“Go, Sell Thy Oil”: Evangelical Protestantism and Petro-Politics in Cold War America

This paper will explore the ideological and institutional linkages between the corporate culture of oil and evangelical Protestantism, and assess their impact on U.S. politics during the Cold War. The petroleum business has always nurtured independent-minded, frontier-types, just the kind of people drawn to the individualistic, revivalistic, self-made mentality of evangelicalism. In the early Cold War this relationship became more obvious as businessmen with prominent names like Sid Richardson, H.L. Hunt, and J. Howard Pew operated in the two parallel universes of oil and evangelicalism. While their petroleum-based profits financed the “new evangelicalism” of Reverend Billy Graham and the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), the Christian schools, missionary agencies, and nonprofit organizations they helped build up endorsed their vigorous political crusades on behalf of deregulated, wildcat capitalism and against New Deal liberalism and industrial unionism. My paper will pay particular attention to the Southwest, where the alliance between petroleum and evangelical Protestantism was strongest, and where an aggressive agenda of family values, free enterprise, and anti-statism profoundly shaped the nation’s course. Though broad and suggestive in its treatment of major political trends between the late 1940s and early 1960s, ending with Barry Goldwater’s election run in 1964, “Go, Sell They Oil” will ground its findings in rigorous examination of a handful of individuals and organizations whose sacred goals were facilitated by oil. These will include Christian colleges such as Baylor University, evangelical ecumenical organizations such as the NAE, missionary agencies such as Wycliffe Bible Translators, and a few targeted philanthropies headed by Pew and Richardson. As I will show, the relationship that these entities forged between God and black gold in the early Cold War years would help shift American politics to the Republican Right.