The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby
Inside a Billionaire Family's Quest to Craft a Christian Nation
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
A revelatory account of how the family behind Hobby Lobby rose to political prominence and used their influence—and fortune—to push a radical religious agenda
“Eye-opening . . . Blanding is at the height of his arts and crafts in telling exactly how Hobby Lobby’s adventurers went so far astray in their effort to raid so many lost and phony arks.” —The New York Times
Hobby Lobby is a multibillion-dollar craft store chain with more than a thousand US locations, founded and owned by the Greens—an evangelical Christian family committed to establishing the Bible as the ultimate authority behind our laws and society.
In The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby, Michael Blanding reveals how the Greens have quietly yet effectively used their vast wealth to spread their beliefs throughout the US and beyond. They have run expensive, wide-reaching ad campaigns to inculcate biblical values and have propped up evangelical education through donations of money and land. They successfully fought a Supreme Court case to deny their employees insurance coverage for contraception and funneled millions of dollars to organizations working to overturn Roe v. Wade and to undermine LGBTQ rights. And, for their multimillion-dollar Museum of the Bible just blocks from the US Capitol building, they’ve acquired looted, stolen, and forged biblical antiquities from the Middle East. In a riveting exposé, Blanding traces the Greens’ efforts to sell their evangelical mission.
Captivating and disturbing, The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby exposes the pivotal role the Green family has played in funding and empowering America’s dangerous, ascendant Christian nationalist movement.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this enlightening yet overstuffed investigation, journalist Blanding (The Map Thief) examines how the billionaire Green family behind the retail chain Hobby Lobby has used their considerable wealth to promote Christian nationalism. The author dates the family's turn toward evangelism to 1932 with the Pentecostal awakening of Hobby Lobby founder David Green's father, Walter, who went on to impart the importance of proselytizing to his children, including business-minded David. Starting in the 1990s, the author traces Hobby Lobby's increasingly public advocacy for evangelical Christianity, including a successful Supreme Court case against the Affordable Care Act's birth control mandate; "buying up properties on a massive scale to donate to religious groups"; a failed foray into the movie business; and the founding of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. The author situates the Greens within the growing influence of evangelicalism in politics, arguments over biblical interpretation, and other evangelicals' career trajectories. These narrative threads can distract from the primary focus on the family, though some are rewarding, like Blanding's detour into the shady provenance of artifacts at the Museum of the Bible, which temporarily transforms the book into a gripping archaeological heist thriller featuring a "back-alley deal from an Oxford professor" and antiquities warehoused among craft supplies. For readers who can stick it out, this offers insight into a powerful family's relentless approach to spreading their beliefs.
