“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” Around Halloween, stories started popping up about the “godly” millionaires who own Hobby Lobby. The New Republic‘s Elizabeth Bruenig: … Hobby Lobby’s owners, the Oklahoma-based Green family, have now set their sights on greater things. No longer content to traffic purely …
Mildly Alarming Reads: “Can Hobby Lobby Buy the Bible?”Post + Comments (70)
Hobby Lobby brings in a yearly revenue of roughly $3.7 billion, according to Forbes. You can do a lot to promote the Bible with that kind of money. And the Greens do: They create films with biblical themes, they own a chain of Christian bookstores, they support the development of a Bible curriculum for schools, they sponsor trips to Israel, they donate to Christian charities. They once spent $70 million to prop up Oral Roberts University when it was struggling. But the most expensive, extensive, and time-consuming project in their portfolio is the Museum of the Bible. Steve Green may be the president of Hobby Lobby, but he devotes half his time to the museum.
The Greens didn’t originally intend to build a museum. Nor did they originally intend to collect biblical artifacts. But in the mid-2000s they began collaborating with Johnny Shipman, an eccentric Dallas businessman who walked around town in a full-length fur coat, carried a firearm, and, as a Baptist, felt called to build something greater than himself: a national Bible museum. Shipman enlisted the support of Scott Carroll, a former academic with a doctorate in ancient studies who had made a career out of helping collectors track down and acquire items, especially rare manuscripts. Shipman had the idea, Carroll had the expertise—and the Greens, Shipman recognized, had the money.
A few years later, the Greens made their first purchase: a very early English translation of the Book of Psalms. Soon they were making acquisitions all over the world, and in 2010, they decided—as Steve Green delicately put it to us—to “take more ownership of the project.” Shipman was out; Dallas was left behind…
Steve Green has a mantra: We aren’t collectors, we’re storytellers. In his conversation with us, he made it clear that he envisages the Museum of the Bible as a place that will tell the story of a sacred book that has traveled down the centuries essentially unchanged since the time of its composition. Green describes the museum’s mission as “nonsectarian,” and language in the museum’s recent nonprofit filings reinforces that idea. “We exist to invite all people to engage with the Bible,” the most recent filing we were able to obtain reads. “We invite biblical exploration through museum exhibits and scholarly pursuits.” But in its first nonprofit filing, in 2010, the museum made a stronger claim: that its primary exempt purpose was “to bring to life the living word of God, to tell its compelling story of preservation, and to inspire confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible.”…
The Greens want to influence Americans and bring them back to the Bible. They’re unlikely to promote their socially conservative views openly in the museum, but its exhibits may give them a prominent, seemingly authoritative platform from which to push back against what they see as the secular tide in American politics. “I hope the museum becomes a beacon for all people to engage with the ideas and beauty of the Bible,” Steve Green wrote in a statement to The Atlantic. And that, he made clear to us in our conversation, includes this country’s political leaders. “They need to know,” he said, “that this book speaks to every area of life and it has advice: It advises how a good government should be … Our Founding Fathers unabashedly looked to the Bible in building this nation, so why wouldn’t it be right for our legislators to know our history of our government?”…