\u201cI want to know that I have affected people for eternity. I matter 10 billion years from now.\u201d Thus said the normally retiring David Green, founder of Oklahoma-based Hobby Lobby. The location is no accident, for Oklahoma has long been home to countless fundamentalist congregations and businesses, a font of support for Christian nationalism. Privately owned Hobby Lobby has supersized this movement with financial support flowing from what investigative reporter Blanding reckons to be $8 billion in annual revenues. With this funding, he says, Hobby Lobby has pressed for the removal of contraception from the Affordable Care Act, opposed gay marriage and civil rights protections for minorities, and battled to make abortion illegal, acting through dozens of organizations and churches. One approach, the author reports, has been to buy properties and donate them to fundamentalist churches, on which Hobby Lobby spent $100 million between 2000 and 2002 alone. \u201cObviously it\u2019s a tax write-off, but we do it for the ministry, that\u2019s our motivation,\u201d said Green. In funding the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., Blanding writes, \u201cthey built up the largest private collection of biblical antiquities in the world\u2026.And when it turned out that many of those items\u2026had been looted, stolen, or forged, they presented themselves as na\u00efve victims of unscrupulous black-market dealers\u2014paying little mind to the extent to which their reckless desire to obtain items to justify their religious beliefs had led them to ignore multiple red flags.\u201d Elsewhere, writes the author, the Green family has turned its attention to such matters as introducing religion courses in public schools. A leading biblical studies scholar said one curriculum was founded on \u201coversimplifications, misrepresentations, logical fallacies, and outright mistakes.\u201d No matter, writes Blanding in closing: \u201cThey\u2019ll no doubt continue trying to impose their biblical worldview on America.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cI want to know that I have affected people for eternity. I matter 10 billion years from now.\u201d Thus said the normally retiring David Green, founder of Oklahoma-based Hobby Lobby. The location is no accident, for Oklahoma has long been home to countless fundamentalist congregations and businesses, a font of support for Christian nationalism. Privately […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6815,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6814"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}