KL Marshall: the Religious Right, Oil, and Alaska

East Anchorage Book Club with Andrew Gray

KL Marshall, while working on her PhD in Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, became enthralled with the influence of oil money on Christian Fundamentalism in Alaska. She moved to the MatSu Valley to research her 2020 book, Faith & Oil: How the Alaska Pipeline Shaped America’s Religious Right. Her doctoral thesis was on Jerry Falwell who started the Moral Majority that helped elect Ronald Reagan. Falwell founded Liberty University in 1971, the same year that his friend Jerry Prevo began leading the Anchorage Baptist Temple. Prevo led ABT until 2020 when he took over Liberty University from Jerry Falwell Jr. who resigned due to a sex scandal. KL connects the dots between Falwell and Prevo to Palin and Trump.
KL Marshall is not her real name; for safety concerns in the MatSu, she published using this nom de plume. She is currently working on her second book about Jerry Falwell, tentatively titled One Nation under God’s Wrath.
Note: when I refer to the clip of Dave Bronson that we played, I mean the clip we played on episode 30 with Michael Burke discussing the 2009 “Summer of Hate.”

Note: although I include a clip of US Senate Candidate Kelly Tshibaka during a discussion of the New Apostolic Reformation, I do not mean to imply that Kelly Tshibaka is part of that movement. Rather, her call from the pulpit that Christians participate in government is meant to exemplify a teaching that might be found at a NAR church.