For certain late-nineteenth-century white Americans, the Standard Oil Company towered as an indominable oil monopoly. Why didn't the vertically integrated, “Christian” corporation maintain its domination of the market? Darren Dochuk's Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America takes on this question, a query that probes at the persistent, if shifting, entanglement of American religion and American business. Dochuk finds that while Rockefeller's success rested on what he calls the “civil religion of crude,” the rise of evangelical fundamentalism in the 1930s disrupted this now “old” American faith and placed it in competition with a new faith in a less predictable, personal God.

Dochuk's 500-plus-page work tells the dramatic history of oil tycoons battling for the right to mold the American economy to its whims. In the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Rockefeller family's robust charitable and missionary work seemed to clarify the truth that God smiled on the work of the corporation. The company had investments throughout the oil-inhabited world and saw its drilling as part and parcel of its missionary enterprise. However, as Dochuk tells the story, that moment lasted only until the early 1930s. Evangelical Fundamentalist revival culture unleashed a new set of beliefs about God's power to grant miracles and personal blessings to those who believed it in their hearts and proclaimed it with their mouths. It was this new set of beliefs about the range of real possibility, Darren Dochuk argues, that profoundly shifted the path of American capitalism. In the early 1930s, what Dochuk calls “wildcat Christianity” drove individual oilmen to drill recklessly throughout East Texas and beyond. Before long, magnates like J. Howard Pew defended both their beliefs and their business practices; in the process, Pew both disturbed and dismantled the Rockefeller empire. Wildcat Christianity also reconfigured American Christians’ perceptions of the blessings of natural resources, as well as the possibilities of private enterprise in the United States.

The book offers a meaningful intervention into both American religious history and the history of American capitalism. Dochuk makes “wildcat Christianity” into a portable term we can use to describe the many entrepreneurial efforts to unseat “old money” business leaders with some combination of prayer, missionary zeal, and resource extraction. The book is at once a story of the conflict between the prosperity gospel and the “liberal Protestantism,” of shifting Christian beliefs about the proper use of natural resources, and of the unlikely “christening” of venture capitalism. However, it also offers a fourth intervention into the field known as “U.S. and the world,” or the history of “U.S. foreign relations.” Dochuk argues that the “civil religion of crude,” the presumption that the American management of the oil market in the world is part and parcel of God's particular calling for the United States in the world, remains as an implicit part of US identity, even as it now coexists with wildcat Christianity. The call to address climate change by divesting from fossil fuels is, in Dochuk's analysis, not just a challenge to our multibillion-dollar oil businesses. Oil tycoons continue to think of themselves as agents of U.S. foreign relations and leaders in the U.S. missionary enterprise; to reject their leadership is to unravel more than a century of American “civil religion.”

Dochuk offers a history that deserves discussion far beyond graduate seminars in history, religion, and American studies. One worries, however, that the length makes the book difficult, if not impossible, to assign in full within an undergraduate seminar. One wishes there were an abridged, 200-page version of the study, suitable for general readers within undergraduate seminars and book clubs. That said, some chapters can stand on their own. In whole or in part, the book offers a remarkable study that will surely live in the canon of U.S. history scholarship for a generation.