Darren Dochuk, Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 139–141 Copyright © 2021, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.2.09 Book Review Darren Dochuk, Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2019) Chad E. Seales University of Texas, Austin, USA The story of crude oil is the story of American Christianity. This is the main argument and major contribution of one of the more significant works in American religious history in the last decade. To begin, this is a heavy book, with the literal feel and allegorical mood of a biblical epic. It opens with the prophetic figure Patillo Higgins, riding into Beaumont, Texas, on horseback in the early twentieth century to learn that another oilman, Anthony Lucas, already had struck black gold on the same hill, Spindletop, that Higgins had believed for many years was the place to drill. Rather than concede this rich territory and move on down the trail, Higgins stuck around and finally was able to drill nearby, on another part of Spindletop, thus fulfilling his own prophecy. A bible believer who converted to evangelical Protestantism in 1885 and later joined First Baptist Church of Beaumont in 1891, Higgins viewed his success as evidence of God’s blessing and considered crude oil to be imbued with a sacred power that if harnessed properly could fuel the Christian enterprise of American supremacy. With its Christian faith in the sacred power of crude oil, the story of Patillo Higgins captures the premise of the book, which is that American oilmen shared a basic set of tenets regarding religion and crude. They all believed oil to be a source of God’s power on earth, and that if they struck it rich, it was because American Religion 2:2 140 they were following God’s lead and thus owed him something in return. That something in return was a promise to use the power of oil, both as an extracted resource and capitalized wealth, to promote and fund Christian missions in the name of the Lord. In this way, the upstart Higgins had much in common with his fellow Baptist John D. Rockefeller, the well-established oil baron of the northeast who refused to invest in Higgins’s dreams to discover crude in Texas. What they shared, what pretty much all the oilmen who make an appearance in the book share, is a religious conviction to dig and drill and extract with a self-assurance that such a violent enterprise was part of God’s plan. They all agreed that one should drill for oil because it was divinely sanctioned, a source of power to promote God’s Kingdom. What they disagreed on, however, was how to organize that pursuit. The majority of the book parses the theological and sectarian differences between two strands of oil religion in the US, differences that distinguished the establishment from the upstarts. The major oil companies, like Standard Oil, institutionalized the established religion of oil, with big men like Rockefeller using the material power of oil to fund ecumenical visions of global missions that comprised a “civil religion of crude.” This civil religion aligned with humanitarian capitalism, or noblesse oblige, where really, really, really rich white men, like Rockefeller, funded civil society, from public libraries to art galleries, an approach that Dochuk associates with the social gospel. By contrast, the upstarts like Higgins practiced a “wildcat Christianity.” Their religion was built on the “rule of capture,” an unofficial doctrine, or unwritten rule of the game, that maintained every man had access to the oil under the ground, provided he could drill it out, regardless of who owned the land above it. This was, of course, anathema to a monopolistic model of empire of the Rockefeller kind. The book’s twelve chapters work out such key tensions in the narrative of American oil, of how to build a corporation, how to institutionalize power, how to maintain global reach. The strength of the book is in the scope and details of this story, of how it begins in early twentieth-century turf wars and regional variations and continues forward, restructured, into the next century...