Join us for a presentation by Michael Blanding of his book, The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby: Inside a Billionaire Family’s Quest to Craft a Christian Nation. As Christian nationalism has surged into the mainstream of American politics in the last decade, no family has been more influential than the Greens, owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of big box craft stores. And yet, their story has been largely untold.
In his book, Blanding explores how the family’s fervent commitment to “biblical truth” has led it to push the bounds of religious liberty in the Supreme Court, fund conservative institutions responsible for repealing Roe v Wade and undermining LGBTQ rights, and establish the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, controversially stocking it with thousands of illegally trafficked biblical antiquities. In tracing the rise of the family from a small Oklahoma business to a billion-dollar political force, the book looks at how Christian nationalism is funded, organized, and deployed—and the challenge it poses to democracy.
Michael Blanding is a Boston-based investigative journalist and author of In Shakespeare’s Shadow and the New York Times bestseller, The Map Thief. A former senior writer at Boston Magazine and senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, his work has appeared in The New York Times, WIRED, Slate, Smithsonian, The Boston Globe, and other publications. Visit his website at www.michaelblanding.com.
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