God, Oil, and Pipeline Politics

In the mid-1960s, construction began on the Great Canadian Oil Sands project in Fort McMurray, Alberta. In part, this massive undertaking was the result of a friendship – that of J. Howard Pew, president of what is now Sunoco, and Ernest Manning, a Canadian politician. Pew and Manning’s relationship grew out of their shared evangelical faith, and as Darren Dochuk reveals, this type of religious ‘soft diplomacy’ is a fascinating, and often overlooked, facet of both politics and economics. Dochuk’s next book will chart evangelical Protestantism’s longstanding - and politically significant - relationship with the petroleum industry. He is an associate professor at Washington University’s Danforth Center on Religion and Politics.