Crude Awakenings: The Faith, Politics, and Crises of Oil in America’s Century: 2015 J.J. Thiessen Lecture Series

2015, 2:26:57 min

October 20-21, 2015

Oil has always enchanted Americans, and inspired them to think about their society’s future in sacred terms. Extracted from the earth in mysterious ways, often with the help of spiritualist devices and prayer, oil was at its origins imagined as the divinely sanctioned lifeblood of a modernizing nation. The United States’ powerbrokers and rank-and-file together ascribed a special status to this abundant material, and in turn used its wealth to construct and legitimate imposing corporate and church institutions, missionary organizations, and an expansive petro-state. Indeed, the concept of the “American Century,” commonly used to describe this nation’s hundred-year ascendancy, is itself a product of petroleum and religion’s arresting reciprocity. When missionary son and magazine publisher Henry Luce coined the term in 1941, he did so fully aware of how his fellow citizens drew special assurance from oil’s seemingly divine potentials, and attached them to a politics of exceptionalism. Luce also knew that as much as oil was the United States' blessing and the source of its leadership in the world, it was also a burden that came with costs to the nation and its people, and the land they inhabited.

Following Luce’s lead, but with an eye to wider and longer trends, and a continental terrain centered by the United States but also encompassing Canada, these lectures will explore some of the ways that religion and oil together shaped existence for modern Americans at the moment of their heightening authority in the twentieth century. It will pay particular attention to evangelical Protestants who, in disproportionate degrees, inhabited and worked the Unites States' oil patches, weathered the violent disruptions of life on these boom-bust terrains, and theologized and politicized their encounter with soil and its subsurface wealth and all that this seemed to promise them, on earth and in heaven. Each of the three lectures will focus on a particularly momentous flashpoint in the life of Unites States oil and evangelicalism and pause for reflection on what this moment meant long-term for matters of faith and society in the twentieth century. In the process of tracking the chronology of God and black gold in the modern era, the lectures will also raise questions and curiosities pertaining to evangelicalism’s relationship to capitalism and globalization, energy and environment, notions of time and broad interests in politics.

Lecture 1 | Blood of the Earth: Evangelicalism's First Encounters with Black Gold

October 20, 2015
This lecture will explore the earliest rumblings of oil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and follow the journeys of some of petroleum’s first wildcatters-those who chased subsurface wealth from western Pennsylvania to Texas and Southern California, Southern Ontario to Russia and Indonesia. Drawing on the illustrative life stories of oil titans like Lyman Stewart and Lady Dundonald and diaries of oil drillers who left their farms in Ontario to travel to oil patches around the world, we will explore the relationship of evangelical Protestantism to processes of resource extraction and economic progress, modern technologies, and mechanisms of a new capitalism. With special focus on Lyman Stewart, it will also consider the effects of these dynamics on the “fight for the fundamentals,” struggles between competing theologies and economic outlooks, and theologically informed corporate leaders, that ruptured Protestantism and petroleum in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Lecture 2 | Carbon Democracies: World Wars and the Rise of Wildcat Christianity

October 20, 2015
This lecture will chart the rise of the Western United States (and Canada)'s independent oil companies and the philosophy of wildcat Christianity, which gained traction amid the crises of the Depression, World War II, and early Cold War. Its purview will be wide, and offer a glimpse at the range of ambitions that shaped large oil companies (those with Rockefeller connections, for instance) as they expanded into the Middle East, South America, and other oil zones of the world. Henry Luce’s charge for American oilmen to take the lead in spreading Christian democracy was but one manifestation of this confidence. But the lecture will focus particularly on the coalescence of evangelical-minded citizens, church leaders, and politicians such as evangelist Billy Graham and Alberta Premier Ernest Manning, all of whom occupied the oil-rich areas of Alberta and the United States Southwest, and grew close in their transnational understanding of region and environment, imperatives for evangelization and urgencies of time, and quest to advance their own sense of Christian democracy before their dispensation of abundance expired.

Lecture 3 | Power Shifts: Fuel and Family Values in the Age of Evangelicalism

October 21, 2015
Moving through the heart of the 1960s and 1970s, with some conclusions in our current moment, this lecture will track the final steps that oil patch evangelicals followed to gain political power. Tapping the behind-the-scenes activities of men like Ernest Manning, Billy Graham, and J. Howard Pew, whose work helped bring to fruition such momentous petroleum ventures as the Great Canadian Oil Sands in Fort McMurray, Alberta, it will revaluate the “culture wars” of the period as a struggle between competing visions of fuel as well as family values. Much has been written, of course, about the conservative-liberal tensions that sparked these culture wars and led to the Republican Right’s capture of the White House in 1980. In this closing talk, we will fold issues of energy and environmentalism into the mix, measure evangelicalism’s abiding connections to the oil sector and their impact on the religious movement’s political success, and revisit the Reagan Revolution as a process long in the making and still much in effect. The lecture will conclude with a glimpse at more recent manifestations of evangelicalism’s relationship to crude oil, and the internal and external pressures of a new generation that have begun to undermine it in this new millennium, with the United States' Century now past.

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