Just What Is the Museum of the Bible Trying to Do?

The Hobby Lobby CEO behind it says it will be nonsectarian—but it looks a lot like a Protestant evangelical’s take on the Bible.

In November, the Museum of the Bible, a 430,000-square foot building, will open at 300 D Street in Washington, D.C. The museum will house thousands of pieces of biblical lore, including fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, pieces of papyrus displaying early copies of the New Testament, and Elvis Presley’s personal Bible, as well as a garden and Bible-themed restaurant where biblical foods like date honey are on the menu. According to its website, the museum will be an “educational institution whose purpose is to invite all people to engage with the history, narrative and impact of the Bible.” It’s a mission that sounds similar to what the Smithsonian Institution, just blocks away, aims to do for everything from American history to tropical biology

Perhaps the most interesting part of all of this is who’s behind it. The CEO of the Hobby Lobby craft-store chain, Steve Green, founded and funded the Museum of the Bible (MOTB), and his family’s collection of artifacts—which recently made news when Hobby Lobby was forced to forfeit thousands of cuneiform texts from Iraq, and pay a $3 million fine for illicit importation—will make up a substantial part of the museum’s holdings. Green and his family are some of the country’s most prominent evangelicals, notable for their successful Supreme Court case challenging Obamacare’s contraception mandate in 2015.

Despite his fundamentalist background, Green claims the new attraction will be nonsectarian—that is, open and appealing to people from any religious perspective. But, as biblical scholars who have reported on Hobby Lobby and the museum for three years for a recently published book, we have discovered that he’s mostly failing in his mission. After touring the site of the museum, visiting its traveling exhibit, and interviewing Green and others involved in the project, we have found that despite genuine efforts at nonsectarianism, the museum’s version of the Bible’s history remains beholden to the worldview of the Green family. The broader story it tells about the Bible, and especially the Bible’s place in American culture, is essentially a Protestant one, and it excludes other traditions when they might come into conflict with that basic story.

The fact that the Greens are prominent evangelicals does not, of course, mean that they are insincere when they claim that they want the Museum of the Bible to be nonsectarian. As Green, who serves as the museum’s chairman of the board, told us, his family openly supports evangelical outreach programs and more overtly evangelical-themed Bible attractions like Ark Encounter—a theme park containing a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark—and the Creation Museum, both located in the conservative, evangelical-rich state of Kentucky. The Museum of the Bible, he insisted, is a separate endeavor. While the publicity for the museum proudly remarks upon its traveling exhibits in Atlanta, Charlotte, the Vatican and Jerusalem, you will see no mention of these less intellectually credible Kentucky attractions.


This doesn’t appear to have always been the plan. When the Museum of the Bible was first envisioned it was clearly evangelical in purpose. According to its first non-profit filings in 2010, the museum’s mission was, “to bring to life the living word of God, to tell its compelling story of preservation, and to inspire confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible.”

But by 2012, the talk about “the absolutely authority and reliability of the Bible” had disappeared from the mission statement on its nonprofit filings, and it read, “We exist to invite people to engage with the Bible through our four primary activities: travelling exhibits, scholarship, building of a permanent museum, and developing elective high school curriculum.”

When we asked Green about the change in the museum’s mission, he denied that a substantive shift had ever taken place. What had changed, he indicated, was mostly his personal perception of what it means to be nonsectarian. “I don’t know that there was a big change. I think from day one now there’s been a bit of a clarification for me in understanding what [nonsectarian] means, but from day one the idea was a nonsectarian museum,” he told us. “I don’t know if there was this big change but it was a process of understanding, clarifying where my fence posts are.”

But Green hasn’t succeeded in taking the museum in this new direction.

The first problem lies in the founding idea of the museum itself. The idea that a museum can be devoted just to the Bible’s words, without presenting the history of its interpretation and the cultural contexts in which that interpretation has taken place, is a distinctly Protestant one. Historically, sola scriptura, “scripture alone”—meaning that the bible was the sole authority on faith and religious practice—was a key tenet of the Protestant Reformation, and a rejection of the Catholic Church’s reliance on the pope and bishops to interpret scripture and dictate doctrine. Catholicism long resisted translation of the Bible into vernacular languages.

In the United States, the notion of presenting the words of the Bible without any explicit doctrinal guidance or interpretation has a storied history. In the 1816, the American Bible Society was founded to bring the King James Version of the Bible to people without “note or comment.” More than a few stories about the ability of the unadulterated, King James Version to convert Catholics were published.

This is not to say that MOTB organizers and curators intend to be anti-Catholic. On the contrary, for Green, presenting Jews, Protestants and Catholics in agreement with one another is itself proof of the importance of the Bible. As he told us, “I think it will be powerful testimony to the world to say: ‘Here’s these people, what we hear about in the news is their fights, but here they come together because they agree upon something that can be powerful.’” But that conclusion, too, supports the essential Protestant idea of the primacy of the Bible: Ultimately the presence and participation of Jews and Catholics in MOTB seems to be to reinforce both Protestant theology and Protestant claims to superiority.

Religious commitments determine what is and is not included in the museum, too. We have to wonder about the religious traditions that have been excluded from this process—especially all of those that came after Protestantism. The lack of references to the expanded biblical canon of the Ethiopic Christian Churches; the glaring omission of the relationship between the Bible and the Qur’an, even in the section of the museum dedicated to the Bible’s impact; the near-silence about the various branches of Orthodox Christianity; and the refusal to engage with the use and expansion of the Bible in Latter-Day Saints tradition all demonstrate the limits of the claims that the museum makes about itself. “Nonsectarian,” for the Greens and the museum, means Jewish, Roman Catholic and Protestant. It is these traditions that are represented and respected. The afterlife of the Bible among other groups and denominations is not something in which the museum is especially interested. For the Greens, and the museum, the story of the Bible reaches its goal with the advent of Protestantism.

The museum also run into problems when it comes to depict the narrative of the Bible. While the prospect of presenting the biblical story from Genesis through Revelation may seem straightforward enough, it is an idea that seems naive to biblical scholars, who would contest the idea that the Bible tells a single consistent story—to say nothing of the many places in which Jews, Catholics and Protestants disagree on the meaning of that story. The Bible is not like a Shakespeare play. It is a library, a collection, and like any collection—except, perhaps, the Green Collection—it contains multiple perspectives and opinions, even about essential plot points. When trying to present the story of Noah’s ark, for instance, do you say that Noah took two of every animal on earth, as it says in Genesis 6? Or do say that he took 14 of every clean animal and two of every unclean animal, as it says in Genesis 7? When telling the story of Jesus, which Gospel account do you follow? The one from John, in which Jesus dies on the day before Passover, or the other three, in which Jesus dies on the first day of the holiday?

It is, of course, central to the literalist evangelical understanding that there are no contradictions within the Bible—that these and the myriad other ostensible problems can be explained or interpreted out of existence. In truth, there is something essentially evangelical about the entire project of telling “the” story—as if there is one single truth that can simply be presented, and in so doing overwhelm the messy complications of reality.

The desire to tell one particular story about the Bible has not gone unchallenged, but the Greens’ vision has remained stubbornly in place. It was not unusual, we learned, for scholarly advisers to have lengthy conversations with Green in which they found themselves trying to persuade him of the accuracy of their historical arguments. At least one such scholar, who cannot be named because of the terms of the nondisclosure agreement they signed, came to the realization that they were fighting a losing battle, and that the museum’s exhibits would represent a Christian view of history.

In 2015, once the news of the federal investigation into the imported cuneiform tablets hit the media, both the Greens and the Museum of the Bible tried to sever any connection that might be assumed to exist with regard to these cuneiform tablets: Hobby Lobby’s official statement to the press emphasized that the MOTB was “a separate not-for-profit entity made possible, in part, by the generous contributions of the Green family.” The Museum of the Bible attempted to distance itself from the Greens, too. The Museum of the Bible website was scrubbed clean of explicit references to the Greens.

What the new Green-free public image conceals is that Green and his immediate family continue to direct the museum. Green is still chairman of the board of the Museum of the Bible; museum offices are still based at the Hobby Lobby compound in Oklahoma City and in Hobby Lobby–owned property in D.C.; Green’s daughter serves both as a brand ambassador for Hobby Lobby and as community outreach spokesperson for the Museum of the Bible; and in fund-raising efforts in evangelical circles the Greens continue to be the face of the museum. On their Twitter and Facebook feeds, the Museum of the Bible regularly pushes Steve Green’s book, The Bible in America.

That the museum and the Green family continue to be close—one might say, inextricably intertwined—is understandable. It’s even defensible: Why wouldn’t the Green family want to have a say in directing the mission of an organization that they funded and founded? The difficulty is that the museum portrays itself to the public as something else: It presents itself as a nonsectarian independent organization, intimates that it contains the best academic research available, and claims to issue an open invitation to everyone. These may be sincere and well-intentioned claims, but they are impossible to support.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/15/just-what-is-the-museum-of-the-bible-trying-to-do-215711