Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America.

"This is a fairly recent book. It trees off what Sutton and Hedges are talking about. It’s about how evangelicals look at the United States, and how oil wealth has helped to build very strong networks amongst evangelicals for political action. A big aspect of it has to do with Israel and the Middle East. When people think of oil, they tend to think of the Middle East and that takes us to the so-called Holy Land and the very curious situation where you have evangelical Christians who are extremely supportive of Israel . And, specifically, of the very conservative governments in Israel who support the occupation of the West Bank. There are conferences that happen in the United States where Zionist Christians rub elbows with Israeli politicians and orthodox rabbis to discuss how they can, among other things, get the Dome of the Rock bulldozed so they can build the third Temple. That’s the big event from an apocalyptic point of view. But imagine if fossil fuels become a thing of the past. What would that do to the Middle East? It would become irrelevant, geopolitically. If that happened how would they sustain this energy about the place where the battle of Armageddon is supposed to happen? There would no longer be any reason for Armageddon to happen there. Right. And many evangelical Americans believe that there are divine reasons why there is such an enormous reservoir of oil directly beneath the Holy Land. They see the Holy Land and the United States as the two most crucial zones in the world. And the book threads these ideas together about the relationship between the United States on the one hand and Israel and the oil-producing states on the other."