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By 1920, Lyman Stewart ruled over twin empires of oil and religion. The company he founded in 1884, Union Oil of California, had grown from seven dry wells and a pile of debts into a 125 million dollar conglomerate. Just forty years after its founding, Union Oil owned more than 800,000 acres of land across the western United States. It produced more than 18 million barrels of oil per year, and operated a massive network of wells, pipelines, refineries, steamships, and of course, gasoline service stations, making it one of the ten largest petroleum companies in the United States.1The Los Angeles Times once described Union's President, the now long-forgotten Lyman Stewart, as "too well known to need any introduction."2
Yet Stewart's religious empire was equally vast, if less centralized. A Presbyterian layman with no theological training, Stewart's influence on twentieth-century American religion overshadowed that of most of his contemporaries, including his fierce business rival, liberal Baptist John D. Rockefeller. By his death in 1923, Stewart had likely contributed more money to conservative religious causes than any contemporaneous figure.3A few of Stewart's projects became famous. In 1909 he concocted the idea for The Fundamentals--the series of books at the etymological heart of the fundamentalist movement. Along with his brother Milton, he organized and funded the publication of twelve volumes of tracts on "the Christian fundamentals," aspiring to send free copies to "all the English-speaking Protestant ministers" in the world.4Over three million copies were distributed between 1910 and 1915. In his later years Stewart established the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (now Biola University), which quickly became the most important center for conservative theological education west of Chicago.5His extensive correspondence with--and patronage of--many of the leaders of the early fundamentalist movement demonstrated Stewart's sway in the various tight-knit fundamentalist networks. While Rockefeller built a massive chapel to tower over his extravagantly funded University of Chicago, Stewart's more modest Bible Institute achieved similar influence in American culture as it trained generations of leaders and missionaries for conservative Protestant causes in America and throughout the globe.
In many respects, the conservative Stewart was cut from the same cloth as liberal Progressives such...