A $14 Billion Glitter Glue Gospel: Michael Blanding on the Wealthiest Christian Nationalist Family You've Never Heard Of
We’ve done plenty of abstract shows on American Christian nationalism. But this one is about a single family: the Greens of Oklahoma City, owners of the Hobby Lobby retail empire, and probably the wealthiest Christian nationalist family you’ve never heard of.
According to investigative writer Michael Blanding, the Greens have amassed a $14 billion fortune from selling glitter glue and popsicle sticks. In his new book The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby, Blanding reveals what he insists is this billionaire family’s quest to craft a Christian nation.
Hobby Lobby is an all-American story — especially in its ridiculous ironies. A fundamentalist fortune built on bead-buying hippy consumers. The business came out of the Sixties counterculture. That said, the Greens have built the closest thing to a Christian corporate behemoth. Hobby Lobby has no corporate debt, is closed on Sundays, pays above average wages, and has a founder, David, who still flies coach. And yet this is the same Trump-loving corporation that forced its warehouse laborers to work during COVID and denies them birth control coverage.
And then there is the Museum of the Bible, blocks from the Capitol — God’s base camp, as it’s known — stocked with 40,000 shady artifacts including a $1.7 million Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, and forged Dead Sea Scrolls. Such are the absurdities of life in Christian MAGAland. Render unto Trump what is Trump’s. Then deduct, forge or steal the rest.
Five Takeaways
• The Most Influential Family You've Never Heard Of. Hobby Lobby is an $8 billion business with a thousand big-box stores, and the Greens are worth $14 billion — among the richest people in America — from what Blanding calls the perfect recession-proof business: when times are good, people buy crafts, and when times are bad, they make things instead of buying them. David Green saw the waste at the TG&Y department store chain in the sixties, started making picture frames in his garage, and — by his own account — owes the takeoff to the beatniks and hippies buying beads. The family credits God rather than themselves: chosen, anointed, and bearing no responsibility for the wealth.
• True Believers, Not Hypocrites. Whatever else the Greens are, Blanding insists, they are not hypocrites: they genuinely believe everyone is going to hell without Jesus, and they live accordingly. No corporate debt, wages well above the minimum, closed Sundays to honor the Lord, a founder who flies coach and lives modestly in Oklahoma. The record cuts both ways: during COVID, warehouse employees worked unmasked in hundred-degree heat after David Green’s wife had a vision from God that the company must stay open. And the 2014 Supreme Court case over birth control coverage made Hobby Lobby a national flashpoint — half the country boycotts it, and the other half shops there precisely because of it.
• Seven Mountains and the Attack on Pluralism. The Greens work within the democratic system, Blanding concedes under Andrew’s devil’s advocacy — but they are associated with Seven Mountains dominionism, the crusade for evangelical control of government, law, entertainment, and the other commanding heights of American society. Steve Green, David’s son, is on record that there is one true worldview, incompatible with all others, and that pluralism should not exist because the rules are laid out in the Bible. His Bible curriculum for public schools taught scripture as reliable historical truth. This isn’t guilt by association, Blanding a
