Hobby Lobby’s founder called wealth ‘a curse.’ His family spent millions chasing biblical artifacts
Source: Fortune ·
In The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby, Michael Blanding traces how the Green family has steered craft-store profits into courts, classrooms and a $500 million museum.
From the source
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…
BestAIBroker analysis
- Finance-aware sentiment: neutral (+0.00 on a -1 to +1 scale).
- Event classification: OTHER.
- Market importance score: 32/100, weighting entity relevance, source credibility, multi-outlet coverage and recency.