Anointed with Oil

Anointed with Oil is a groundbreaking new history of the United States that places the relationship between religious faith and oil together at the center of America's rise to global power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As prize-winning historian Darren Dochuk reveals, from the earliest discovery of oil in America during the Civil War, Americans saw oil as the nation's special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. Over the century that followed and down to the present day, the oil industry's leaders and its ordinary workers together fundamentally transformed American religion, business, and politics--boosting America's ascent as the preeminent global power, giving shape to modern evangelical Christianity, fueling the rise of the Republican Right, and setting the terms for today's political and environmental uncertainties. Through extensive research in corporate, political, and community archives in the US and around the world,