The Hobby Lobby Paradox: How a Chain Store Built a Billionaire’s Empire on Stolen Art and Religious Power
(SeaPRwire) – David Green told Forbes in 2022 that wealth can be a curse. Fourteen billion dollars later, sitting at the head of a $7.7 billion craft store empire, that line reads like something you’d expect from a man who’s never had to count pennies. But the Green family has spent decades proving that wealth is anything but cursed—if you know how to weaponize it.
It started with a curiosity in 2021. Journalist Michael Blanding read a New York Times piece about a 3,500-year-old clay tablet inscribed with part of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Federal agents had seized it from the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. The tablet belonged to Hobby Lobby. Blanding, who had written about art theft before, found himself asking a simple question: what is a big box craft chain doing with ancient cuneiform?
The answer opened a door into something far bigger than artifacts. Starting in 2009, Hobby Lobby president Steve Green gathered tens of thousands of biblical artifacts, claiming he wanted to prove the Bible’s historical accuracy. The family spent an estimated $500 million building the Museum of the Bible, a 430,000-square-foot institution that opened three blocks from the U.S. Capitol in November 2017. Steve Green chairs its board. The line between family and museum remains, by Blanding’s account, “always very, very porous.”
Federal scrutiny arrived quickly. 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. The company shipped the items under false labels. In 2017, it settled, forfeited thousands of artifacts, and paid a $3 million fine. A year earlier, a museum-commissioned study found its Dead Sea Scroll fragments were fakes. That summer in 2021, Iraq received about 17,000 looted artifacts from the U.S. in its largest-ever repatriation—roughly 12,000 held by the Museum of the Bible. The Gilgamesh tablet itself was bought from an auction house in 2014 for about $1.67 million. Agents seized it in 2019. Prosecutors said the auction house withheld the tablet’s false provenance from both Hobby Lobby and the museum.
What Blanding found most striking was how the Greens chose to spend 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, they spent hundreds of millions promoting a biblical worldview and trying to reshape American law and society. The most consequential fight was their own. In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby that closely held for-profit companies could be exempt from regulations violating their owners’ religious beliefs. The ruling spared Hobby Lobby from covering certain contraceptives. Blanding argues it also limited employees’ reproductive choices and opened the door for the family to back anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ causes, school prayer, and Bible teaching in public schools.
The Greens declined to be interviewed for the book. Their lawyer told Blanding the family wouldn’t participate, questioned his methods, and asked to review the manuscript before publication. He sent six or seven pages of follow-up questions. No response came back. So Blanding built the book from what the Greens had already produced—books, articles, podcasts, interviews—and from documents he obtained showing how the artifacts were trafficked. He calls it an exposé, but one that tries to understand its subjects. “For better or for worse, they’re really sincere in their beliefs,” he said. The harder question he left for readers: how does that conviction fit a pluralistic country? It’s the same question every American owes themselves right now.