Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America by Darren Dochuk

Abstract

Reviewed by: Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America by Darren Dochuk Mark Stoll Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America. By Darren Dochuk. (New York: Basic Books, 2019. Pp. 674. Notes, bibliography, index.) Darren Dochuk, author of the highly readable blockbuster From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (W. W. Norton, 2011), has followed up with another well-written doorstop, Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America. Anointed with Oil sets out to tell "the religious biography of a natural resource with outsized— and seemingly otherworldly—importance" (9). Dochuk traces the history of the American petroleum business from Edwin Drake's first well in Pennsylvania through the turn of the twenty-first century. He seeks to show an affinity of wildcatters for a certain individualist style of Protestantism, along with the tensions between the major oil companies and the wildcatters, and how oil and Christianity combined to foster a divisive American politics. Dochuk tells his story through the interwoven lives of a number of major oil figures, all with deep religious convictions: John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Rockefeller dynasty; Lyman Stewart of Union Oil; the Pew family of Sun Oil; and a handful of such independent oilmen as H. L. Hunt, Robert Kerr, Jake Simmons, and a few minor characters. The book's structure is episodic and chronological. Each chapter tells a relatively [End Page 221] self-contained story that connects to the others through individuals and their families, companies, and broader themes. Dochuk is a gifted storyteller. Chapters begin in the early oil fields of Pennsylvania and describe the rise of John D. Rockefeller. Wildcatters, whom Rockefeller pushed out of business, headed west of the Mississippi, a region that conventional wisdom said held no oil, and where they mixed with chance-takers from the South. In Texas, they discovered the immense Spindletop oil field, then quickly spread through East Texas into Oklahoma or headed to California. Contrasting the chance-taking, individualistic, conservative religion of wildcatters with the liberal Protestant leanings of the Rockefellers, Dochuk turns his focus to the Middle East, where several sons of American missionaries worked for American and (occasionally) European oil interests as intermediaries with Muslim Arabs. Later chapters delve into the growing presence of Israel, the denouement of the Rockefeller family saga, and wildcatters' support for libertarian politics and evangelical Protestantism. Only the prologue and two of the twelve chapters focus on Texas, although Texas oilmen figure prominently in many chapters. Individually, chapters are engaging, but the book as a whole lacks a compelling narrative. The Middle East chapters feel disconnected, for example. Dochuk creates a plausible explanation for a wildcat religion, but his choice to concentrate on individual stories does not allow the reader to form an overall impression: Were deeply religious oilmen typical or exceptional? How important was region? That Western Pennsylvania, birthplace of the oil industry, spawned no highly conservative John Birch-style political movements suggests that such movements were very likely linked to Texas and the Southwest rather than endemic to the industry, just as Dochuk's first, region-focused book suggested. Categories need clarification. Dochuk's wildcat religion, for example, is theologically unspecific—Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and sometimes Pentecostal. Is wildcat religion Protestant, then? But without prologue or explanation, Jewish and Catholic wildcatters like Jacob Blaustein, Rudolf Sonneborn, and Ignatius O'Shaughnessy walk on stage. How do they fit, exactly? Moreover, Dochuk never speaks of a "wildcatter Islam," although authors like political theorist Timothy Mitchell have posited an alliance of convenience among oil companies, authoritarian regimes, and extreme Islam. Finally, in light of the considerable detail in Dochuk's account of the early oil industry, the powerful influence of oil money on the growth of conservative evangelicalism and of right-wing politics is rushed. He could have given us much more on this potent combination. For all that, Dochuk's deeply researched history of the neglected relationship between religion and oil makes a major contribution to the histories of the American oil business, religion, and politics, and it provides a [End Page 222] valuable introduction to many of its...