Review: Bible Nation, Candida Moss and Joel Baden

Show of hands who all was aware that Hobby Lobby did a crime of smuggling antiquities out of Iraq? Because I remembered when this story broke and was thus distantly aware of HobLob’s weird antiquities situation, but I mentioned it to Friend of the Podcast Ashley and she was flabbergasted. However, HobLob’s religious agenda for America — including but not limited to their smuggling of antiquities — is the subject of my latest nonfiction read, Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby, so strap in.

Candida Moss and Joel Baden break down four areas in which the family that owns Hobby Lobby and the foundation owned by the family that owns Hobby Lobby are working to increase the Bible’s influence in American culture. The big scandalous one is the antiquities of shady provenance, but the three others — cultivating scholars to work on their antiquities, developing curricula about the Bible for use in public schools, and creating the “nonsectarian” Museum of the Bible –are each their own kettle of fish

The big thing — everything else kind of expands outward from this — is that the Greens, the evangelical family that owns and operates Hobby Lobby, want to acquire a whole bunch of antiquities relating to the Bible and early Christianity. They buy them cheap and donate them to their charitable foundation for massive tax write-offs, and that would be relatively okay in the same sort of not-exactly-okay a lot of tax write-off things are relatively okay, except they are very, very careless about provenance.

WELL I AM JUDGEY. Buying antiquities without a clean provenance massively increases the likelihood that they at some point passed through the hands of illegal dealers. This very much includes groups like ISIS, which raid ancient sites and do horrible hasty digs to find things they can sell to then fund their bad ISIS-y activities. And! The okayer the market makes it to buy unprovenanced antiquities, the more leeway illegal dealers will have to acquire and sell such antiquities — and ultimately, the more vital information about their original location will be lost beyond recovery. This would be very bad for Scholarship even if it didn’t also finance terrorism, which it does. Moss and Baden are careful to say that the Greens probably mean well, and that they have tried to clean up their act somewhat in the past few years. But somewhat is not enough, and they continue to acquire all sorts of cuneiform tablets and papyri and other really important stuff without making sure that those things were bought and sold legally along the way.

So, yeah, there’s that. Feel free not to shop at Hobby Lobby if you have an alternative, just because of that nonsense.¹

Each subsequent chapter of the book is less immediately upsetting than possibly funds terrorism, but let’s not skip being furious about the Green Scholars Initiative, which is the program the Greens have created to study all these antiquities they acquired semi-unethically. Basically they pick scholars at religious universities, or scholars they happen to know — not necessarily the top people in the relevant fields, not even necessarily people in the relevant fields at all — and bestow upon them the exclusive right to study this or that papyrus or tablet. But! (This is the part that makes me want to Hulk-smash.) They make the scholars sign non-disclosure agreements so that they can’t publish anything they find without the Greens’ say-so. Then they, the Greens, go ahead and publish nothing. For years. One book and that’s all.

Also, they try to pick scholars whose beliefs match their own; i.e., scholars who they think won’t find anything in the artifacts that might conflict with what they want to teach about the Bible and Christian history. Luckily, should any of the scholars ever find a fragment that says, like, “this is John the Apostle here to let you know that Jesus never walked on water not even slightly and we just said that to impress people,” they still couldn’t publish about it or even talk about it because of the non-disclosure agreement.

That’s cool, right? To hoard a bunch of ancient knowledge, keep it from the experts in those fields, and not share it with anyone ever? That’s in line with what we want out of scholarship?

YEAH. NO.

The education thing is like, that they keep making an insane curriculum that’s based on nothing and they want to put it in public schools. I decided to put a pin in being mad about this until it seems likelier to come to fruition — so, you know, probably that’ll happen later this year because that is just life in this administration.

And then the Museum of the Bible, okay, like. This museum opened in 2017 and it has a bunch of the Green collection artifacts which they keep saying they don’t personally own but they own the foundation the artifacts belong to so I’m not sure who they think they’re fooling, here. It’s immensely frustrating because they keep saying the museum is “nonsectarian” but they’re coming at it from one perspective only — Protestant and evangelical — and pretending that it’s scholarship instead of what it actually is, which is evangelism.

Baden and Moss are very nice about the Greens and their good intentions, without giving them a pass on any of the unethical and shady-as-shit things they’re doing. It’s great. Now you know everything I know about all this.