Hobby Lobby’s founder called wealth ‘a curse.’ His family spent millions chasing biblical artifacts

“I’d written about art and antiquities and theft before, and so I was really intrigued by this,” Blanding told Fortune. He asked himself, “What is this big box chain of craft stores doing with this ancient cuneiform tablet?”

The answer took him well beyond antiquities. The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby: Inside a Billionaire Family’s Quest to Craft a Christian Nation, published in July by PublicAffairs, argues that the Green family, which owns the Oklahoma City-based chain, has spent decades using the company’s profits to push its evangelical worldview into American law, education and culture. Blanding calls that effort Christian nationalism.

Few shoppers know the Greens, but many live near one of their stores. Hobby Lobby says it runs more than 1,000 stores in 48 states with about 50,000 employees, and that reach is why Blanding wrote the book.

“It’s obviously a free country; people can spend their money however they want. But when you deal with a retail company, I felt like I had a duty to expose this for people who are shopping at Hobby Lobby,” he said. “They should know what their money is being used for.”

Hobby Lobby did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment. The family declined to be interviewed for the book.

A $1.67 million tablet and a $3 million settlement

The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet was one piece of a far larger collection. Starting in 2009, Hobby Lobby president Steve Green gathered tens of thousands of biblical artifacts, which Blanding says the family bought in part to “prove the historical accuracy and truth of the Bible.”

Many were bound for the Museum of the Bible, a 430,000-square-foot institution that opened in November 2017 three blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Steve Green chairs its board, and Fortune has reported that the family spent $500 million to open it.

The museum “wasn’t initially their idea,” Blanding said, but “they sort of took it over, and they became the real founders of the Museum of the Bible.” It operates as a separate nonprofit, yet he describes the line between family and museum as “always very, very porous.” In his telling, Hobby Lobby often bought artifacts and donated them to the museum, which brought the company tax benefits.

The buying drew federal scrutiny. In December 2010, Hobby Lobby agreed to buy more than 5,500 artifacts for $1.6 million despite an expert’s warning about looted Iraqi antiquities, according to the Justice Department. The company shipped the items under false labels. In 2017, the company settled, forfeited thousands of artifacts, paid $3 million, and accepted responsibility for its conduct.

The Gilgamesh tablet came next. Hobby Lobby bought it from an auction house in 2014 for about $1.67 million; agents seized it in 2019, and the company consented to its forfeiture in 2021. Prosecutors said the auction house had withheld the tablet’s false provenance from Hobby Lobby and the museum.

That summer, Iraq received about 17,000 looted artifacts from the U.S. in its largest-ever repatriation; roughly 12,000 had been held by the Museum of the Bible. A year earlier, a museum-commissioned study had found that its Dead Sea Scroll fragments were fakes.

Steve Green has said that when he began collecting, he “knew little about the world of collecting.” Blanding built on the work of what he calls a “ragtag team of biblical scholars” who spotted suspect listings online, then added documents he obtained showing how the artifacts were trafficked.

Influence without campaign checks

What surprised Blanding most was how the Greens use their money. “A lot of times you think of people or families having an impact through campaign contributions and electing politicians, and they actually have done very little of that,” he said.

Instead, he said, “they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars literally promoting this kind of biblical worldview and trying to impact our laws and our society to bring it more in line with what they believe is biblical truth.” He points to education, the courts, and political groups that write and promote legislation.

The most consequential court fight was the family’s own. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in 2014 that closely held for-profit companies can be exempt from regulations that violate their owners’ religious beliefs, sparing Hobby Lobby from covering certain contraceptives. Blanding argues the ruling limited employees’ reproductive choices, and says the family has also backed anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ causes, school prayer and teaching the Bible in schools.

The money behind it is substantial. A company-supplied biography of Steve Green put Hobby Lobby’s 2021 sales above $7.7 billion. In 2022, when Forbes valued David Green at $14 billion, the founder said all of Hobby Lobby’s voting stock had moved to a trust, Fortune reported. “Wealth can be a curse,” he said.

Reporting on a family that wouldn’t talk

The Greens declined to cooperate. But because they are “really motivated to spread their story,” Blanding said, they have produced books, articles, podcasts and interviews, which he used to reconstruct their views. He added interviews with biblical scholars, former Museum of the Bible employees and experts on the religious right.

After he contacted family members, Blanding said the Greens’ lawyer told him the family would not take part, questioned his reporting methods, and asked to review the manuscript before publication. “Of course we weren’t going to do that,” he said.

He later sent six or seven pages of questions, which he says went unanswered. “I haven’t heard back from them since. And, knock on wood, I never will.”

Not every believer shares the family’s politics. “Evangelicals are not a monolith,” Blanding said, and some sources from religious backgrounds who disagree with the Greens helped his reporting.

An exposé that tries to understand its subjects

Blanding calls the book an exposé but says he did not want “just this anti-religious or anti-corporate screed.” He wanted readers to understand the family’s motives.

“For better or for worse, they’re really sincere in their beliefs,” he said. So the book asks: “If you really do believe that, what would that motivate you to do?”

The harder question is how that conviction fits a pluralistic country. “I wanted to understand how and why they believe what they do,” he said, “and how that actually is compatible or incompatible with our democracy as a whole.”

Blanding’s comments have been edited for length and clarity.