Hobby Lobby’s Billionaire Founders Are Building a White Evangelical America

For decades, Barbara and David Green, the billionaire couple behind the craft store chain Hobby Lobby, have tried to shape the country according to their white evangelical worldview. In his book The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby: Inside a Billionaire Family’s Quest to Craft a Christian Nation, investigative journalist Michael Blanding shows how the Greens deliberately used their wealth to build institutions and gain cultural and political influence. They funded missionaries, ministries, and evangelical colleges, produced documentaries, and founded the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., which was filled with tens of thousands looted and stolen antiquities at its founding. According to Blanding, Hobby Lobby was forced to return 17,000 of the looted and stolen artifacts after a raid by federal agents.

The Greens have also backed controversial conservative figures and have been at the forefront of some of the most contentious legal battles of recent decades, including the fight over reproductive rights. In this interview, Blanding — the best-selling author of The Map Thief, In Shakespeare’s Shadow, The Coke Machine, and most recently, The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby (2026) — discusses the beliefs that drive the Greens, the strategy behind their giving, and what it means that they now operate from the center of American political life.

The interview that follows has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Claudia Garcia-Rojas: What was the moment you felt a flicker of interest in writing about the Green family?

Michael Blanding: It was immediate upon reading a 2021 New York Times article that was about the seizure of the Gilgamesh Dream tablet in the Museum of the Bible. Halfway through, it said that the tablet was owned by Hobby Lobby Corporation. It got me curious. What is this big-box craft chain doing with an ancient tablet? Why and how was Hobby Lobby trafficking Middle Eastern antiquities? I started researching and realized they were doing it to prove the truth of the Bible, and they had used their fortune to fund right-wing religious causes. It made me realize there was a much bigger story about this family and the influence and impact that they have in our culture.

Early on, you trace a worldview in which the Greens see their lives as evidence of God’s intervention and believe they possess absolute biblical truth. What happens when that view is combined with enormous wealth and political power?

I wanted to understand where the Green family was coming from and the origins of their beliefs. I found two strains in their beliefs. One was Pentecostalism: speaking in tongues, receiving prophecies, hearing God’s voice direct your every move. The other is fundamentalism, that the Bible is inerrant. What surprised me is that American fundamentalism only goes back about 100 years; before that, the Bible was open to many interpretations. Once you see it as inerrant, there’s only one truth, and anyone that doesn’t follow is going to hell. So, my central question became: how does that sincere belief, and I have no doubt it’s sincere, interact with our pluralistic democracy?

What emerged were questions of accountability. When you believe you have a personal relationship with God and he directs all your actions, you see yourself as privileged, doing God’s work. When things go wrong, the Greens blame their lack of faith in God. But oftentimes they blame others. When they nearly lost Hobby Lobby in the ’80s oil bust, the lesson wasn’t that they’d taken on too much debt, but that they hadn’t been humble enough before God. There’s no sense that their actions are theirs or they need to learn from their mistakes. That lack of personal accountability becomes maddening over time.

The Green men are the public face of the family, but the women seem to hold real power behind the scenes. What role do they play?

The Greens were major supporters of Bill Gothard. One of the main Christian ministries the Greens funded was the one founded by Gothard. He had an extremely hierarchical view of the family — God, then the father, the mother, and the children — that the Green family really embraced. Yet, during the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. Supreme Court case, [in which the court ruled that certain employers could block their employees access to birth control if it violates the employers’ religious beliefs], Barbara Green became the family’s main spokesperson, I think to shield them from accusations of gender discrimination. When it was convenient, they pushed her to the forefront.

I’m also thinking about David’s mother. His siblings all went into ministry, and she seems to have pressured him not to be the outlier.

His mother had a huge impact. In his books, he barely mentions his father beyond saying he was a pastor, but he talks constantly about his mother and how she was critical of him because he wasn’t doing more for God. When he became a department store manager, she’d ask, “What are you doing for the Lord, David?” When he became a regional manager over six stores, she’d ask again. There’s a Freudian reading here: once he built his wealth, he gave so much to religious causes partly to assuage guilt from her pressure.

In the book you note that despite their strict beliefs, the Greens had their own first child, Mart, out of wedlock?

I was surprised to discover that. They married in February, I believe, and Mart was born seven months later. The birth announcement described a healthy baby at a normal weight. It seems clear they had premarital sex, which I don’t judge, but which their religion did, and which was grounds for excommunication then.

They’ve never acknowledged it. Them not being able to follow their own religion, yet imposing it on other people, telling them what to do with their reproductive freedom. I found that fascinating, if not completely arrogant and hypocritical.

You place the Greens within a movement shaped by figures like R.J. Rushdoony, Jerry Falwell, and Bill Gothard. How direct was their influence on the family?

I wanted to tell of the rise of Christian nationalism alongside the rise of the Green family and Hobby Lobby. Sometimes the influence was direct. The Greens were among Gothard’s biggest financial backers; he was hugely influential in Christian homeschooling and was later accused of molesting young girls. Other influences were a generation removed. They supported David Barton, a self-styled historian who believes the United States was founded as a Christian nation. Barton, in turn, drew on Rushdoony, who established the basis for some of these ideas in the ’50s and ’60s.

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There’s a perception that because the Greens are fundamentalist, they’re politically unsophisticated. But your book suggests they understand that controlling institutions that produce knowledge, like schools, museums, and film production companies, can be as consequential as winning elections.

There is something unsophisticated and naive about them. None of them went to college, and nearly all still live near each other in Oklahoma City. Yet, their influence comes through controlling institutions. This is a different model of political influence than the one most of us have, which is about making campaign contributions and controlling politicians. The Greens give only token amounts to candidates. They started with supporting missionaries, then ministries. They’d buy land, wait a year, get it appraised much higher, donate it to a ministry, and pocket a hefty tax break. They gave to evangelical colleges and figures like Falwell and Oral Roberts, then founded the Museum of the Bible. After Burwell, they realized the courts were a way to get their policies established. At each step, they’re controlling these institutions with outsized impact on our culture. Whether or not they fully realize it, they have been far more effective than they would be if they were simply lobbying legislators.

For David Green, making money seems to have become a religious calling in itself. How did his convictions blur the line between building wealth and pursuing a religious mission?

Ultimately, there was no boundary. From his first church donation, David saw the company as a vessel for his worldview. And because his siblings were ministers, I think he lacked a sense of purpose until he realized that making money and giving it the right way could be just as influential. The ’80s crisis crystallized that; in his mind, God became an owner of the company. Yet you don’t see them giving much to the poor, as you might expect Jesus to advocate. Their Christianity aligns with right-wing market capitalism.

Every Christmas, Hobby Lobby runs full-page newspaper ads that don’t sell anything. Instead, they preach the gospel. How did those ads begin, and what do they reveal about the family’s sense of being persecuted?

The origin story of how the Green family became much more public about their beliefs was that on Christmas, around 1994, David Green opened [The Oklahoman] newspaper, saw no mention of Jesus, and was outraged. So, the Greens began placing Christmas ads professing their faith. And when I went back to the newspaper, I found Jesus all over it. There was a picture of Jesus in the manger on the front page above the fold. I can’t explain it outside of the belief, shared by the Greens and those like them, that they’re persecuted. As white Christian evangelicals, they’re at the center of the culture, yet they see themselves in a holy battle against demonic forces, the forces of secularism… It’s a victim mentality.

There’s a distinctly American “bootstraps” story here, but it’s also a story about neocolonial power. A white fundamentalist Christian family builds extraordinary wealth, uses it to amplify its ideology through cultural institutions and political influence, and acquires objects from the “Middle East.”

Many call it white Christian nationalism because there’s no equivalent for people of color. The story of America’s Christian founding is always one of white European colonial powers. The Greens never talk about race, but people with Christian nationalist views are more likely to support deporting immigrants, believing the founders’ white Christian heritage is under attack. Some of that targets other faiths, but much of it is racialized, a belief about who counts as a real American.

You close the book with your visit to Iraq, from which some of the antiquities once held in the Greens’ Museum of the Bible were looted. What was that experience like?

It’s one thing to say the Greens illegally acquired antiquities. It’s another to see what stripping cultural heritage means. Visiting sites pocked with looters’ pits, then museums whose objects now sit in European institutions, drove that home.

What is your own relationship to Christianity?

I grew up devoutly Catholic in Massachusetts. I was an altar boy and thought I’d become a priest, but as a teenager I saw hypocrisy in the people who held themselves up as most religious. I didn’t get confirmed, and eventually found Buddhism, which I practice now.

You read the Bible as part of your research for this book. What did you take away from it?

To sincerely understand the Greens, I spent four months reading the Bible and its commentaries. There are so many Bibles and interpretations, and because it’s inherently contradictory, you have to impose a belief system to make sense of it.

On abortion or homosexuality, there are only a handful of verses, all open to interpretation. A passage in Exodus says that if a pregnant woman is killed, the killer is put to death, but if she’s injured and loses the baby, the penalty is lesser, suggesting the “unborn” wasn’t considered equal to a human life. I think more people should read the Bible. You won’t persuade believers by saying it isn’t true, but you might by knowing it as well as they do.

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