These days many who are secular and/or on the center-left just don’t get why so many on the evangelical right seem so darn dead set against the threat of global climate change, to the point they thrill in chanting “drill, baby, drill!” After crude is slimy, smelly, icky stuff, and the refined products are not all that refined. Many may imagine that if duly educated about the science of CO2 driven atmospheric and ocean warming and acidification a fair number of theocons will come around to agreeing on prudent steps to cut down on mass transferring fossil carbon from underground into the sky and sea. 

            Don’t hold your breath on that. 

            To understand why oil in particular has a special place on the hearts of theocons, we go back to 1800s America when Puritanical Calvinism was still dominant. The Bible is as usual contradictory when it comes to wealth, but the USA being the land of opportunity the great Protestant majority was fine with being rich. But the old time religion was rather dour, and as America moved into the Gilded Age and the early 1900s many Christians increasingly adopted the cheerful thesis that obviously America is the most God blessed land, and since America is above all else about getting more money and stuff, it follows that God wants Americans to become laden with as many things material via the miracle of capitalism as they can get. Thus was born the Prosperity Christianity promoted by the likes of Aimee McPherson, E. W. Keen, Oral Roberts, Joel Osteen, and the Norman Vincent Peale that Trump is a big fan of.

            In the early 1900s Americans found a new way to get really, really rich. The Calvinist, pacifist, anti-Semite Henry Ford had devised a means to mass assemble a cheap, reliable horseless carriage, so by 1920 urban streets were experiencing traffic jams of Model-Ts and other autos and trucks. All those internal combustion engines needed a whole lot of what until then had been of modest value, petroleum derived gasoline. There was a mad rush to drill for oil. And most of that derivative of ancient marine planktonic marine life (not dinosaurs!) was to be found in Oklahoma and especially Texas. 

            Wild catting for oil was the acme of high risk for big gains, all American entrepreneurial, free market, individualistic capitalism. And some of the early oil barons got rich, filthy rich. Among them Hugh Roy Cullen, Sir Richardson, Clint Murchison, and the H. L. Hunt whose ruthless greed, multiple romances and serial marriages were the inspiration for the J. R. Ewing of Dallas.  

            Often self-made and correspondingly certain of their self-centered opinions, all oilmen were hard bitten conservatives, generally bigots regarding any who were not WASPS. Although not always particularly churchly – the born again Hunt being a notable exception — they were pro-prosperity Christians. All loathed communism, which to them was nothing more than virulent, anti-American Godless if not Satanic Bolshevism cleverly designed to strip those of wealth of their hard earned, God bestowed gains.

            And because God had blessed these United States with vast deposits of oil – until the mid 1900s the USA was the world’s largest oil producer — that made a critical contribution to our victory in WW 2 while fueling a largely suburban and white mass middle class lifestyle based on the automobile on a scale never before seen, then any good and decent citizen with any sense could see that the oil was put here by our white America loving creator. Natural gas being of similar creation gets grandfathered in as a divine gift. 

            The pious oil barons put their money where their mouths were. They hobnobbed with and financed those of political influence and power, promoting the hardline campaign against atheistic communism that became the American norm during the Cold War. That in turn made a big contribution to the notion – only now receding as religion fast declines even in the white working class – that being American requires being God fearing. Oilmen had a natural propensity to back McCarthyism, and southern segregation. Cullen, Richardson and Murchison had the ear of President Eisenhower, who made “In God We Trust” the national motto and put God into the Pledge of Allegiance. (Big oil also backed Texas had to be segregationist at the time senator Lyndon Johnson, until he went for civil rights as president.)  

            Even more powerfully, oilmen have injected big bucks directly into the Christian right, helping fund theocon radio and television, publications, revivals, megachurches, think tanks and universities such as Baylor and Criswell, assembling a vast theocon infrastructure that would otherwise be far smaller. If not for Ameropetroleum, the dimensions and power of the Christian right would be markedly less, and Ameroatheism larger, than it is.  

            According to prosperity theocons God wants his followers to enjoy the biggest, energy guzzling, stuff packed homes, SUVs, private planes, and boats that they can afford as they prepare to join him in His Heaven where the streets are paved in gold. It follows that the effort to curb such lavish lifestyles by claiming that the oil the creator placed within the continent is going to produce very bad climatic results can only be a brazen, un-American, fake news conspiracy by the left leaning atheistic scientific community in league with other secular liberal and progressive, wealth hating socialists led by the Clintons, Gore and Soros under the influence of Satan intended to deny the Godly the earthly, fossil fueled lavish  lives His followers deserve. Ergo, it is pretty dang hard to get the high life loving, heaven seeking, tribalist, theocons to see the scientific light. 

            But wait just a second many of you clever free thinkers are thinking. If the Lord Creator really is pro-American, then why the hell did He place the world’s largest oil reserves under lands the All Seeing Him must have known would be controlled by Muslims?

            Good question. 

            Saudi Arabia is called that because after the destruction of the Ottoman Empire by the moderate Christian Anglo-French led by T. E. Lawrence of Arabia in the Great War, the royal House of Saud cut a cynical deal with the fundamentalist clerics – they would run the government while the fundies got to control the theosocial life of the population (the secular Zionists came to similar but less draconian arrangement with the ultra-Orthodox when founding Israel). That made little difference to the world until the 1970s when gulf governments nationalized their oil industries as the oil crises sent crude prices sky high. To keep the clerics happy they were lavished with enormous monies to set up hardline Wahhabist mosques and madrasas around the world, radicalizing much of global Islam. Had God not put so much oil under so many deniers of Christ’s divinity, then 9/11 almost certainly would not have happened, followed by the invasion of Iraq led by conservative AmeroChristians, followed by super virulent ISIS driving enormous numbers of generally but not always moderate Muslims to Europe where they have inspired a white nationalistic backlash against democracy.  

            How do disbelievers of human induced global warming reconcile their belief that oil is God’s great gift to America when He put even more black gold under Christ deniers? Heck if I know, those are the people who made the adulterous including with porn stars, serial divorcee, brags about sexually assaulting women, rarely attends church Trump president. Twice.

            If any gods exist they work in mysterious — and very cynical — ways.