvania and launched the oil age, the American industrial economy needed a reliable and abundant source of energy, illumination, and lubrication. Unlike rival energy sources like coal, oil came with spiritual qualities. It was “summoned” from the earth and came to the surface in “earth-shattering” fashion. Tied to Indigenous spirituality from its early days, and with an ancestral line traced back to ancient Babylon, oil was “associated with the work of the gods” (32). As preachers explained, Americans now must “bath in oil’s sacramental splendor” (33).
Guiding America’s oil rush was the rule of capture, which deemed that the owner of the ground surface also owns the resources captured beneath. Hence the rush to drill in as many places as possible, leading to the boom and bust nature of oil’s economy. When mixed with religious experience, oil quickly developed its own eschatology, as time was always short. The drama of oil’s arrival and the suddenness of wealth and ruin inspired oilers like Lyman Stewart to direct profits to saving the world through missionary activities and related enterprises committed to spreading the gospel.
John D. Rockefeller entered this frenetic environment early in its development. As a social-gospel-infused Baptist, Rockefeller saw the need for order and the improvement of the world through a Christian presence in philanthropy, government, and corporate boards, where both market freedom and systems of control mitigating the roughest edges of oil production could be embraced. He quickly consolidated his hold over the industry by buying out his competition, ultimately controlling most of the American oil industry until the 1901 discovery at Spindletop near Beaumont, Texas. Even as detractors criticized him for his heartless conquest of the industry, he saw himself as saving it from its excesses.
To this early cast of characters Dochuk adds Ida Tarbell, an investigative journalist, who by the mid-1880s was well aware of the curses oil brought as she saw her father broken by Rockefeller. From these experiences and her Methodist faith, Tarbell took on Rockefeller in her book, The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), which was instrumental in shifting the cultural narrative around Rockefeller, ending with the breakup of Standard. Strong critiques of the industry continued as issues of labor, racism, and the environment became more prominent.
These threads lead us through the book: Wildcat Christianity and rule of capture on one side, the civil religion of crude and ordered control on the other, and detractors and critics in the middle. Even when the story of American Christianity and oil goes global—the middle third of the {98} book largely concerns itself with the reach of this American industry into Canada, Latin America, and the Middle East—these themes dominate. Here we meet Wycliffe Bible translators in Latin America and American Arabists in the Middle East. Significant attention is given to Alberta and the role Ernest Manning played. As Dochuk writes, Manning saw the importance of linking politics and evangelism, but it is worth noting that Manning was also careful to avoid legislating Christian morality to resolve the social issues of his day, to the dismay of many evangelical supporters. Readers of Direction will also find interesting the brief discussion of Paraguayan Mennonites and oil’s role in the construction of the Trans-Chaco Highway as globalization came to the colonies.
In the Middle East, Christianity mixed with Islam in pursuit of crude as it became clear that monotheism and oil would define the postwar order. Into the 1950s and the Eisenhower administration, an ecumenism emerged in the majors that sought a quadrilateral relationship of Protestant, Catholic, Jew, and Muslim, encouraged by a common foe in atheistic communism. Though the relationships oil created tended along Christian-Islamic and Christian-Jewish lines, the civil religion of the crude camp saw an interfaith future as wildcatters sought energy for Israel. The final third of the book takes us from the 1970s to the present, tracing quickly the seismic shifts in the American-led global oil industry.
Throughout, Dochuk does a masterful job of keeping the reader oriented. The exceptionalism of oil and America is clearly seen as American businessmen and politicians intended to guide it along its planetary paths. Yet the story of exceptionalism also came with its antithesis. Oil was also violent, explosive, and exploitive of labor and the environment. While one could quibble with details—little is said about the place of Getty Oil or Russia—this is neither an encyclopedia nor a global history.
With extensive endnotes, helpful company history charts, and bibliography, and grounded largely in archival research, Anointed with Oil is an exceptional book about America’s global project built upon crude and Christianity. This book is suitable for university courses at any level, and a satisfying read for anyone interested in modern American, religious, or industrial history.
