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

In 2021, investigative journalist Michael Blanding was reading a New York Times story about a 3,500-year-old clay tablet that federal agents had seized from the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. About halfway down, he hit the detail that became his next book: the tablet, inscribed with part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, belonged to Hobby Lobby.

“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.

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.