Hobby Lobby stores feel like a second home if you were raised evangelical. It’s Vacation Bible School and Sunday School and girls’ Bible study, located inside one shabby-chic warren. The stores’ owners, David Green and his family—like Chick-fil-A’s Dan Cathy and many before them—have layered a Christ-like veneer onto the pursuit of profit. At Hobby Lobby you can buy a Jesus cross-stitch kit or a poster that reads “This Girl Runs On Cupcakes and Jesus” alongside beads and quilting fabric; it is the store of choice for America’s church ladies, and it has, in turn, made its owners billionaires. The Lord is good—to the Greens.



BIBLE NATION: THE UNITED STATES OF HOBBY LOBBY by Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden Princeton University Press, 240 pp., $29.95

David Green is an exemplar among Christian businessmen. He stands out not just for his improbably large craft empire, now worth $4.3 billion, or for his religiosity but for the scale of his ambitions. Green and his family have a clear set of beliefs that, they hold, should shape American life: The U.S. is a Christian nation, the archaeological record supports an evangelical Protestant view of the Bible, and Americans should be compelled by law to live according to this interpretation. And they are determined to prove it. In Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, Green’s company argued before the Supreme Court that employers should not have to provide insurance coverage for contraception, if they had a religious objection, and he won.



The Supreme Court ruling was far from the pinnacle of the Greens’ ambition, as theology professors Candida Moss and Joel Baden show in their new book Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby. The Greens “didn’t just want to turn their mom-and-pop homecrafts store into a billion-dollar empire,” Moss and Baden write, “or even merely give back to society once they had made it big. They wanted to play a role in the course of human history. As Mark Rutland, the former president of Oral Roberts University, put it, ‘the Greens are Kingdom-givers.’”

Almost since they opened their first store in 1972, the Greens have mounted a multi-pronged and well-financed campaign to give credibility to and spread their version of human history. Moss and Baden have written the first comprehensive account of that campaign, focusing mostly on the Green Collection, which has purchased a still-unknown quantity of Biblical artifacts; the Green Scholars Initiative, which analyzes those artifacts and produces its own academic curriculum; and the Museum of the Bible, which will open in Washington, D.C. this fall to display the Green Collection’s artifacts. These projects provide a crucial foundation for the family’s theology. For the rest of their evangelical beliefs to make sense—their stance on the role of religion in American public life, for example—they must first defend their understanding of the Bible as a consistent, and literally true, historical record. This is not scholarship for the sake of learning or enquiry, but rather an attempt to prove definitively the truth of conservative evangelicalism.

Exhaustively reported and scrupulously fair, Bible Nation doubles as a portrait of conviction: The Greens may well be the most sincere and most-frequently misguided activists in America. “If they are culture warriors,” say Moss and Baden, “that has been the case for many years.” They’ve successfully shaped the culture they want through the labor practices in their stores, through their philanthropic choices and through their proselytizing mission. Real piety and strategic canniness—it’s a familiar blend. The Green family thinks they need to build their America, but we’re already in it and we have been for a long time.