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 in yarn, felt, or health care policy, the Greens have begun trafficking in potentially looted antiquities plucked from conflict zones in the Middle East.
This week Candida Moss and Joel Baden—professors at Notre Dame and Yale Divinity School, respectively—reported that federal investigators are looking into a shipment of more than 200 ancient clay tablets procured by the Greens from Iraq via Israel… Both federal and international laws prohibit the plunder of antiquities from conflict zones, as well as the ruins of important historical sites…
The sale of looted artifacts likely benefits ISIS, which appears to be smuggling portable artifacts out of the region as a means of raising income… Though it isn’t clear how the Greens purchased their tablets, Moss and Baden emphasized in an email to the New Republic that “every purchase of unprovenanced artifacts reinforces the market for illicit antiquities and emboldens those engaged in looting,” adding that “the risks of inadvertently financing an illegal and violent market are just too high to justify the acquisition of improperly documented material.”…
Mr. Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire:
… I think it was so nice of those 5000-odd Americans, and those 100,000-odd Iraqis, to die so that Dick Cheney’s pals could clean up in the oil fields and so that evangelical grifters could loot what artwork the mobs in the streets hadn’t already carried off or wrecked. (“Freedom is messy.” – Donald Rumsfeld, career wrongfella.) The Greens are truly appalling people with a truly appalling amount of money that is enabling them to build a truly appalling building in the middle of the nation’s capital. Now, it appears, their truly appalling Museum Of The Bible may discuss only eight commandments – hanging up those prohibitions against bearing false witness and coveting your neighbor’s goods may strike some people as a little ironic, and may cause this truly appalling monument to theocratic simpletons to catch the odd lightning bolt or three…
Why would the Greens so egregiously violate their own professed moral code, not to mention Federal and international law, in order to stockpile batches of “handmade clay tiles” (how the smuggled artifacts were mislabeled) and similar antique bumf? Well, evangelicals believe in the power of The Word — consider the tantrums over how President Obama has failed to intone the correct version of radical Islamic terrorism, because if he had then ISIS would already have disbanded. And it seems that the Greens have an Orwellian vision of “The Good Word” (divine, perfect, transmitted intact from a solitary Higher Power to today’s American evangelists via King James’ translators) which they are committed to impose upon the messy theological history of the past two millenia.
Joel Baden & Candida Moss, in The Atlantic:
In November 2017, the Museum of the Bible will open in Washington, D.C., two blocks from the National Mall. Like many of the city’s other museums, it is designed to attract hordes of visitors each year, and it will be vast—eight stories tall, and covering 430,000 square feet. Despite its location and size, however, it isn’t a government institution. It’s private, backed by the family of David Green, a wealthy businessman from Oklahoma City, better known as the founder of the Hobby Lobby retail chain, and it will house artifacts from the family’s stunning collection of biblical manuscripts, Torah scrolls, Dead Sea Scrolls, and cuneiform texts. The Greens’ collection is one of the largest private collections of such artifacts in the world, comprising some 40,000 objects—many of which, remarkably, were unknown to scholars and the general public before the Greens acquired them. And the Greens made their first purchase only six years ago.
That’s a startling pace of acquisition, especially given the fraught and specialized market for biblical antiquities, and it raises difficult questions about how the Green family has acquired its artifacts, and why…
… Steve Green doesn’t distinguish between business and belief. “God’s given us the ability to be very successful in our business,” he told us, “and I think to some degree it’s providential.” Hobby Lobby, he explained, is not just a business. It’s a business that enables a ministry, and at the center of that ministry is the Bible. “We want to share this book with people all over the world,” he said. “And the more resources we have, the more we’re able to do that.”
Mildly Alarming Reads: “Can Hobby Lobby Buy the Bible?”Post + Comments (70)