Washington Post hit piece attacking oil, Christians and Trump

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

Washington Post is at it again, with their frothing hatred of the U.S.

Just unbelievable.

Posting the article in full, for those lurkers who do not wish to click the link and add to WaPo's internet traffic.

Oil-patch evangelicals: How Christianity and crude fueled the rise of the American right

Oil-patch evangelicals: How Christianity and crude fueled the rise of the American right

Fuel-and-family politics remade the GOP in the 1970s and 1980s.

 

An oil refinery in Deer Park, Tex. (Gregory Bull/AP)

By Darren Dochuk

Darren Dochuk is an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and author of "Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America."

 

July 15 at 6:00 AM

As President Trump’s populist appointees continue to deregulate the mineral-rich lands of the American West, approve pipelines and diminish oversight of fracking, the region’s independent oil and gas producers are riding high. Reliant both on their capacity to set down discovery wells on untapped land — a practice in oil known as “wildcatting” — and on a federal government that prioritizes domestic exploration over foreign resources, these risk-taking impresarios see Trump’s “America First” energy agenda as a godsend. Self-made entrepreneurs and organizations such as the Independent Petroleum Association of America are quite literally laughing at their good fortune.

The White House has eagerly courted this constituency. “We’re putting American energy first,” Vice President Pence beamed in mid-April while touring an independent energy company’s new rig in Texas. There, he heralded the “three pillars of American greatness”: faith, freedom and “vast natural resources.” Pence promised that “developing the vast, natural, God-given resources that we have” will make America great again.

By invoking God, Pence tapped this oil patch’s homegrown religiosity: a blend of fervent libertarianism, “traditional” family values and religious nationalism that fuels the Republican right. This mingling of oil and faith in a fiercely individualistic wildcat ethos has long extended beyond the realm of business to shape a distinctive strain of American Christianity, one that the White House seeks to marshal for political gain.

Roots of this strain stretch back in Texas to the “Gusher Age” of the early 20th century, when independent oilers, freed from John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil’s monopolistic control over the industry, gained leverage both in the business and their church. Empowered by the petroleum sector’s ascent, subsequent generations sponsored churches — none larger than First Baptist Dallas — powerful preachers including evangelist Billy Graham and sprawling nondenominational religious networks that espoused their dogma: a muscular evangelicalism that utterly rejected the Rockefeller-sponsored liberal, ecumenical (in their eyes, “monopolistic”) Protestant establishment in the East.

In the face of the Rockefellers’ progressive way, Texan oilers championed a theology of personal encounter with scripture and an active Higher Being. They heralded church autonomy and gospel teachings about prosperity and end times, a message that anticipated the violent disruptions of the oil age and the need to save souls and reap God’s — and the earth’s — riches before the world’s end.

It was during the energy crisis of the 1970s that this belief system fastened itself to a culture-warring agenda at the national level. To reduce U.S. reliance on foreign (“Muslim”) oil, drillers and devout evangelicals ⁠ — often one and the same ⁠ — demanded that Washington let them tap Western lands and recenter God and black gold as America’s going concerns.

Always at odds with the multinational oil companies such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron that spawned from the original Standard conglomerate, independent oilmen marketed themselves as the answer to the nation’s weakened global standing, which they pinned on the majors’ misguided vision.

They also pledged oil money for religious-right initiatives that promised to bring their fuel and family values to the White House and restore the nation’s founding (“Christian”) roots. Besides suffering from an energy crisis, America, in their eyes, was also plagued by a secular drift away from the rugged, conservative ideals they had always lived by — a drift that seemed to be tolerated by the liberal Protestant establishment and Rockefeller legacy.

One of the biggest boosters of evangelical oil culture was the Hunt family of East Texas. H.L. Hunt’s son Bunker was unmatched in his giving. He endorsed Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ, which proposed a $1 billion venture to proselytize youths, and wrote checks for Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer, whose 1979 manifesto “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” sparked evangelicals’ antiabortion crusade.

But nothing triggered Hunt and his peers’ rage more than the fuel-and-family politics of President Jimmy Carter. The president’s support of the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights infuriated them. Carter’s infamous “Malaise” speech, delivered 40 years ago today, was equally damning in their eyes. In this dour homily, Carter bemoaned the nation’s high-energy consumption and lack of conservation. The attack on oil, made not only in economic but in moral terms, was the final straw.

Over the course of the next year, Ronald Reagan inflamed their anger with his hard-driving quest for the presidency. Running on the slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again,” Reagan won the hearts and minds of the American oil patch. “[We] must remove government obstacles to energy production,” he declared when he announced his candidacy. “It is no program simply to say ‘use less energy.’ ”

Malaise had no place in Reagan’s vocabulary. Exuding an audacity that the oil patch embraced, he traveled to Texas and mingled with preachers and petroleum kings, promising them that the nation would be great again as soon as Washington bureaucrats let rugged wildcatters open up new frontiers of extractive wealth and God-fearing pioneers raise their children in communities calibrated to the morals of an honorable past. In the pulpits and pews of the Southwest, Reagan’s calls for Washington to protect local oil producers’ rights to drill, drill, drill were a potent and effective rallying cry that has since become a staple of the Republican Party.

As they look ahead to 2020, Trump and his running mate know that they have to nurture that same spirit. In his recent Texas swing, Pence headlined fundraising dinners in Dallas and Midland. Filling seats and Trump Victory Committee coffers were independent oilmen such as Kyle Stallings, whose career started with Hunt Energy in 1979, and West Texas evangelical wildcatter Tim Dunn, who in one pundit’s estimation is utterly determined to push “the Republican Party into the arms of God.”

As deep-pocketed independent oil and gas producers like Dunn continue to ratchet up their defense of domestic extraction, thwart environmentalists and champion the right’s social agenda, for the moment, at least, it appears the wildcatters have won.

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

7 comments so far to the WaPo article:

• All Comments 7

 

tcinla

 

2 hours ago

 

Further proof that Texas should become that "whole other country," with a wall 10 feet high around the border with the rest of us. Oh, and throw in Oklahoma too.

Says a Texan who's damned glad to be as far from that hellhole as you can get and still be in the same country.

thumb_up1

 

Time for the Truth

 

3 hours ago

 

When all that fracking causes severe water pollution and earthquakes, do not come running to the federal government demanding my tax money to fix the problems you caused.  This is typical republicanism:  privatize the profits and socialize the costs.

thumb_up1

 

LizzieH

 

3 hours ago

 

America was greater under Obama and greater under Clinton.  George W Bush and Trump have pulled out the rug from under our great democracy.

thumb_up4

 

Ti Road Frame

 

3 hours ago

 

Oil and Christianity, two things which are way passed their expiration date.

thumb_up4

 

Rayosun9

 

4 hours ago

 (Edited)

 

The G.O.P. is no more the "party of Lincoln" than the evangelicals are the religion of Jesus Christ. But they are clever enough to fool the ignorant among us, who would know better if they were grounded in http://WhatwouldJesusthink.info . Rev. R D 
 

thumb_up4

Ti Road Frame

 

3 hours ago

 (Edited)

 

Well sure, the Republican party of the 1860s was home to radical liberals.  Now that it's home to hard-right conservatives, it's exactly like the pro-slavery Democrats of the 1860s.  Party membership isn't immutable, but ideologies are.

thumb_up1

 

 

dd780

 

10 hours ago

 

Yep.  It's all about black gold and black people.  propping one up and keeping the other down.

thumb_up3

[DanilKa + 443]

1 hour ago, Tom Kirkman said:

In the face of the Rockefellers’ progressive way,

stupid jorno gives out right there cui bono... Had a good chuckle at that.

If that's an answer to Trump's administration attack on big tech subverting politics - that's a lame one. You can do better, Jeff!

Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" is a good read on history of oil - not the attempt to re-write it as the shameless WaPo tries to do.

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

10 hours ago, DanilKa said:

Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" is a good read on history of oil - not the attempt to re-write it as the shameless WaPo tries to do.

Agreed.  "The Prize" is an exceptional book about the history of oil.  Highly recommended.  A bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner, it really is an amazing non-fiction book. 

[Meredith Poor + 883]

On 7/15/2019 at 5:47 PM, Tom Kirkman said:

Washington Post is at it again, with their frothing hatred of the U.S.

Just unbelievable.

Posting the article in full, for those lurkers who do not wish to click the link and add to WaPo's internet traffic.

Oil-patch evangelicals: How Christianity and crude fueled the rise of the American right

Oil-patch evangelicals: How Christianity and crude fueled the rise of the American right

As opposed to the 'hit pieces' here against Muslims, immigrants, 'liberals', etc.

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

Hmmm....Not sure that there ever was a period called the Gusher Age and his concept of 'wildcatting' needs some work.

Typical journalism in this day and age.

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

Tom you got me to click on his book link, at [hatchet press] no less.  

The prologue is interesting and not as polemic as his article. Interesting that he's a professor at Notre Dame and likely Catholic. And as we know, the only ones who hate Christians more than Muslims are Catholics.

Quote

Forty years after Spindletop, in February 1941, magazine publisher Henry Luce would give that moment an enduring name: the “American Century.” Luce, the son of foreign missionaries sponsored by the Rockefeller family, used the pages of his Life magazine to compel his fellow citizens to “create the first great American Century.” He had actually tested that charge a month earlier before the American Petroleum Institute in Oklahoma. In his keynote address, Luce heralded oilmen as the vanguard of pure American values, praising their “dynamic spirit of freedom and enterprise” and “sense of illimitable roundness of the world.” When harnessed by God-fearing patriots, he intimated, oil had the capacity to transform the world into something godlier and better. America’s special blessing was, in his mind, also its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission. Like so many powerbrokers at the time, he drew on grand metaphors to underscore the need for the United States to use its oil to illumine the world, fuel progress, and power international advancement. Higgins could not have stated it better himself.¹

These were inspiring sentiments, indeed; yet their open-ended nature made them grounds for fierce debate: Exactly who in the oil guild retained the rights and means to lead Luce’s charge? As taken as they were with Luce’s lofty vision, oilers only rarely spoke with one voice. Most often, they engaged in unabated cutthroat competition. Such was the by-product of the “rule of capture,” a legal canon unique in its application to US mineral rights that guaranteed the right of each driller who had access to a common pool to drain as much crude as he could, at dizzying rates and on his terms. That competition spilled over into the churchly realm, where oil’s constituents waged war for the right to define the core beliefs and moral composition of America at home and abroad. Far from presenting the united front imagined in Luce’s address, then, the oil fraternity was marked by bitter infighting and fits of righteous rage, which in turn raised the intensity and stakes of the industry’s—and, by extension, the nation’s—quest for dominance.

 

[esgeo + 54]

It is my understanding that the United States is meant to be a nation where an individual is free to believe and espouse:

On 7/15/2019 at 4:47 PM, Tom Kirkman said:

“three pillars of American greatness”: faith, freedom and “vast natural resources.

or [bemoan]

On 7/15/2019 at 4:47 PM, Tom Kirkman said:

the nation’s high-energy consumption and lack of conservation

But that requires our citizenry to be tolerant of one another, of our system of governance and the liberties endowed by it. 

Instead we have disavowed that requisite element of our liberty, and in doing so, are nurturing a system whose political, social, and economic institutions increasingly capitalize on conflict at the expense of tolerance.

I'm sorry you are so outraged by this guy's writing. I can see how it might trigger some negative emotional responses. I'm grateful that in today's world you are free to share your disdain without fear of repercussion

On 7/15/2019 at 4:47 PM, Tom Kirkman said:

Washington Post is at it again, with their frothing hatred of the U.S.

Just unbelievable.

I personally think it is a fair attempt by a historian at describing how oil and the gospel have changed political, social, and economic institutions in the US over the past half century or so. I hope you can tolerate my appreciation of the freedom of the press in this situation.

 

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

The problem here seems to be that folks are taking one guy's opinion as 'gospel truth' (pun intended).

Opinions are like armpits, people usually have one or two, and they usually stink.

If you are really concerned about someone's opinion regarding some issue in the past, go study it yourself. The pitfall here is 'cherry picking' the sources you choose to study.