Pious firm’s fortune paid for war booty taken from Iraq

When spreading the Gospel of Jesus, what sorts of peccadilloes are you permitted? Can you lie, traffic in stolen goods and line the pockets of murderers if it allows you to, say, accumulate a bunch of neat-o artifacts for a museum in Washington?

These are questions at the heart of a scandal surrounding Hobby Lobby, the giant craft retail enterprise owned by a family unabashed about their calling as Christian evangelists.

A civil settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice requires Hobby Lobby to relinquish a trove of more than 5,500 artifacts believed to have been looted from Iraq.

Hobby Lobby’s owners paid $1.6 million for the antiquities. Now, they must pay a $3 million fine.

Hobby Lobby’s president, the son of the retailer’s founder, issued a mea culpa of sorts. In a statement, Steve Green cited “regrettable mistakes” and said, “We should have exercised more oversight and carefully questioned how the acquisitions were handled.”

This is weak sauce. Willful ignorance, and no small amount of hubris, were more likely at play.

According to the government’s evidence, Hobby Lobby was told that the artifacts’ offering prices amounted to more than $2 million. The treasures included Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform tablets, bricks and other items used in ancient writings and seals.

A consultant told the company’s leaders that he believed the loot could be appraised as high as $11.8 million.

And yet he thought the company could negotiate things down to $1.6 million.

Hmm, let’s see. Ancient artifacts coming out of a war-torn country overrun by terrorist organizations that were known to be raising operating funds by selling looted antiquities on the black market — and the stuff is on offer at an 86 percent discount. Seems legit, right?

Hobby Lobby’s owners never met with the artifacts’ owners. They wired the money to seven separate personal bank accounts, according to the complaint.

Some items were shipped, marked as tile samples, to Oklahoma. That looks nothing like smuggling, no sir.

For the past six years, Hobby Lobby’s owners have been gobbling up religious artifacts, believed to be the world’s largest privately owned collection of such items. Experts have been raising concerns, worried that the antiquities are not being properly vetted.

Indeed, according to the government complaint, Steve Green brought to the United States a Bible he bought for $1 million in the United Arab Emirates and failed to declare it.

Many of the treasures are for the Museum of the Bible, an eight-story building two blocks from the National Mall in Washington. The museum will display much of the Green Collection.

The items in the federal complaint had not yet been made a part of the Museum of the Bible, which is scheduled to open in November.

Most religions teach that God doesn’t like thievery or lying. It’s also pretty safe to say he takes a dim view of those who wring pecuniary advantage out of war while cravenly casting themselves as holy.

So let Hobby Lobby’s owners reflect on what Jesus might actually counsel rich, powerful people such as them to do with their spare millions.

They might end up doing some real good in this world.