Extracted Truths: The Politics of God and Black Gold in Post-World War II America

It is impossible to talk about twentieth-century religion and politics without accounting for two driving forces: evangelicalism and the extractive industry. This is hardly a novel claim, especially as far as the Republican Right is concerned. As Kirkpatrick Sale suggested in the 1970s and fellow-pundit (though political foe) Kevin Phillips has repeated in his recent bestseller American Theocracy, in order to understand how conservative Republicans achieved political hegemony we need to appreciate the extraordinary political leverage of religion and oil. What Sale and Phillips editorialize as parallel dynamics I seek to explore in integrated, nuanced form. By drawing on primary sources that document the personal and institutional enterprises of key conservative Protestant oilmen like J. Howard Pew and R.G. LeTourneau, my paper will reveal the layers of interconnectedness between evangelicalism and the extractive industry and then measure their impact on post-World War II politics. This will not be an expose, in other words, but an examination of the multiple ways these two forces worked in unison to advance conservative and ultimately the Republican Right’s political interests, particularly as they took shape in the Sunbelt South and West. Here, a number of key questions will provide structure to the essay: How did the emboldened plain folk evangelical culture of the postwar Southwest legitimate and boost the interests of oil—theologically, institutionally, and politically? Conversely, how did its direct connections to the extractive industry allow evangelicalism to flourish by the 1970s as a powerful agent for change, first at the regional level and then on a national scale? Finally, what were the lasting consequences of this relationship, not only as they affected the politics of oil and evangelicalism but also in terms of the Sunbelt’s sense of identity and place within the national community?