In a recent episode of the Craft Industry Alliance podcast, we talked with investigative journalist and best-selling author Michael Blanding about his new book, The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby: Inside a Billionaire Family’s Quest to Craft a Christian Nation.
In this riveting exposé, Blanding traces the pivotal role the Green family has played in funding and empowering America’s Christian nationalist movement. Today, we’re sharing an excerpt from this new book.
One day in 1982, David found himself outside an oil company facility in Oklahoma City, praying. He walked around the plant, beseeching God to stop taking Hobby Lobby’s employees away. For months, Hobby Lobby had been losing its best people, as Oklahoma was in the midst of an unprecedented oil and gas boom. It had started in the Anadarko Basin in West Oklahoma, where prospectors had discovered new natural gas deposits by digging ultradeep wells. By the early ’80s, they were investing billions in new leases as newly rich oilmen took helicopters to Dallas and private jets to Europe. For the first time, Oklahoma had a per capita income on par with the rest of the country.
Hobby Lobby initially capitalized on this good fortune, opening several new stores and a giant warehouse alongside the Oklahoma River, allowing the company to buy in even larger quantities. Each time another store moved out of the Tenth Street shopping center, Hobby Lobby gobbled up the space, now occupying a full fifty thousand square feet. The company began selling more expensive items to appeal to newly rich Oklahomans, including Samsonite luggage, grandfather clocks, and exotic foods such as “bird’s nest soup.” Seward oversaw a fine art department with numbered lithographs selling for more than $1,000 each. Still, the parking lot filled early every morning, the overflow spilling into a neighboring field. “Christmas shoppers are elbow-to-elbow in the five stores owned by Greene and Seward,” read an article in The Oklahoman during the 1980 holiday season, spelling David’s name wrong in the company’s first major newspaper feature.
The pair were so confident that they didn’t even consider opening a store in one of the indoor shopping malls that were fast becoming the center of American social life.
“We don’t feel we need the built-in traffic,” Seward said. “We’ll create our own.”
Real estate agents began advertising homes as “close to Hobby Lobby” as church groups and homemaker associations planned social outings to stores. (“We oohed and aahed over everything they had,” said one satisfied Okmulgee housewife.”) Hobby Lobby ended 1980 with two hundred employees and sales of $10 million. Even then, David had loftier ambitions— “Thirty stores, each of them doing $2.5 million a year in sales volume,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be great?”
As David and Hobby Lobby prospered, the next generation of Greens was thriving as well. After Mart graduated from high school, he took classes at Bethany Nazarene College and a semester at the church’s Tomlinson Bible College in Tennessee, but he felt that he’d rather be working. He called his father to remind him about a conversation they’d had about opening a new store selling Bibles and other religious books. “You’re really going to do it?” Mart asked. David turned it back on him: “Well, you wanna do it? If you come home I’ll help you get a loan.”
Mart returned to Oklahoma City, and David helped him locate space in a shopping center near their home, suggesting that he sell office supplies in addition to books. In the summer of 1981, at age nineteen, Mart opened Mardel Office & Christian Supply (named for a combination of his first and middle name, Mart Delyn), promising a “vast range of office supplies” along with “Oklahoma’s largest selection of religious books.” By now, Christian publishing was a phenomenon, with multiple books by James Dobson and Billy Graham topping the charts along with the apocalyptic fiction of Hal Lindsey and Schaeffer and Koop’s antiabortion book. The store grossed $8,000 in sales its first month, $34,000 its second, and soared to $91,000 a month by Christmas.
When Steve graduated from high school in 1981, he thought about college but decided “I’d be further ahead if I were to just go ahead and start working.” He joined Hobby Lobby full-time as store operations manager, his father’s liaison between branches and corporate headquarters.
Meanwhile, the new church building David had funded was going up fast, with a majestic triangular brick facade and soaring white steeple. In one of its first ceremonies, Mart walked down the aisle on a Friday night in January 1982 to marry Diane Kay Maddox, a longtime Bethany resident with a shy smile and blunt-cut bangs who had been a cheerleader as well as a fellow member of math club and student council.
By now, David was setting aside money every year for the church’s missionary work, feeling like God was personally blessing him with the continued success of the company. Hobby Lobby opened a new location focused specifically on fashion, stocking calico fabrics so homemakers could sew the flounced skirts of the “prairie style” then in vogue across the country, while Mart opened a Mardel next door. By Hobby Lobby’s tenth anniversary, the company had seven stores with annual sales of $18 million—double the amount of just two years earlier.
The only problem was that the raging economy from the oil boom threatened to decimate Hobby Lobby’s workforce. As civic boosters predicted a hundred-year spike of prosperity, the gas companies were able to offer wages David just couldn’t match. In desperation, he drove out to the oil plant to pray for God to stop taking employees away. To his delight, God listened, personally rewarding his faith.
“From that day on, we stopped losing our best people,” he said. “God cares about our problems. He cares about employee retention.”
A more secular explanation for the reversal can be found in the events of Fourth of July weekend 1982, when Oklahoma City’s Penn Square Bank suddenly collapsed. Initially founded in a shopping mall, the bank had grown flush on increasingly risky loans to wildcatters, ultimately lending $2 billion on some $500 million in assets and selling shares to other banks as well. When the price of oil dropped from $40 to $28 a barrel due to supply increases, Penn Square watched its borrowers default on loan after loan, spurring a Bailey Bros. Building & Loan–style run on Friday, July 2. Bank employees brought ice water to depositors who lined up outside its headquarters in 90-degree heat. By Monday, the bank was insolvent—the country’s largest-ever banking collapse.
At the time, David took pleasure in the comeuppance of Penn Square, which had denied Hobby Lobby a loan when the company was first starting out. “If Penn Square had only been willing to take a $1,000 risk on us, they would have had at least one good loan to show the auditors!” he joked. But eventually, the bank’s demise would ripple out to take down the entire Oklahoma economy, and Hobby Lobby with it, bringing the company to the brink of disaster.
Even as that time bomb was ticking, David and his family could celebrate the fact that the country was waking up to Jesus at last. In April 1980, a half-million evangelicals poured onto the National Mall under overcast skies for the Washington for Jesus rally, marking the arrival of the religious right as a political force. Organized by broad- caster Pat Robertson and Campus Crusade’s Bill Bright, the event featured fasting, speeches, and lobbying with a clear message: the nation had sunk into a pit of immorality due to drug use, homosexuality, and abortion and had to be saved.
“We have enough votes to run the country,” Robertson thundered. “And when the people say, ‘We’ve had enough,’ we are going to take over.”
Excerpted from The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby: Inside a Billionaire Family’s Quest to Craft a Christian Nation by Michael Blanding. Copyright © 2026 by Michael Blanding. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
