# Green Family The **Green family** of Oklahoma City are evangelical billionaires who own **[[Hobby Lobby]]**. They have turned a privately held craft-store chain into one of the most versatile religious-right vehicles in the country, using it at once as a litigant, a museum builder, an ad funder and a political donor. The family members each run a different part of it: - **[[David Green]]**, born 1941, is the founder and patriarch. He is the son of a Pentecostal preacher, and he started Hobby Lobby in 1972 with a $600 loan. - **[[Steve Green]]**, the president since 1992, is the religious-cultural architect behind the [[Museum of the Bible]]. - **[[Mart Green]]** runs the family's Christian retail and media operations and was the lead donor in the bailout and board takeover of [[Oral Roberts University]]. ## What the family built **1. A precedent: corporate religious liberty.** [[Burwell v. Hobby Lobby]] (June 30, 2014, 5–4, argued by the [[Becket Fund]]) held that closely held for-profit corporations can claim religious exemptions under the [[Religious Freedom Restoration Act]]. Hobby Lobby was excused from the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate. The case turned a family's convictions into a doctrine that later litigants, from wedding vendors to employers, have built on. **2. A monument: the Museum of the Bible.** It opened in November 2017 on a site two blocks from the Capitol and cost more than $500 million. It is built for ecumenical respectability, and it has had two scandals. In July 2017 Hobby Lobby paid a **$3 million federal settlement** and forfeited about **5,500 smuggled Iraqi artifacts**. In March 2020 the museum admitted that all 16 of its "Dead Sea Scrolls" fragments were **modern forgeries**. The pattern is consistent: the family acquires first and verifies later. **3. An ad campaign: "He Gets Us."** David Green has said the family was among the funders of the "He Gets Us" campaign. It is a billion-dollar-scale effort to rebrand Jesus for skeptical audiences, and its Super Bowl ads ran in 2023 and 2024. Its donor network drew criticism for anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion ties. **4. A seat at the table: [[Ziklag]].** ProPublica's July 2024 reporting on the leaked "Ziklag files" listed the Greens among the ultra-wealthy Christian families in the invitation-only charity. Ziklag works on the [[Seven Mountain Mandate]] and on election mechanics, including voter-roll challenges, alongside the Uihlein and [[Waller Family]] money. ## Why the family matters The Greens are the clearest case of the **business-as-ministry model**, where the company itself does the religious-political work. Burwell gave the right a legal tool, the museum gave it respectability, the ad campaign gave it culture, and Ziklag gave it an electoral program. It is the same stack the [[Christian Nationalism Ecosystem]] runs on, owned by a single family. ## See Also - [[Hobby Lobby]] · [[Museum of the Bible]] · [[Burwell v. Hobby Lobby]] · [[Becket Fund]] - [[Ziklag]] · [[Christian Nationalism]] · [[Christian Nationalism Ecosystem]] · [[National Christian Foundation]] - [[David Green]] · [[Steve Green]] · [[Mart Green]] · [[Oral Roberts University]]