Just to clarify my going-in position on the subject of author Michael Blanding’s new book, I flip the bird every time I pass a Hobby Lobby, with an extra fillip thrown in that’s meant for the Supreme Court. Thus, when I saw The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby available for review, I immediately snagged it. Blanding is — to quote The Big Guy Himself, as reported by Samuel (Old Testament) and Paul (New Testament) — “a man after my own heart.” 

Indeed, I picked up Gospel at the same time as Emma Cline’s The Problem of God, sensing that there would be some synergy. Indeed. For me, the Green family of Hobby Lobby fame is Exhibit A in illustrating the real problem of God: all the people who are certain they have a direct, personal line into His Truth, Plan, and Intentions and that everyone else had better listen up and get with the program.

Thus enters David Marvin Green, born in 1941 to Walter Green, a receiver of holy visions starting at age 24, and Marie Lark, once pastor of the Emporia, Kansas, branch of the Church of God of Prophecy (good on CGP for being enlightened enough to allow women preachers back in the day). David was one of six siblings who traveled across the Southwest with their parents as Dad opened new churches to meet the Pentecostal demand. The family was an early adopter of the prosperity gospel, believing that God rewards true believers with material benefits. They also believed that all giving must go to the church in support of spreading the Word, not to any other possibly worthy cause (such as, say, feeding the hungry).

After years learning the retail ropes at other stores, David first went out on his own with a partner making and selling picture frames. Wife Barbara and their sons, 9-year-old Mart and 7-year-old Steve, glued the frames at the kitchen table. For their first store, in Oklahoma City, they heisted the name of one of their customer’s shops; thus was born the Greens’ original Hobby Lobby.

Like his father’s receiving divine visions, David believes that God has directly guided him and Barbara in the business decisions they have made, and that the corporation’s success is proof of divine approval. David, sensitive that he was the lone sibling not involved in the church, was at pains to show his mother that the profits he was generating could be reinvested to the glory of their particular brand of Christianity. In 2010, writes Blanding, “Forbes named the Green family the top lifetime giver to religious charities, estimating its donations so far at $500 million.” And that was before they began giving anonymously through donor-advised funds.

Certain of their righteousness, the Greens see no reason to compromise simply because they live within a multicultural society. After the 2006 blowback to Hobby Lobby’s first July 4th ad, which asserted that America was founded as a Christian nation, Steve Green observed, “I could already see the folly in the attitude that we should all just get along and coexist with one another.”

Blanding tells a compelling, well-woven story with an unexpected propulsion of suspense. Besides charting the rise of this craft-store/religious-giving juggernaut, presenting significant questions being debated among biblical scholars, and immersing readers in the early days of mass-media preachers that led to the political influence of Evangelicals today, the author sets up a multi-continent whodunit filled with plundered antiquities both genuine and counterfeit. Because, in case readers have forgotten, this is the same Green family that went on a worldwide buying spree to outfit their Museum of the Bible.

Whatever else they may have told the various curators who helped them build the collection — and who might have thought it was all in service to a true scholarly endeavor — the museum’s objective is to demonstrate that the King James Bible is historically accurate and completely true. The museum sits in Washington, DC, in sight of the U.S. Capitol, all the better to host lawmakers and Supreme Court justices for religious symposia and prayer breakfasts.

In putting the collection together, the Green family was able to earn significant tax breaks by using the difference between the price they paid for objects and their assessed value upon donation to the museum. More problematic was their habit of importing items with false packaging and vastly understated value, and of not going through customs brokers. (In legal terms, this is called smuggling.) Worse still, the family seemed to be directly participating in the illegal trafficking of antiquities. The detective work to prove this case played out deep in the background while Hobby Lobby accrued its lasting notoriety elsewhere. 

The chapter “In the Womb I Knew You” offers a blow-by-blow description of the legal battle that culminated in the 2014 Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. (Interestingly, the first time Hobby Lobby won in court — garnering an injunction by citing Citizens United and arguing if a corporation has a right to free speech, then it also has a right to religion — the Tenth Circuit decision was written by Neil Gorsuch.)

Thus, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito — staunch champions of religious liberty, just as long as that religion is Christianity — clapped back at the executive branch’s puzzlement that a “for-profit, secular corporation established to sell art and craft supplies can claim to exercise religion” with a hearty you bet! Alito assured the country that the ruling applied only to closely held corporations. Yet, in 2020, the Court upheld a Trump executive order allowing any company to deny birth-control coverage to employees on religious grounds.

Blanding delivers on his subtitle, revealing the extent of the network that this very rich, politically powerful family has cultivated — most chillingly, within all branches of the federal government — and the results so far in their “quest to craft a Christian nation.” The Greens, now into their fourth generation as a Hobby Lobby family and sure of their personal knowledge of the Lord’s Plan, show no sign of giving quarter.

God help us all.

Jennifer Bort Yacovissi’s novel, Up the Hill to Home, tells the story of four generations of a family in Washington, DC, from the Civil War to the Great Depression. She reviews regularly for the Independent and serves on its board of directors as president. Follow Jenny on Bluesky at @jbywrites.bsky.social.