How?

In his magisterial new study of this era, acclaimed classical historian Peter Brown attributes this transformation to the evolution of wealth and, in particular, philanthropy in Christian churches.Make no mistake: this was an era of massive wealth. “From Constantine onward,” writes Brown, “the Roman state flooded the economy with gold.” Enormously productive countryside villas fueled the economic growth of cities. The senatorial class was augmented by viri clarissimi—newly minted aristocrats. Farmers and merchants rose to the rank of town councilors. By modern standards, inequality was vast, but by ancient standards, a large middle class had emerged.

In an age of gold, these “middling persons,” or mediocres, found themselves possessed of wealth. As a Spanish mediocris described his station:

It is not for us to live in houses sheathed in marble, to be weighed down with gold, in flowing silks and bright scarlet. But all the same we have our little places in gardens and by the sea-side. We have good quality wine, neat little banquets, and all that goes with a sprightly old age.

It was among the class of mediocres that many Latin Christians were found, and from this class that clergy were drawn. The wealth of the era, then, was already flowing into churches. Even churches in small provincial cities might have expensive mosaics and gold or silver Eucharistic vessels. This sort of giving, Brown notes, was significant but on a much smaller scale than the vast entertainments and building projects of the senatorial classes.

Indeed, Christian philanthropy grew out of a culture that Brown refers to as an “empire of gifts.” The charitable donation was deeply embedded in Roman cultural norms. (The college of Vestal Virgins, for example, was one of Rome’s tax-exempt organizations.) “The [late] Roman empire was held together by personal ties expressed and cemented through massive giving.”

Much of this traditional Roman philanthropy—almsgiving, hospitality—has been obscured by acts of what Brown calls “civic euergetism,” major acts of giving for improvements and events that dominated civic life. Giving theaters, games, temples, public art—these acts of generosity marked the donor as an amator patriae, or lover of one’s hometown. “It was the most honorable love that a wealthy person could show,” Brown writes. (In his narrative, civic euergetism bears a striking resemblance to the universities, museums, and concert halls that today’s big donors give—and to the acclaim they receive.)

The Rise of Christian Philanthropy

There are a few ways to understand the response of Christian leaders to the wealth and philanthropy of the late Roman world. A cynic might say, as Brown does in an off-handed remark, that the bishops “knew a rival for the wealth of the rich when they saw one.”

But Brown also describes the Christian response as a righteous reply to the way that Roman euergetism favored citizens over the poor. The annona, Rome’s grain distribution and a gift from the emperor, went only to citizens, a relatively small proportion of the general population. The bishops attempted to reframe wealthy attitudes from love of the city to love for the poor.

Brown offers a sophisticated analysis of this development in Christian preaching, and how it affected giving. First, preachers described the plight of the poor in colorful and melodramatic terms (“a man showing two eyeless sockets directs his straying, faltering footsteps with a stick”), in effect “pauperizing” the poor. “For the logic of Christian preaching was to reach out to the poor in such a way as to join the very top of society to the very bottom,” Brown explains.

Second, the teaching of bishops like Ambrose of Milan drew strongly on the Old Testament, in which the poor come before the rich not in search of alms but of justice. The poor of Israel were lowly in condition, not spirit. They were part of God’s chosen people. They had virtual family ties with the rich of God’s people. “It is not anything of yours that you are bestowing on the poor,” explained Ambrose. “Rather, you are giving back something of theirs.”

The poor of Israel were thus more analogous to the plebs of a Roman city—“vulnerable persons compared with the rich but by no means beggars.” The churches drew their wealth from the middle classes, spent their wealth on the poor, and united the groups together with familial ties. “[I]t was the redefinition of the Christian poor (derived from the Old Testament) that did the most to secure the eventual triumph of Christianity in the cities in the course of the fifth century,” Brown writes. “Ultimately the Christian bishops rose to prominence neither through fostering the very poor nor through persuading the very rich to switch their generosity from the circus to the churches. It was through winning the middle.”

Another way in which the bishops challenged civic euergetism was in how they framed the gift transaction. Donors to the city could expect their amor patriae to be returned by the citizens, through honors and praise. In contrast, donors to the church would be accumulating “treasure in heaven,” in Jesus’ words. This was an appealing idea to donors in a culture in which one spent time trying to earn earthly immortality through bravery or good deeds. And it was effective at reducing class distinctions among donors. “To place treasure in heaven empowered the average donor,” notes Brown. “For the reward of the gift was thought to be utterly out of proportion to the gift itself. Heroic giving was no longer seen as the monopoly of the truly rich.”

Ambrose, Augustine of Hippo, and other bishops of this period were laying the groundwork to pair a donor’s desire for a pious life with the needs of the churches and the poor they served. They were preparing the way for the trickle of wealth into the churches to become a cataract.

How Should We Then Give?

Easter Sunday, 394, marked a major event in the history of Christianity: a senatorial fortune was surrendered to God. Paulinus of Nola, who owned major landholdings in Italy, Gaul, and Spain, renounced his wealth. “For the first time,” Brown writes, “Christian ascetic teaching had touched a male member of the super-rich.” Brown is an expert on renunciation in Christianity (both sexual and financial—and they often go together), and he offers a powerful account of Paulinus’ act and how it was received by the bishops and in the Roman world. Paulinus’ Christian forebears had not felt the need to renounce their wealth so long as they could use it for pious purposes; the rich could remain “at ease in the world.” Paulinus could not. “He said that he would follow to the letter Christ’s command to the Rich Young Man.”

Even in purported poverty, Paulinus was a sensation. Ambrose and Augustine celebrated him. He eventually became bishop of Nola. He had viewed his wealth as a gift from God, and he had given it back to God—a “spiritual exchange” for which he received treasure in heaven.

Paulinus also represented an increasingly popular choice of beneficence for donors. His principal philanthropic project was a shrine to St. Felix at Cimitile. As Christianity expanded to include more of the rich, donors became increasingly interested in the Christian counterparts to civic institutions—something like Christian euergetism. They gave gifts and bequests of their money and goods to build new churches and monasteries. They gave mosaic floors and encrusted marble walls, and expensive candles to keep churches lit throughout the night. Women even gave their precious silks to make opulent curtains for the churches. Giving became a central part of the church service, with the faithful proceeding to the altar with their gifts and the names of donors being read aloud. Christian donors in the late Roman era gave for the glory of Christ and his church.

But Paulinus-style renunciation, though held up as exemplary, was not mandatory across the churches of the Roman west. The disposition of wealth was a subject in the Pelagian and Donatist controversies, but Augustine’s understanding seems to have emerged victorious—and “Augustine kept close to the contours of the possible when facing a real audience of rich and powerful persons in a late Roman city.” “Let them be rich in good works,” Augustine preached. The bishop of Hippo posited giving as expiatory for day-by-day sinning.

Brown argues that Paulinus’ and Augustine’s approaches to philanthropy became the dominant ones. “What won out was a combination of Paulinus of Nola’s poetic sense of the romance of treasure placed in heaven by a spiritual exchange with Augustine’s sad emphasis on daily giving as the remedy for daily sin. To this was added the dry view upheld by later Augustinians that wealth itself was a gift of God that demanded forms of management as strict and as careful as that exercised by any procurator on an imperial estate.”

And as much as Christian giving looked like Roman civic piety, it took on a different cast thanks to Augustine and Paulinus. “Donations were no longer seen as made for the community and for the honor of the family,” says Ville Vuolanto, “but became a personal matter between God and individuals.”

Christianity in a Changed World

Christianity had other advantages, most notably its status as the empire’s official religion after 380—although paganism continued to flourish for decades in the rich senatorial families of the West. But the incursions of barbarian tribes into the Roman West starting in the fifth century, combined with Christian understandings of philanthropy, led to a surge of church power. The disruptions decimated the economy that fueled the cities, and especially the taxes and tributes paid to Rome. This weakened the economic position of the Roman plebs—making them poorer. The churches, with their service to the poor and unity of social classes, became more attractive. They also became increasingly important sources of alms and repositories of wealth.

The power of the bishops came about in part because wealth poured into churches even as civil law was unclear about the corporate status of the churches. In the end, civil law extended its pre-existing understanding of corporate entities and tended to recognize the bishop as the dominus of his church—the legal authority figure, with full power over the administration of his church’s funds.

By the time Romulus Augustulus capitulated to Odoacer in 476, Brown argues, Europe’s Christian conversion was progressing inexorably. Why? “It was the entry of new wealth and talent into the churches from around the year 370 onward, rather than the conversion of Constantine in 312, which marks the turning point in the Christianization of Europe,” he writes. “From then onward, as members of a religion that had been joined by the rich and powerful, Christians could begin to think the unthinkable—to envision the possibility of a totally Christian society.”

A Convincing Case

The late Roman era foreshadows many latter-day issues in philanthropy. Rich Christians patronized their churches and monasteries with beautification. Even if they renounced their wealth, they continued to benefit from a high social position. Some at the time argued against this kind of ostentatious giving. Sounding like nothing more than one of today’s social justice advocacy groups fulminating against opera funding, Jerome wrote, “The parchment page is dyed deep in purple, the letters are a trickle of gold, the bound volumes are dressed in gems—and the naked Christ lies dying at the gate.” (As Brown notes ironically, “Ascetic piety such as that favored by Jerome cost money. It involved the transfer of large sums to monastic settlements in Egypt and the Holy Land”—much of which went to scholarship, libraries, and books.)

Through the Eye of a Needle is full of fascinating asides with contemporary relevance. A donor named Valila includes a donor intent clause in his gift of land and churches—calling for it to revert to his heirs should a future bishop “detract in any way from this little oasis of splendor.” After he renounced his wealth, Paulinus faced a struggle many wealthy people have even after making a major commitment: money keeps making money. It took Paulinus more than a decade to unwind his estate and personal wealth, and he had plenty of money during those years for major philanthropic projects.

But most consequential is Brown’s argument about how Christian wealth and philanthropy shaped the fall of Rome and the emergence of the Latin church as the dominant institution in society. Brown’s tightly but elegantly written stories of towering individuals—Symmachus, Ambrose, Augustine, Paulinus, Jerome—combine with his deep knowledge of original sources and recent scholarship to make his interpretation convincing.

“Human decency, alas, finds few historians,” writes Brown early on in the book. The field of philanthropy—vibrant, fascinating, and curious—draws little attention. We who study and practice it are lucky that a scholar of such skill has given us such a gift.

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This review of Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 A.D., by Peter Brown, originally appeared in the winter 2013 issue of Philanthropy.

Ecstatic children shriek with delight, piercing the summer humidity. Around a bend in a curving arbor, a playground comes into view. Several dozen kids scurry about, ignoring the summer heat. The first play area features a 15-foot slide, a tower, and a hand-operated fountain. From there, a footpath winds toward a huge bowl of slides and rope ladders, and then loops away to another play circle, where kids swing from maypoles. Curve again, and you see Swiss Family Robinson–style treehouses connected by a suspended rope mesh.

The playground is one of the newest features at Shelby Farms Park, one of America’s largest urban parks. Near the playground, but just inside the shade, chatty parents keep one eye on their kids. Past a stand of mature trees is Pine Lake, where a family unloads a cooler and starts to suspend a piñata. A pair of cyclists appears at a crest of a ridge opposite the lake. Did they arrive via the 6.5-mile Greenline trail that runs east from midtown Memphis—or north across a brand-new bike-pedestrian bridge?

From the bikers’ vantage point, Shelby Farms opens up—a pastoral landscape of grassy hills, dotted by stands of poplars and magnolias. Windsurfers are out on Patriot Lake, and to the south, through the afternoon haze, mountain bikers crush the Wolf River trails. At the bottom of the hill, a herd of bison grazes contentedly.

The new playground, trails, and bridge are just the beginning of a transformation at Shelby Farms. It is possible because of a philanthropic innovation: putting public parks under nonprofit, private management—and largely operating them with a mixture of public and private funds. It’s a public-private partnership, but all the energy is on the private side of the equation, and all across the country, the results are some of the most amazing urban parks America has ever seen.

These public-private partnerships take shape in three situations. In some cities, parks are decent but suffer from benign neglect; private donors and managers bring a burst of energy to improve the park and match its promise. In other cities, once-great parks have declined—or been destroyed—to the point that they are beyond rescue unless private initiative takes over. And many fast-growing American cities don’t have enough parkland—so private donors furnish the imagination to create new parks from scratch.

Improving Underperformers

Pitt and Barbara Hyde live just a few minutes from the entrance to Shelby Farms Park, in a leafy part of Memphis. Barbara opens the door. Pitt, the founder of AutoZone, one of Memphis’ largest hometown companies, joins us in the living room. Over iced tea, we talk about their support for public parks.

Located on 4,500 acres in the center of Shelby County—Tennessee’s most populous—the park had been through previous incarnations as a failed utopian commune (in the 19th century) and a penal farm (in the 20th). Starting in the 1970s, Shelby County shut down most of the penal farm operations (although the county prison remains located on the edge of the park) and began allowing recreational use. But it remained something of a hodgepodge—experimental fields here, an RV park there, an expo center at one end. A freeway shoots through the middle.

Improvements were generally slapdash. “They had to come up with dirt to cover the landfill that’s nearby, and so they said, ‘Oh, we’ll create a lake,’” Pitt says about Patriot Lake, the park’s accidental centerpiece. “It’s a popular spot for biking, walking, and running, but unfortunately the lake leaks quite a bit.” Despite modest resources from the county, Shelby Farms took shape. The leaking lake became a spot for sailing. Along the Wolf River, a tributary of the Mississippi that borders the park to the south, biking and hiking trails went in. Stands of trees grew. In the northern part of the park, Pine Lake turned into a favorite picnic spot.

In the late 1990s, a few local activists and philanthropists took notice. “Very little was spent on it, and it was maintained pretty much in its natural state,” Pitt says. “There had been proposals to develop parts of it, and we were concerned that the park could be sold off, one piece at a time.” The possibility that Shelby Farms might lose its pastoral character seemed like a step backward to the Hydes.

“Every major city in the country is interested in improving its green, recreational, outdoor areas,” Pitt explains. “We were struck by the fact that we had this huge asset just sitting there. Most cities have had to spend a fortune assembling park space! The stage was set.”

Conserving Shelby Farms wasn’t without its opponents, but enthusiasm for the idea grew. “It wasn’t just a handful of influential people saying, ‘Let’s do a park,’ Barbara explains. “It became clear that this was a park that was going to serve a whole lot more people, a lot of strong fans and advocates who supported it.” The county protected the park from development, and, in 2007, awarded a management contract for the new park to the private, nonprofit Shelby Farms Park Conservancy. With the park protected by a conservancy, its board of directors commissioned a master plan, with Barbara leading the volunteer effort. In 2008, the Hydes made a $20 million challenge grant to jumpstart the initiative. It was the couple’s largest-ever single gift.

“We took seriously the public ownership of the park, and did a good job of getting public input as to what the park should look like,” says Barbara. “We developed an international competition to bring the best talent to this work. We had the freedom to choose a design team with a strong track record. This outside expertise led us to a world-class master plan.”

The first part of that plan is moving toward completion. “You’ve seen some of the early, new projects—the bridge, the playground, and the Greenline,” Barbara says. “A lot of emphasis in the master plan is around creating more access for everyone, different neighborhoods all around the park, more connectivity within the park.” It seems like a small point, but the Hydes insist that the park become easily accessible for all kinds of people with all kinds of transportation.

“One of the things that’s so fabulous about the park is its location in the center of the county,” says Barbara. “When coupled with the Shelby Farms Greenline, it truly connects with neighborhoods that reflect the diversity of Memphis. On any visit to the park, one can witness what a unifying role it plays in our community.” And better access has paid off in attendance, which has tripled since the conservancy took over, according to executive director Laura Adams.

The next big step, which will build on the improvements in access, is to double the size of Patriot Lake. “The doubling of Patriot Lake allows us to develop a 300-acre ‘heart of the park.’ The lake will become the park’s centerpiece, but with lots of amenities around it,” Barbara explains.

“It’s going to be a much more sustainable lake,” Pitt adds. “And, of course, by it increasing in size, you’re going to have many more recreational opportunities on the water—sailing, rowing, those kinds of things.” The plans also call for the construction of a water park, an amphitheater with a floating stage, an event rental space, and a boathouse.

“The north side of the lake will have a lot of active amenities,” says Barbara, “and then the south side of the lake is going to have cypress groves and be more natural. There will be trails and loops for biking and walking around the lake and connecting to the rest of the park. There will be amenities that generate revenue—the conservancy is thinking in new ways, and doing what the government wouldn’t be able to do on its own. It’s a great partnership.”

Intervening in Broken Systems

Shelby Farms was an underperforming space that needed a lift from philanthropy to become a great park. But in New York City, Central Park needed more than a nudge. It needed to be rescued. It was trapped in a dysfunctional system—one that required a drastic intervention.

Starting in the 1960s, Central Park had begun a long, but preventable, decline. Once emerald lawns had been trampled to bare dirt. Changes in policing and homeless policy meant that bums and gangs dominated the park. Graffiti was everywhere. In the ’70s, New York’s fiscal crisis reduced the budget for routine maintenance, leaving Central Park’s landmarks to break down under neglect and vandalism. And public-employee-union work rules strangled initiative among park workers.

“As a boy, I wasn’t particularly aware of the condition of the park,” says Richard Gilder, the founder of a brokerage firm and a leading philanthropist in New York City. He grew up around Central Park. “It was always playable. But it had started to fall into disrepair. Finally, I could see the dreadful condition of the park, and it was getting worse, not better.” To do something—anything—Gilder teamed up with an unlikely partner.

“We both felt very strongly that Central Park needed some looking after,” says hedge fund titan George Soros in a commemorative video. “We formed the Central Park Community Fund. This was my first attempt at philanthropy. Our outlook on life is quite different. He’s a libertarian, and I’m much more of a government-interference type. Nevertheless, we got on very well.”

In 1976, Gilder and Soros funded a study of how Central Park could be revived, calling for a private board and modern management. The idea went nowhere—at the time, many thought the park was beyond rescue. Then they met a young landscape planner named Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, whose Central Park Task Force was likewise struggling. In 1978, a newly elected Mayor Ed Koch took an interest in this handful of citizen-activists. To capitalize on their opportunity, Gilder and Rogers merged their organizations, creating the Central Park Conservancy in 1980. “You don’t throw money at the problem,” Rogers realized. “You throw management.”

The Central Park Conservancy began slowly, re-sodding the Sheep Meadow and rebuilding the crumbling Belvedere Castle. With every successful project, the public could see that the conservancy was working. In the 1980s, the parks department remained what Gilder calls a “dominant partner,” covering two-thirds of capital expenditures and supplying most of the park’s staff.

The conservancy gradually took the driver’s seat. It raised well over $100 million in the 1980s and ’90s, including big gifts from Gilder and private equity leader Henry Kravis. Rogers used the funds to restore Harlem Meer and its boathouse, to re-plant and restore the Great Lawn, to renovate sports fields, and to finish the landscaping on the West Side. Meanwhile, city budget cuts in the early 1990s allowed the conservancy to fill in the gaps with new personnel. By 1997, the city was providing one-third of the park’s budget and 30 percent of its workforce. The next year, New York rewarded the conservancy with a long-term contract to manage Central Park.

If you visit today, it’s hard to imagine the Central Park Conservancy not in charge of the 843-acre park, which attracts 40 million visitors annually (up from 12 million in the early 1980s). Crime in the park has fallen by more than 90 percent. The conservancy employs 90 percent of the park’s maintenance staff and provides 85 percent of its $42.4 million budget. The city pays an annual fee to the conservancy, but that’s a small part of its budget. It is private money and private management that have made Central Park the outstanding place it is today—and helped the city around it to come alive.

Central Park’s restoration is sometimes cited as a result of the Rudy Giuliani–era reforms that helped to revive New York City. Government, though, had little to do with the comeback. The conservancy pre-dates the Giuliani administration by more than a decade—indeed, the restoration of Central Park was a harbinger of New York’s resilience and vitality, a leading indicator that it was possible for a broken city to thrive again, with the help of innovative and far-sighted philanthropists. “As the park goes, the city goes,” explains conservancy president and CEO Douglas Blonsky.

The Central Park model for restoring parks spread quickly. In the wake of its success, landmark parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx were all reclaimed from crime and decay and given new civic energy by private donors. “Dick Gilder made it possible for many other like-minded citizens to get involved in the life of public parks,” says Adrian Benepe, who recently served as New York City Parks Commissioner and is now head of the Trust for Public Land. “Without Dick’s participation, there would be no Prospect Park Alliance, there would be no Battery Conservancy, there wouldn’t be a Friends of the High Line group creating the High Line.”

Imagining New Parks

In some parts of the country—especially the fast-growing Sunbelt cities—rapid population growth has made big parks something of an afterthought. For these cities, the challenge isn’t turning around existing parks. Rather, it’s imagining new parks and, using the private conservatory model, building them from scratch.

“Houston, which has seen tremendous growth in the last 50 years, will only become more densely populated,” says Nancy Kinder. Her husband, Rich Kinder, is chairman and CEO of Kinder Morgan, America’s largest pipeline company. Together, they are generous donors in their adopted Texas hometown. “We feel a sense of urgency in preserving and developing green space.”

In the early 2000s, the Kinders had their eyes on creating a brand-new park on an undeveloped 12-acre tract in downtown Houston, near the convention center. “When Rich and I became involved with the Discovery Green project, we had a unique opportunity: to be part of a small group of like-minded donors who had a vision to create a type of park that did not exist in Houston,” Nancy explains. “We knew early on that a public-private partnership was crucial, and research introduced us to similar success stories in other cities. The result is that Discovery Green significantly changed the way people think about parks in Houston.” The park cost $125 million to purchase and develop, but it has generated a reported $500 million in adjacent real estate development.

Discovery Green was ideal for private management, says former director Guy Hagstette, for three reasons: because downtown parks require a higher level of management, because it was intended to serve as a spur to development, and because it would be “highly programmed.” Since it opened in 2008, Discovery Green has logged over a million visitors per year and hosted more than 250 mostly free public events annually. “We love it,” Nancy adds. “Our grandchildren love it. Our dogs love it. Rich, in particular, enjoys the jazz concerts that feature current students and alumni from the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.”

The Kinders turned next to Buffalo Bayou, the bayou that runs through the center of Houston to the Gulf of Mexico. The bayou, which is part of Houston’s flood control system, has long featured trails, but—like Shelby Farms—the park space never reached its full potential. Nancy Kinder is excited: “Buffalo Bayou Park will redefine how Houstonians think of bayou park land. It’s under construction now from Shepherd Drive to Sabine Street. This park will be iconic and beautiful and set the standard for other bayou park development throughout the region.” Launched by the Kinders’ $30 million gift, the $55 million project includes renovations to this stretch of Buffalo Bayou and will feature 10-foot-wide bike and pedestrian paths, two pedestrian bridges, water features, and art.

They’re not stopping there. “Our most recent park investment has been in Emancipation Park, which was bought in 1872 for $800 by four former slaves and donated to the city in 1916 to become the oldest park in Houston,” Kinder explains. “It is our hope in Houston to inspire like-minded individuals to donate to parks.”

Vacant lots, drainage basins: philanthropists are uncovering entirely new places to create parks. In Dallas, a private conservancy is building Klyde Warren Park on decking placed over a freeway—connecting downtown to uptown via the Arts District. Manhattan is home to one of America’s most celebrated unconventional new parks. On the Lower West Side, a group of private donors, inspired by the Central Park model, created a new park on an abandoned elevated railway colonized by wild grasses. Led by a $20 million gift from Diane von Fürstenburg and Barry Diller’s family, the High Line has become a major Manhattan attraction since opening in 2009, providing a place for millions of annual visitors to stroll and jog amid the wild-feeling flora along a right-of-way that snakes through a once-gritty neighborhood of old industrial buildings.

“The Next Great Park”

Everyone benefits from a landmark park—whether the great space is created via improvement, intervention, or new imagination. Kids get active; families gather outside; cities can focus on other priorities like emergency services and public schools. The private management model isn’t an end in and of itself—it’s a means to a broader vision of public spaces with exceptional beauty and civic vitality.

Toward the end of the conversation with the Hydes, their teenaged daughter Claire comes into the living room to make evening plans with her parents. “Claire is a fan of Shelby Farms,” Barbara says. She thinks for a moment. “Actually, one of the things that motivated us around the park was a conversation with our older daughter, Susannah, about what the family foundation was doing. She said, ‘Well, I can see that the K–12 education work is really important, but I don’t think you guys are doing enough around the environment.’”

“That resonated with us,” smiles Barbara. “It’s so exciting to be a part of taking Shelby Farms from being a beautiful big piece of ground that was underutilized and undermanaged—from that, to a vision of being the next great park for the 21st century.”

This article originally appeared in the fall 2012 issue of Philanthropy magazine.

Schmuel Zmurri was born in 1877 in Bessarabia, modern-day Moldova, and emigrated to the United States at age 14. In 1893, he visited Mobile, Alabama, where the teenager spied his first opportunity in the banana trade. Watching the big ships of the Boston Fruit Company deliver banana shipments from the Caribbean islands, Zemurray noted that ripened stems, some 15 percent of a ship’s cargo, were discarded upon arrival. He invested his savings of $150 on several thousand “ripes” and reserved space on a boxcar headed north. Telegraphing ahead to towns along the way, Zemurray sold his bananas straight from the door and in six days netted $35. By age 21, he had made $100,000, selling over a million bananas a year. Zemurray expanded his trade to unripe bananas (“greens”), bought a plot of land in Honduras, and acquired a small steamship company.

Starting in 1910, Zemurray focused his efforts on growing bananas abroad. He spent most of each year working his plantations in Honduras, speaking a Russian-inflected “Dog Spanish.” “He was deep in the muck, sweat-covered, swinging a blade,” Cohen writes of Zemurray’s hands-on approach to entrepreneurialism. “He helped map the plantations, plant the rhizomes, clear the weeds, lay the track.” . . .

To read the full review, click here.

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This review of The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King, by Rich Cohen, originally appeared in the September 2012 issue of Commentary.

David Koch has George Eastman on his mind. “You know the Eastman story, don’t you?” he asks as he leans his six-foot-five-inch frame onto a large chenille sofa. Over his right shoulder, the view goes uptown along Madison Avenue.

He begins to relate the story of the entrepreneur who founded Eastman Kodak. “He put up the money—anonymously—to acquire property for MIT across the Charles River from Boston. He had a condition that his donation for the land and to put up the major buildings not be disclosed until after his death. He was an amazing guy.”

Eastman’s millions transformed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before Eastman, MIT was a vocational commuter school. It was Eastman who provided the means to turn it into an international powerhouse for research and teaching in applied sciences. And it was very much the Eastman campus onto which a 19-year-old David Koch (pronounced “coke”) stepped in 1958. It would be one of the most formative experiences of his life.

MIT Men

David Koch is executive vice president of Koch Industries, America’s second-largest privately held company, and the CEO of Koch’s chemical technology subsidiary; he also owns 42 percent of Koch Industries. Bloomberg estimates his net worth at $34 billion. But long before his business acumen made him the fourth-wealthiest man in America, long before Koch Industries cleared $100 billion in annual revenues, long before he became one of New York’s most celebrated philanthropists, David Koch was a freshman at MIT. And he was determined to make a name for himself.

The Koch family already had a long history at the school. Fred Koch, David’s father, transferred from Rice to MIT to study in the newly established department of chemical engineering. (Fred was an undergraduate when the January 1920 issue of MIT’s student newspaper revealed—after nearly two decades of speculation—that the school’s great, anonymous benefactor was, in fact, George Eastman.) Fred captained the boxing team and, after graduation in 1922, formed a partnership with another MIT graduate.

A year before David arrived on campus, his older brother Charles earned an undergraduate degree in engineering, and then went on to earn a pair of masters degrees. David’s twin brother, William, went to MIT as well. The three Koch boys were well prepared for the rigors of the school. Their father enjoyed enormous success in the oil refining industry, but he was determined that his sons not become what he called “country club bums.” From the time they turned nine, they would spend every summer on the family’s west Kansas ranch, bailing hay and digging post holes.

David took that discipline to the basketball court. He was an intense competitor, an aggressive big man who owned the center of the key. He lit a fire under a struggling team. His sophomore year, the Engineers had a 1-15 record—one of the worst years in the program’s history. (After his team inflicted a brutal 84-34 clobbering, an embarrassed Harvard head coach apologized to his MIT counterpart.) But things were changing.

Koch led the varsity squad to a 17-4 record his senior year. As team captain, he drove the team to a season-capping 15-game winning streak. In a hard-fought contest against Rensselaer Polytechnic, he went up for a rebound and took an elbow to the head. It took four stitches to close his scalp. The next day he was back on the court, opening a game against Union College with three quick jump shots to give the Engineers an early 6-0 lead. In the final matchup of his college career, Koch threw everything he had against the visiting University of Chicago. Koch put up 19 points before fouling out with a few minutes to go. “Tech Five Ends Greatest Season in History,” blared the headline in MIT’s student paper. “Dave supplied the spark.”

Koch left the school as MIT’s all-time scoring leader. In his senior year, he tallied 41 points against Middlebury—a school record that stood until 2009. With 21 points per game, Koch still ranks second in MIT hoops history for career scoring average. He was just as aggressive under the net, hauling in 545 rebounds. By the time he earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, he had twice been named to the All-New England First Team.

Rebounding Strong

Back in Koch’s Manhattan office, hundreds of photos, awards, and plaques line the walls. On the end table, among an assortment of mementos and trophies, sits a model of an artificial knee. “See that?” he quips. “That’s what four years of college basketball got me.” But the model knee isn’t on the end table because it reminds Koch of his days in the Rockwell Cage. It’s there because he’s genuinely, almost boyishly, interested in science and medicine.

“I first joined a medical board in the middle ’80s,” he recalls—first NYU’s hospital board and then the board of New York–Presbyterian. “I’m on about a dozen hospital boards now.” His interest in medicine became less abstract and more personal in 1991, when Koch was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer.

“That puts the fear of God in you!” he says. “I thought I was going to die, certainly in months, if not in weeks. It’s really a horrifying experience.” Soon, however, his instinctive competitiveness kicked in. First, he realized, he had to overcome his own cancer. Then, he knew, he had to beat cancer—period.

Over the past two decades he has undergone four different types of treatments. First came 3-D conformal radiation therapy at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. “My cancer went away, then came back, and I had surgery to remove my prostate,” Koch says quickly in a soft voice. “Again, the cancer went away, then it came back, and I went on hormones.”

Two years ago, Koch’s hormone treatment began to lose its effect. “They discovered that after prolonged use of hormones, eventually the prostate cancer cells—which need testosterone to grow—a tiny percentage of the cancer cells slowly learn how to generate their own testosterone internally. Externally reducing testosterone through these hormones no longer affects the generation of testosterone inside the cell.”

Luckily for Koch, a new therapy was in clinical trials: abiraterone, which goes by the trade name Zytiga. “It’s an oral treatment you take once a day,” Koch explains. He speaks more quickly now, becoming animated as he explains how Zytiga works. “What the drug does is interrupt the chain of events that the cancer cells go through to generate their own testosterone. That was a major discovery, so I was included on a clinical trial. My cancer had been rising very steadily, and so I started taking that drug. Within three months, my PSA [a protein elevated in men with prostate cancer] had collapsed to zero.”

Even as he battled his own cancer, Koch set his eyes on defeating the disease itself. “Discovering that I had cancer and the terrible fear that it generated in me turned me into a crusader,” he explains, “a crusader to provide financing to many different centers to develop cures—not only for prostate cancer but for other kinds of cancer as well.”

Cancer Crusader

Koch fairly bursts with pride at the cancer research centers he funds. He has provided $30 million for cancer research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, $20 million for a cancer center at Johns Hopkins, $25 million to M. D. Anderson in Houston (where he’s currently receiving treatment), $15 million to New York–Presbyterian, and $25 million to the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. (“I’ve had 10 operations there over the years,” Koch says of the latter. “I’m one of their best customers,” he jokes with a great, hearty laugh.) He also supports Rockefeller University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the Whitehead Institute. Since 1998, Koch has donated over $395 million to support medical research.

But Koch focuses his work on cancer at MIT. In 2007, capping off over a decade of support for cancer research at MIT, he provided $100 million to create the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research—an interdisciplinary effort that aims to gather engineers and biological scientists in the same building, working together. (All told, since he joined MIT’s board in 1988, Koch has given over $185 million to the university.)

“It’s all the rage now among the cancer research institutes around the country,” Koch says. “What makes the Koch Institute so special is the combination of MIT’s best bioengineers and their laboratory personnel with the basic cancer researchers that were part of the MIT Center for Cancer Research.”

That old MIT cancer center, a more conventional research facility without the emphasis on involving engineers, had its own storied history. When Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer” in 1971, MIT’s biologists began to ramp up their work. “MIT’s contribution to this effort was to apply the techniques in cell and molecular biology and genetics to understand how cancer cells arise and develop the various behaviors that they exhibit,” says cancer biologist Tyler Jacks. “It was immensely successful—a heyday in our understanding of basic molecular oncology.”

MIT researchers indeed notched some remarkable accomplishments: David Baltimore won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1975 for his discovery of how cancer-causing viruses can reformat the genetic makeup of cells. Indeed, “five Nobel Prize winners have worked in the cancer center over the years,” beams Koch.

By early in the new millennium, however, the cancer center’s physical plant was long in the tooth. “My God, I was appalled at the inadequate conditions,” Koch recalls. “Nothing was compliant with code, and everything was grandfathered. The facilities were so poor that MIT was at risk of losing some of their top researchers. We had to build a world-class building to keep our best people.”

Team Building

The need for new facilities coincided with a fresh new vision of cancer research in Cambridge. “Many of our colleagues in engineering were beginning to turn their attention to cancer,” says Jacks, who was director of the old cancer center and remains the head of the Koch Institute. “Engineers approach problems fundamentally differently than do scientists,” he notes. “Scientists tend to dig into a question and keep digging—there’s always another question to be answered. Engineers dig into problems to fix them. They need to know only as much as is necessary to develop the solution.”

Neuroscientist Susan Hockfield was MIT’s first president with a background in life sciences. She describes this approach to cancer research as a “convergence.” “We have moved from cataloguing the basic building blocks of cells to studying the dynamic ways these building blocks can interact,” she explains. “Convergence, the melding together of the life, engineering, and physical sciences, holds the promise of new ways to detect, treat, and some day prevent cancer.”

Thus, the high concept behind the Koch Institute: “Engineers bring a series of skills unfamiliar to your average biologist—who may not understand, for example, nanotechnology or network structures—in ways that are increasingly important for understanding the complexity of cancer cells,” Jacks explains. “But engineers need a problem—they need to define the parameters of the necessary solution. Engineering development in a vacuum isn’t helpful. The contributions of the biologists are to define the nature of the problem, and to provide insights into the molecular basis of the problem.”

Initial joint-research efforts along these lines showed promise, reports Hockfield. “The interdisciplinary projects were becoming more and more common and demonstrating remarkable results,” she explains. “From those discussions the idea of a new, radically cross-disciplinary institute was born.” She shared the idea with Koch. “He got it immediately,” she says. “David had experienced what it means to be told, ‘You have cancer,’ and although his treatment was successful, he believed that cancer doctors needed dramatically improved approaches—and that no place was better equipped than MIT to bring these to reality.” In 2007, Koch got it started with his nine-figure gift.

The facility opened in 2011. Koch is thrilled. “It is the most spectacular research building on the campus. It’s brilliantly well-designed.” Because so many investigators wanted to be part of the work, the institute ended up nearly three times larger than originally envisioned. It is currently home to 650 researchers, with capacity for up to 700. Koch’s gifts were not limited to the physical plant. He also endowed the chairs of several of MIT’s top cancer researchers, including Jacks; Nobel laureate H. Robert Horvitz; chemical engineers Michael Cima, Paula Hammond, and Robert Langer; and biomedical engineer Michael Yaffe.

Koch is proud of the work his philanthropy makes possible, and he follows it closely. “Bob Langer is one of the finest biological researchers at MIT,” he says. “Bob is the world leader in the use of nanoparticles to deliver chemical toxins directly and uniquely to cancer cells.” Langer’s efforts are focused on one of the biggest dilemmas in the history of cancer treatment: how to deliver a dose of therapy sufficiently toxic to kill the cancer cells without producing ruinous side effects on the rest of the body. Although researchers have made progress in this area over the past several decades, “it’s really an unsolved problem,” says Langer. His lab has taken the effort in a new direction.
Man-to-Man Defense

Nanoparticles “deliver a drug right to a tumor,” explains Langer. In a recent study, published in April in Science Translational Medicine, Langer and his colleagues took the chemotherapy molecule docetaxel (commonly used to fight breast, ovarian, lung, and prostate cancers) and placed it inside of a semi-porous microscopic particle. They added polymers to enhance the delivery of the drug once the particle reaches the cancer cell. Finally, they added what Langer calls a “warhead” to the nanoparticle, which allows the particle to “navigate through the body—as though it has its own GPS.” The warhead attaches to receptors that exist in cancer cells but not in healthy tissue, and once the particle attaches to cancer, its porous lining breaks down and the drug is released into the cancerous cell. Not only is the therapy better targeted, but the method of delivery means that the effects of the treatment linger for several days or more, far longer than with traditional chemotherapy.

“We took this all the way from the blackboard to small animal studies, large animal studies, and now we’ve done 22 patients,” Langer explains. Many of the patients who have been treated thus far in the clinical trial have advanced metastatic cancers. In a number of cases the patients’ tumors did not grow, or even shrank—even if the nanoparticle delivered a lower dosage of docetaxel than usually administered, indicating that the therapy was better targeted.

Koch was involved in Langer’s research from the beginning. “David was the initial supporter,” Langer explains. And he stuck with it “all the way through.” Koch did more than just support the research. MIT is famous as an entrepreneurial hothouse, and Langer has co-founded a biotech company called BIND to develop nanotechnology applications for cancer. The company can help with the practical challenges of manufacturing nanoparticles and getting them into medical practice quickly. Koch is one of its investors. “He has been the catalyst for the entire program,” Langer says. “Without his help we would not be where we are today.”

Koch is enthusiastic about applying nanoparticles to other cancers. “It looks like it’s going to be hugely successful. It can revolutionize the treatment of a number of different types of cancers. So that’s probably the treatment I’m most proud of.”

“Engineers want to solve problems and create new technologies,” summarizes Langer. “Nanoparticles are a novel technology.” Thus, nanoparticles are the sort of innovation that is more likely to come out of an integrated research program like MIT’s than to emerge from a pure research venture.

The Future of Medical Research

“I’m interested in developing the treatments that, once approved by the FDA, will cure tens of thousands of patients,” Koch explains. “That’s what I think my role should be.” Cancer research is the core of his philanthropy—representing his biggest gifts, followed, in descending order, by arts and culture, education, and public policy. Despite the notoriety Koch has been assigned by left-of-center commentators for his free-market giving, he insists that “probably the smallest amount of money that I give is to public-policy institutions.”

Nor is Koch’s medical giving limited to cancer. This spring, he and his wife, Julia, pledged $10 million to Mount Sinai Hospital to fund research in how to produce safer food allergy therapies. “My oldest son, David Jr., is stricken with a serious food allergy problem,” Koch explains. On his coffee table is a photo of the Koch family: David and Julia surrounded by David Jr., Mary Julia, and Johnny, who range in age from 13 to 5. “You might wonder who these are,” he says, eyes twinkling mischievously, as he points to a nude statue of the Three Graces in the background. “Those are ex-girlfriends of mine!”

Given the importance of medical research in his giving, Koch is sensitive to what kind of environment will produce the cancer breakthroughs he hopes to see. First, he acknowledges the role that the for-profit pharmaceutical sector has in innovating cures. “One thing I worry is that someday the government may impose price controls on drugs,” he explains. “It’s the profits off of those drugs that are providing the funds to carry out this breakthrough research.”

Second, he believes that cancer research needs more funding, philanthropic and otherwise. (And mostly otherwise; philanthropy accounts for only about 2 percent of medical research funding.) From 2005 to 2010, the budget of the National Cancer Institute—the agency of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that is the principal federal funder of cancer research—averaged about $4.9 billion annually (not counting a temporary bump up from the 2009 stimulus). “Federal support for research has stagnated,” says Tyler Jacks. “In inflation-adjusted dollars, it’s dropped.”

Philanthropy’s opportunity, however, is that the federal funding available tends to avoid high-risk/high-reward research. “You might think that somebody like me has an easy time getting money, but that’s not true!” exclaims Bob Langer. “When money’s tight, no matter who you are, if you have a cutting-edge or high-risk idea, I don’t know of any agency that will fund it.” This, Langer says, puts a premium on risk-tolerant donors like Koch.

When I ask Koch how he balances his limited-government principles with his support for more federal spending on cancer research, he answers immediately: “It’d be great if there was enough financial support from private institutions and individuals to support this enormous need for cancer research. But there really is this enormous number of very promising projects that don’t get funded through private philanthropy! I think probably the most important thing that the government does is to provide funding to these great institutions. It’s a shame that the NIH’s funding has been cut back because of these massive deficits in government. I think the long-term salvation of a healthcare system is massive and outstanding research.”

“It’s like antibiotics,” he continues, offering a personal example. “I just had a terrible battle with diverticulitis three weeks ago. I was on intravenous antibiotics for a week, then oral antibiotics. If those antibiotics hadn’t existed, my colon would’ve ruptured. I probably would have died. Discovering powerful medications will enormously reduce the cost of medical care in this country.”

And Koch is deeply concerned about a broader threat to philanthropic support for medical research. “I’m worried about the tax increases the Obama administration is lobbying for with Congress,” he explains. “A substantial amount of my income comes to me through dividends.” The administration has proposed, among other tax increases, raising the top dividend tax rate from 15 percent to 39.6 percent.

In concert with other provisions coming into force, the Wall Street Journal notes that dividends for top earners could be taxed at a cumulative rate of 44.8 percent. The cumulative rates “may have as much or greater effect on the [nonprofit] sector as reforms made to the [charitable] deduction itself,” according to Eugene Steuerle of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in recent congressional testimony.

All told, what the Obama administration’s proposals would do “is take away an extra 30 percent of my pre-tax income and give it to the federal government for general purposes,” Koch laments. “That’s the money that I would like to give—that I desperately want to give—to the great medical institutions, to set up these magnificent research programs, improve the clinics, and be able to hire more good doctors to provide better care.”

Koch becomes more animated, speaking fast and gesturing vigorously with both hands. “There are so many wealthy people who are very generous philanthropically. If these taxes go up enormously, these great institutions—medical, educational, cultural—are going to be starved of the capital they need to continue their mission in this world. That’s one of the greatest fears I have. They’re going to suffer terribly if wealthy people have a substantial portion of their income taken away from them.”

Supplying the Spark

George Eastman was, if this is the right turn of phrase, famously anonymous—his identity as one of MIT’s leading donors was not supposed to be disclosed until after his death. David Koch is not bound by anonymity; he is happy to have his name attached to the projects he funds.

But he is like Eastman in another important way. As Koch describes his big gifts he is positively buoyant, and clearly relishes what his giving makes possible. “Men who leave their money to be distributed by others are pie-faced mutts,” Eastman once said. “I want to see the action during my lifetime.”

Koch—the six-foot-five basketball star, an unstoppable force even with four stitches in his head—loves being in the action. And he believes he’s seeing the action now. “It’s amazing how little hindsight leading cancer researchers had about how cancer functions, how it works, when they launched the war on cancer. It’s extraordinarily more difficult than anybody ever realized.”

He pauses for a moment. A spark flashes in his eyes. “The rate of breakthrough discoveries is steadily increasing. I expect that, in the next 10 to 15 years, we will see phenomenal discoveries. I expect to see FDA approvals for new treatments, treatments that will go a long way toward curing people of cancer. But what I expect most of all is to see our people helping to drive everything forward.”

This article was originally published in Philanthropy magazine’s Summer 2012 issue.

Desires—like Tom Monaghan’s—to strengthen religious faith are responsible for a flurry of new colleges in recent decades. In 1990, Pope John Paul II issued Ex Corde Ecclesiae, a decree on Catholic identity for new Catholic colleges and universities. Ex Corde colleges submit to the authority of their local bishops and to the teachings of the Church. Twenty-three institutions now adhere to it, including several founded prior to its promulgation, like the Catholic University of America. But nine have been founded since 1970, and five since 1990—most recently John Paul the Great University, a media-focused school in San Diego, and Wyoming Catholic College in the small town of Lander.

Likewise, numerous Protestant colleges have emerged in recent years. Whereas a century ago, Christian colleges were most likely to have a denominational association (and to be funded by both tuition and appropriations from denominational bodies, drawn from churches), today’s Christian colleges have more idiosyncratic identities. Many Christian colleges grow out of the brand of a well-known preacher or leader, like Oral Roberts University in Tulsa and Pat Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia Beach. Some, like the Master’s College in Santa Clarita, California, or New St. Andrew’s College in Moscow, Idaho, grow out of an existing church. Rarer are colleges that emerge more or less from scratch, like Patrick Henry College in northern Virginia, which was founded both to serve homeschooling families and prepare graduates for service in politics, national security, and positions of cultural influence.

Sometimes, colleges are “re-booted” to have a different focus and identity. In 1996, a group of Mormon business leaders led by Richmond real estate investor Glade Knight took over Southern Virginia University. They re-fashioned the struggling former women’s college to embrace the values of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1999, donors helped to re-open the defunct King’s College, moving it from its former site in Westchester County, New York, to facilities in the Empire State Building. The new location came with an explicit goal of seeding graduates with a Christian worldview in positions of influence in government, media, and finance.

Young religious colleges can face special challenges, such as finding the right balance between religious orthodoxy and academic independence. In 2006, 5 out of 16 full-time faculty members departed Patrick Henry College after the college’s founder, Michael Farris, reportedly rebuked professors who taught that there was value in studying non-biblical sources, fired instructors with whom he disagreed, and denigrated Calvinist theology as incompatible with PHC’s statement of faith.

Sometimes philanthropy can get out ahead of a would-be Christian college. The family of David Green, founder of the Oklahoma-based arts and crafts chain Hobby Lobby, are generous funders of facilities for Christian colleges. A few years ago, they bought a campus in rural Massachusetts for the planned start-up C. S. Lewis College, a “Great Books” school. The Greens renovated the campus, but the college failed to meet its fundraising goals in January. The Greens are now offering the campus, in whole or in part, for free to any Christian college that will be able to use it well.

This article was originally published in Philanthropy magazine’s spring 2012 issue.

These very questions vexed leaders in Rwanda. Families and communities needed to heal and rebuild, and the criminal justice system would never be able to deal with the backlog of genocide trials.

Rwanda opted for the path of forgiveness. In 2003, President Paul Kagame released 40,000 genocide perpetrators who had confessed to their crimes. Prison Fellowship’s Rwanda affiliate works with these ex-prisoners, encouraging them to seek forgiveness from the families of those they killed and helping them to re-integrate into their communities.

The question of forgiveness was one that fascinated the late John M. Templeton. “Forgiveness benefits both the giver and the receiver,” he would say. “Forgiving uplifts the forgiver.” “Forgiveness was what Sir John called a ‘spiritual reality,’” says Kimon Sargeant, the vice president for human sciences at the John Templeton Foundation. “He put forgiveness as a core theme in the foundation’s charter, so it’s part of our long-term subjects for research.”

Sargeant was thus intrigued by a 2008 documentary that told the story of forgiveness in Rwanda. As We Forgive features two Rwandan women whose relatives were killed in the genocide and the men who killed their families. Rosaria forgives Saveri, saying, “How can I refuse to forgive when I’m a forgiven sinner?” Reconciled, Saveri and Rosaria work side by side on projects in their village. Chantale, however, resists forgiving John—and her struggle illuminates the great challenge facing the genocide’s perpetrators and victims. It gives the film dramatic force: will Chantale forgive John? “The stories from Rwanda are one powerful example of how people can, without forgetting the past, work through the trauma, over time, to forgive,” says Sargeant.

Templeton provided the filmmaker, Laura Waters Hinson, with funding to promote her film and communicate its lessons, both in Rwanda and throughout the United States. Hinson used the movie to launch the As We Forgive Rwanda Initiative, a Rwandan-led organization that promotes reconciliation by presenting the film, as well as a comprehensive discussion program, in Rwandan public schools, churches, and villages. “The majority of people come away with a new hope that reconciliation is possible, where they may not have previously thought it possible,” says Hinson. “People come away believing that it is possible.”

Hinson uses the movie as a way to launch reconciliation efforts. “When our team goes into a village setting, they work with the community, giving them ideas for engaging in practical reconciliation.” A team may recommend planting a community garden or sharing a cow or goat. In some villages, victims and perpetrators have formed associations that pool money, purchase and work collective land, and share the income. “This,” Hinson says, is “leading to an enterprise solution to poverty.”

That same spirit of enterprise animates Hinson’s next film, Mama Rwanda, which is being supported by the SEVEN Fund, a Templeton grantee. “It’s about Rwandan mothers who, after overcoming the effects of the genocide, are becoming entrepreneurs and lifting their communities and country out of poverty,” says Hinson. “It shows how people who are very, very poor are able to do these practical projects to rise out of poverty.” She points to one woman featured in the film who started a business making banana beer, commercializing what had long been a somewhat unsafe traditional homebrew.

“My first film was all about what happens with the reconciliation phase of rebuilding,” Hinson adds. “Now that reconciliation is setting in, how do we move to the next phase of rebuilding—creating prosperity, creating new things, innovating, growing. This is the next stage of reconciliation.”

Hinson’s words echo those of now-retired Anglican bishop John Rucyahana in As We Forgive: “When they forgive, they get released. Repentance is a requirement. Transformation is our calling.”

This article was originally published in Philanthropy magazine’s Winter 2012 issue as an accompaniment to “Stopping the Slaughter.”

The open office is a small part of Montgomery’s powerful sense of openness and equality. He’s the founding partner of Bridgeway, an investment management firm based in Houston. It’s not a typical financial firm. Among its 30 employees—Montgomery calls them all partners—there is a seven-to-one compensation cap: the highest-earning partner makes no more than seven times the salary of the lowest-earning partner.

Founded in 1993, Bridgeway pursues what Montgomery calls a “statistically driven and evidence-based investment strategy.” Bridgeway adheres to a rigorously quantitative model for selecting stocks, mitigating risk, and minimizing costs. This approach, he told Barron’s in 2007, “not only takes a lot of the cost out of the process, but also a lot of the emotionalism that so often trips up individual and institutional investors alike.” Today, Bridgeway has $2 billion under management.

While it seems there is something clinical, almost mechanical, about Montgomery’s investment strategy, his overall business model is ambitious, passionate, and more than a little idealistic. Bridgeway gives away half of its after-tax profits each year. (“The only idea I had in starting Bridgeway that turned out 10 times more powerful than I expected,” notes Montgomery, was “having a strong mission statement that attracts people who want to make a real difference in the world.”) And its principal charitable focus is as ambitious as Montgomery is unassuming: eliminating genocide.

Genocide has haunted Montgomery since 1968, when he first studied the Holocaust in an eighth grade history class. “It was news to me,” he explains. “It was a watershed moment. I had no concept of the cruelty and the idea of eradicating a whole people group because of their religion, race, ethnicity, or beliefs. And it had happened just a single generation before.” Then, beginning in 1975, the Khmer Rouge began eradicating as many as two million people—a quarter of Cambodia’s population. The college-aged Montgomery “thought we had learned the ‘never again’ lesson of the Holocaust. And I felt utterly helpless to do anything about it. ‘If I had a million dollars,’ I thought, ‘I’d be doing something.’”

“Today,” he continues, “the world has shrunk to nothing. When Cambodia happened, I had this sense of it happening on my watch. When the Rwandan genocide happened, I felt it was happening in my backyard. You can get on a plane and go to Rwanda; you can be there in a day.”

Learning from Rwanda

Bridgeway was less than a year old when the genocide broke out in Rwanda. For 100 days in 1994, Hutu nationalists, incited by the Hutu-led Rwandan government, slaughtered some 800,000 Tutsis. Montgomery was in no position to intervene, but Rwanda was a profound learning experience for him. The lessons of what happened (and what didn’t happen) in the lead-up to the bloodbath could be applied to future conflicts—and the process of reconciliation and restoration afterward.

By 1997, Bridgeway was profitable, and by the early 2000s, it had substantial resources at its disposal. One of the first places it went was Rwanda. To get the initiative underway, Montgomery brought Shannon Sedgwick Davis onto his team. Davis had previously worked at anti-slavery organization International Justice Mission and on Rwandan restoration for philanthropic advisory firm Geneva Global. She quickly determined that Bridgeway should work at the grassroots level. “We want to empower local organizations to take reconciliation into their own hands and work within their own culture and experience,” notes Davis. “It’s much more valuable than having me go there and preach as an outsider.”

For example, Bridgeway has supported groups of Rwandan widows of the genocide. (“Widow” here includes women whose husbands are serving life sentences for their roles in the genocide.) Brought together by the Anglican Church in Rwanda, half of the women are Hutu and the other half are Tutsi. They gather together to turn sorghum into soap. They pool their profits to achieve a greater measure of economic self-sufficiency—and to expand into new ventures—but they also promote reconciliation within the group. “One woman’s husband is in jail for killing the husband of another woman in the group,” Davis marvels. “This woman went to the other woman and sought forgiveness on behalf of her husband, and they began to move forward in a relationship. There’s a lot of power in that.” (Click here for more on how Rwandans are working together to heal the scars of hatred.)

Bridgeway has also supported an initiative called “child-headed villages.” Rwanda has upwards of one million orphans, and over 40,000 families without an adult head of the household. Due to expropriation during the genocide or loss of records (or both), many of these young orphans cannot return to their families’ ancestral land. Rather than being institutionalized in orphanages, they are placed in groups in new villages, with the responsibility for tending its land and managing their own affairs. Adult chaperones live in the villages as surrogate parents, and the land is titled in the name of the youngest child in each family—to ensure that property isn’t transferred or taken away when an older child marries or moves.

Stopping the LRA

Montgomery and Davis began to think about what they would do next. “Our mission statement is a world without genocide,” says Davis. “Do we mean that? Or do we want to be a foundation that picks up the pieces after a mass atrocity?”

They also felt that they were spreading themselves a little thin, having supported a number of NGOs working worldwide, as well as groups working in Darfur and the Middle East. “We decided to focus on sub-Saharan Africa,” says Montgomery. Specifically, they decided to focus on the Lord’s Resistance Army in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Central African Republic, and South Sudan,  where, Davis says, 90 percent of Bridgeway’s resources (and her time) are now devoted. Why? “Of all the armed conflicts on the face of the planet,” Montgomery explains, “this should be the easiest one to stop.”

The Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, is a guerrilla rebel group in east-central Africa. Starting in Uganda and spreading throughout central Africa, the LRA has killed thousands, abducting nearly 70,000 boys to serve in its ranks and leading to the internal displacement of more than 2.1 million Africans. Led by Joseph Kony—“an incredibly evil man,” Davis says—the LRA usually invades the villages, kills most of the men, and rapes most of the women. It will kidnap strong boys and force them to join the LRA, and often take a few younger girls as concubines.

“Their cruelty is utterly egregious,” Montgomery adds. “Relative to Eastern Congo or Darfur, it’s not a large number of people killed, but the havoc and fear they create is far out of proportion to their numbers.” Kony’s LRA is infamous for its Christmas massacres, in which squads of LRA guerrillas have brutally killed hundreds of villagers in the DRC.

Bridgeway is working on a number of fronts to stop the violence and conflict. It has supported organizations like Invisible Children and Resolve. Invisible Children produced an eponymous film about the LRA that brought American attention to the war for the first time. “Never before have we seen advocacy groups work so well together and be so effective,” Davis raves. “They passed the LRA Disarmament Act with a unanimous vote. But a lot of the stories they were telling were Ugandan stories, and their programmatic work was in Uganda.”

For more than five years, Davis says, the LRA has been largely neutralized in Uganda. Instead, the conflict has migrated to the northeastern part of the DRC, where Kony’s troops would launch surprise raids on fearful villages. “I was spending a lot of time in Congo,” Davis explains. “We went deep into the LRA territory—what they call the Red Zone. It was critical to Bridgeway that we find a way for these people to start protecting themselves against attacks. The 2009 Christmas massacre happened over a several-day period, 30 kilometers from the operating base of MONUC [the United Nations mission in the DRC]. No one responded. These people were slaughtered.”

Davis shivered as she thought of the carnage. Then she got to work. The attacks were mostly on villages in a rough circle with a radius of about 30 kilometers. What if the villagers were able to warn each other about impending attacks? “I asked Invisible Children, ‘Can you get these communities radios so they can start warning themselves?’,” Davis explains. “They took the ball and just ran with it. We funded the radio system. They equip these villages with radio towers and give the radios to the tribal chiefs, who put up the tower when they need to communicate about attacks.” When attacks are reported, the villagers are able to flee into the forest and elude the LRA.

The radio network had other benefits. “We were getting an incredible amount of intel, so we could plot attacks and patterns.” The data points became LRA Crisis Tracker, a website on which attack locations are publicly available. The tracker is expanding into the Central African Republic, farther south in the DRC and north into South Sudan as attacks are reported.

“We as philanthropists have leeway to be a lot bolder on these sorts of investments,” Davis explains. “Traditionally, you pay advocates to swing the stick for governmental intervention. That’s fine, but it’s also good to go directly to the source and listen directly to the people. I don’t have to ask the U.S. government to get radio towers out there!”

Montgomery shares the sentiment. “Sure, there’s advocacy, and yes, there’s education,” he says, “but right now there are people dying.”

Bridgeway’s work—some of which Davis prefers to keep off the record—has helped to catalyze international attention and action. At least 10 mid-level LRA commanders have defected, been captured, or been killed recently, and President Barack Obama has authorized 100 combat troops into the region under the aegis of U.S. Africa Command. The aforementioned LRA Disarmament Act, enacted in 2010, established a formal U.S. goal of apprehending Joseph Kony and bringing him to justice, as well as supporting victims of LRA attacks in both the DRC and Uganda. “There’s been more action on the LRA front in the past few months than in the previous three years,” Davis says. But she and Montgomery have their eye on the prize: ending the violence for good. “The goal would be to get Joseph Kony to the Hague where he can stand trial,” Montgomery points out.

“That would be the end of the LRA,” Davis adds.

“Just Lines on a Map”

Montgomery is intrigued by research on happiness. Once you hit $50,000 in annual income, he points out, increases in income no longer correspond to increased happiness. That was one reason why he and his wife, Ann, agreed to practice a simpler lifestyle than their wealth would allow. They own a modest four-bedroom home, a few blocks away from Bridgeway’s office. With their surplus wealth, they decided to pursue philanthropy now. “We just thought it would be a lot more fun to give along the way,” he explains.

To date, Montgomery and Bridgeway have given tens of millions of dollars toward the efforts of their philanthropic mission. Why so much of their profits, and why so much of it to eliminate genocide? Montgomery thinks for a moment. “Sometimes you don’t know the deeper reasons of what you do, and I think that’s true for me and genocide specifically,” he replies. “I have some sense that there’s a bigger picture that I’m part of, but I don’t understand the full dynamics of that.”

“There is a spiritual aspect of this to me, a life calling,” he adds in a reflective tone. “National borders are just lines on a map. They’re completely artificial.” For John Montgomery and his team at Bridgeway, that is the guiding vision: a world in which the lines with the potential for hateful division—race, religion, ethnicity, nationality—do not become fault lines of conflict.

And until that time, they sense it’s their duty to stop the slaughter.

This article was originally published in Philanthropy magazine’s Winter 2012 issue.

Green is president of Hobby Lobby, a nationwide chain of arts-and-crafts stores founded by his father, David. The Good Book informs his family’s business and inspires their philanthropy. It is also the centerpiece of their latest charitable project: the creation of the country’s first museum devoted to telling the story of how the Bible came to be, recounting its effects on the world, and relating its message.

The Greens own an unrivaled personal collection of Bibles, biblical manuscripts, and scriptural antiquities. When their museum opens, it will showcase a world-class collection with a strong non-sectarian emphasis. Among the items it will feature are fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of the world’s oldest complete Bibles, exquisitely illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages, and first editions of landmark Bibles.

In the meantime, a portion of the family’s collection is touring the world. On May 16, Steve Green unveiled “Passages,” an exhibit at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art that marks the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. After that, a portion focused on the Catholic contribution to the King James Bible will travel to the Vatican, where it will be a featured exhibit at the Braccio di Carlo Magno museum in St. Peter’s Square. Other sites for a “Passages” exhibition are currently being negotiated both stateside and abroad. The exhibit will go on a worldwide tour while the Green family continues to build a permanent museum dedicated to the Bible.

“Whether you believe or not,” Steve says, “the history of this book is a story to be told—people gave their lives for it. Our goal is to make the Bible more accessible than ever before.” This story, as told through the Greens’ collection, is breathtaking. “Passages” starts with the earliest Jewish scribes and moves on through the apostolic, patristic, and medieval ages. It examines the Renaissance and European Reformation and culminates with the English Reformation and the translation of the King James Bible.

“You would have to travel around the world to see single items that are on display here in Oklahoma City,” says Scott Carroll, a biblical scholar and the curator of the exhibition. He glances at the artifacts on display, eyes wide with awe, before continuing. “There are numerous items that you couldn’t see anywhere outside of Oklahoma City.”

Among its more than 300 notable artifacts are an unpublished fragment of Genesis from the Dead Sea Scrolls; the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, which contains the earliest known manuscript of the New Testament in Palestinian Aramaic; the Roseberry Rolle, a translation of the Psalms into Middle English that predates John Wycliffe’s English Bible by 40 years, as well as first editions of Coverdale, Tyndale, Geneva, and King James Bibles. The exhibit also includes a number of interactive features. St. Jerome, who translated the Latin Vulgate, appears as an animatronic figure. So too does William Tyndale, who translated the New Testament into English and was put to death by Henry VIII. Docents dressed in period costumes operate exact replicas of the Gutenberg and King James printing presses, and artists conduct live demonstration of scriptural adornment techniques.

“To know the story of how the Bible was transmitted and preserved is important,” says Carroll. “It didn’t simply drop from Mt. Sinai and end up in a motel drawer! It’s a story of sacrifice and loss of life, of people diligently copying texts, of teaching the story to generation after generation. That’s all part of the story of ‘Passages.’ If you are a person of culture, you must know about the Bible and how it came to be.”

“We believe in the Bible,” says Steve Green. “We live our lives according to the Bible. We believe it is the best instruction for man to live by, and we strive to do that ourselves.” The Bible is likewise at the heart of their business. “We strive to run our business according to biblical principles. As we apply the principles that we see in scripture, we believe that God blesses—and we have definitely been blessed.”

More Than a Hobby

The Green family traces those blessings to Altus, a small town in the dusty southwestern corner of Oklahoma. At age 16, David Green started working in the Altus five-and-dime. After serving briefly in the U.S. Air Force, he married Barbara and joined the fast-growing five-and-dime chain TG&Y, working his way up to area supervisor for Oklahoma City.

David loved retail and had a natural gift for moving merchandise. “I saw potential that TG&Y was not capturing,” he explained. He grew TG&Y’s pet department by selling 10-gallon fish tanks below wholesale price. The tanks were loss leaders. The stores more than made up for them on sales of fish, equipment, and accessories.

He also saw an opportunity to produce picture frames for the store’s craft department. With $600 in borrowed capital, David and a partner bought a frame chopper and materials. They enlisted their families in making the frames. David and Barbara’s children—Mart, Steve, and Darsee—earned 7¢ for each frame they assembled. Before long, they were struggling to keep up with orders.
In 1972, independent of TG&Y, David and his partner opened a 300-square-foot store for their frames and other craft supplies. Hobby Lobby struggled at first, but its product mix proved ideal for Christmas decorating. The little store finished the year with a small profit. From there, Hobby Lobby grew and grew. David bought out his partner in 1973, and in 1975, he opened a new store and resigned from TG&Y.

Today, Hobby Lobby is the nation’s largest privately held arts-and-crafts store, with 479 stores in 40 states and 18,000 employees. Sales top $2 billion annually. The company has a massive manufacturing and warehouse operation in Oklahoma City. And Hobby Lobby’s business model has proved resilient during the recession. “When economic times are bad, people tend to make and craft even more of their gifts, rather than buy them ready-made,” David writes.

There have been a few hiccups along the way. Cash sluiced around Oklahoma during the oil boom of the ’70s and early ’80s, and David admits that they got sucked in. “We had been born as an arts-and-crafts store, but now we were loading up [on] all kinds of upscale merchandise,” he recalls. “We were coasting high on a false sense of security.” When the price of oil collapsed, and Oklahoma’s economy with it, Hobby Lobby’s high-end goods stopped selling. The company lost $1 million in 1985.

“Dad would say he wasn’t sure how we were going to make it,” says Steve. “He would say that was the worst time and yet at the same time the best time, because he would say that that’s when he gave the business over to God and said, ‘I can’t make it. And if it’s going to make it, You are going to have to make it happen.’” The Greens re-focused on their core arts-and-crafts merchandise, secured financing, and ended the year in the black.

Working on Purpose

“I graduated high school and started working for my dad,” smiles Steve Green. “I still do.” Steve has worked in virtually every corner of Hobby Lobby. He mowed lawns, painted buildings, and unloaded trucks in high school. He worked as a liaison between stores and the corporate office. “I worked in buying,” he recalls, “I’ve been over our international department, legal department, accounting department, information systems department.” Steve ultimately worked all the way up the corporate ladder and is now president of Hobby Lobby. “I currently spend most of my time in the real estate department overseeing our growth and new store expansions.”

A deep sense of purpose animates Hobby Lobby. “My father was a son of a pastor,” says Steve, “so he was born in a Christian home, and most of his siblings went into the ministry.” The Greens see Hobby Lobby as a ministry of their own: first, in retail as a form of service; second, in the way the company treats its employees; and finally, in the way it employs its profits.

The Greens believe that they serve their customers by “offering an exceptional selection and value.” “We ask that all employees see themselves as servants,” David explains. “Our stores serve the customers. If everything is working as it should, the staff will feel honored and fulfilled, and the customers will be pleased.”

Hobby Lobby is also the Greens’ ministry to their employees. Like Chick-fil-A—another privately held company owned by evangelical Christians—Hobby Lobby closes on Sundays. That was not always the case. It wasn’t until 1998 that Hobby Lobby first experimented with Sunday closures in its three Nebraska stores. Then David had a revelation: “It was as if God was saying to me, ‘Oh . . . so if you’re blessed, you’re going to be obedient, but if the numbers don’t work out for you, maybe not?’” By 2000, all Hobby Lobby locations were closed on Sundays. “Our decisions are long-term,” Steve explains. “We believe that it has been good for our company. I think that it has attracted better employees, because they like the idea that they’re going to be able to get off on Sundays to worship and be with their families.”

Being privately held allows Hobby Lobby much greater flexibility to use company resources for philanthropic ends. “We are wholly owned by the family,” explains Steve. “We get together as a family and we make those decisions. If we want to close on Sundays, we can do that. There’s a lot of benefit in not having to worry about being a publicly traded company, dealing with the pressures created by the stock market.”

Family ownership also allows the Greens to minister directly from Hobby Lobby’s profits to support Christian and humanitarian ministries around the world. “If everybody agrees that we want to help support a particular ministry, we can do that.” The Greens don’t make a distinction between personal philanthropy and Hobby Lobby’s corporate philanthropy. “Most of the giving is done as a family through the business. We don’t have a separate family foundation. It’s a business decision that we make as a family.”

Sharing God’s word, Steve explains, is the common denominator in the Green family’s giving. “Most of our business decisions are long-term, so we bring that same thought to our charitable giving, which has led us in many cases to God’s word. Much of our giving has been spreading God’s word around the world through different ministries, and the Bible project happened to be a very good fit. There are other humanitarian things that we do as well, but what seems to be at the core of this is sharing God’s word and encouraging people to consider it.”

“It Just Fell into Our Lap”

At the moment, the Greens’ Bible collection and “Passages” are Steve’s top philanthropic priorities—so much so that he is devoting half of his time to them. But the Greens’ philanthropy extends to much more. For example, they support ministries that bring the gospel message to people who haven’t heard it. They support Wycliffe Bible Translators, which is seeking to make the full text of the Bible available in every language. (Although the narrative of “Passages” culminates with the King James Bible, it wraps up with a pitch for Wycliffe.) They also support OneHope, which, Steve says, “takes the four gospels, harmonizes them, puts all the stories in chronological order without repeating them, and distributes that to kids in 100 countries around the world.” Another ministry, Every Home for Christ, seeks to bring “a gospel message to every home in the world.”

The Greens likewise work to tell the story of evangelistic efforts. For instance, Mart Green has long been fascinated by the story of Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, and three other young American missionaries. In 1956, they were murdered in Ecuador by the Waodani Indians—a tribe they were trying to reach with the Christian gospel. Saint and Elliot’s widows, Rachel and Elisabeth, continued their husbands’ work with the Waodani, eventually seeing widespread Christianization among the tribe. Mart founded a nonprofit film company, EthnoGraphic Media, which in 2006 released End of the Spear, a drama based on the lives and deaths of the young missionaries—and the reconciliation of Saint’s son Steve with his father’s Waodani killer.

The Greens have also been very active in supporting Christian colleges, but not necessarily on purpose. “I think some of that kind of just fell into our lap,” Steve explains. “The biggest one has been Oral Roberts University.” In 2007, the Tulsa-based university found itself embroiled in a nasty scandal involving personal and financial misconduct by its president and his wife. The Greens had no personal connection to ORU, Steve explains, “but from what we were reading in the papers, it looked like they were getting ready to close their doors. We hurt for that. We don’t need fewer institutions that are teaching on a biblical basis.” In 2008, the Greens gave $70 million to ORU, including over $50 million to retire its debt. Mart became chairman of the board and imposed a plan for financial recovery and governance reform.

Much of the Greens’ support for Christian higher education has been through property deals—$300 million worth of deals for 50 institutions, notes David. The family gave a $10.5 million facility to Liberty University for a law school, and made $5 million worth of renovations to a campus that they gave to Zion Bible College. In 2009, the Greens bought an idyllic 224-acre campus dotted with Romanesque revival buildings for C. S. Lewis College, a non-denominational Great Books college planning to open next year in Northfield, Massachusetts. Steve considers the property a bargain. Hobby Lobby will spend $6 million on its purchase and renovation; when they turn the deed over to C. S. Lewis College, it may be worth as much as $30 million.

“We’re involved in buying and giving real estate when we’re able to buy it at a very good price,” Steve explains. “That was an opportunity. It’s not been an intentional one, but it’s been, I think, one that God has directed us to.”

“One Thing Led to Another”

“My brother runs a Christian bookstore chain [Mardel, an affiliate of Hobby Lobby],” says Steve. “He commented many times that it would be neat to create a Bible museum. By the time an opportunity arose, the idea had been pretty thoroughly discussed in our family.”

When the moment came, it was in the form of a gospel of Luke, written in gold ink on purple vellum. “An opportunity presented itself at a very good price,” Steve says. The family that owned the artifact ended up changing its mind, but the Greens’ inquiry triggered interest in the world of biblical antiquities. “So we started looking for opportunities,” he continues, “and one thing led to another, and we have the collection we have today.”

The collection came together “at lightning speed”—in less than two years. “Our intent was not necessarily to do that,” Steve admits, “but as we started acquiring items, other items became available, word got out, and so people started presenting us with opportunities.” The Greens had an unlikely assist from the economy. “There were people who were struggling because of the economy and in need of cash,” Steve explains, “and they elected to sell a collection or a Bible.” Other collectors decided to sell because of the Greens’ vision for the museum. “I think there are some who might have been motivated to sell because we would share with them what we would love to do with the artifacts.”

The family worked closely with Scott Carroll, a biblical scholar with a long career of acquiring and studying ancient manuscripts. Steve Green joined Carroll on several acquisition trips, meeting dealers and attending auctions. “I tagged along and was just soaking in all the information Scott was sharing,” Steve says. “Then he would present the opportunities. We would discuss them, and I would decide to make the offers.”

“We don’t consider ourselves collectors,” he adds. “That’s not our nature as a family. It was more of the purpose that we had and the vision for the museum. A collector may have a little different mindset from what we might have; for us, it was the opportunities that presented themselves.”

“A Museum, Not a Ministry”

“Passages” is a prelude. After it closes in Oklahoma City in October, a selection of the exhibit will be displayed in the Vatican City. “Passages” will tour major cities for the next few years while the Greens’ ultimate goal—a museum of the Bible—comes to life. “‘Passages’ is a way for us to be able to start telling our story while we’re waiting for that permanent museum,” Steve Green explains.

That museum is perhaps as ambitious a project as the collection it will house. “We want to be a resource where the story of the Bible can be told in a very scholarly way that will also create an interest in the Bible,” Steve says. Like “Passages,” the museum is planned to be interactive, “attracting a wide spectrum of people, from children to scholars.”

It is not, however, planned to be evangelistic—at least not directly. “It’s a museum, not a ministry,” he adds. “But if we do the museum right, it will minister to people as a byproduct. I think it’ll be evangelistic in the sense that the evidence is very compelling that this book is unlike any book out there.” Even so, the museum will be deliberately non-sectarian. “Passages” includes artifacts from the Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant traditions; significantly, it will make a prominent stop at a museum in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. The eventual Bible museum will feature, among other things, the world’s largest private collection of Jewish scrolls (including Torahs that survived the Spanish Inquisition and the Shoah) and items that document the contribution of Jews and Roman Catholics to the King James Bible. “The idea of it being non-sectarian was really a decision based on the history of the Bible,” Green explains. “We didn’t make that decision. That decision was made because the history runs through the traditions of Judaism and Catholicism and Protestantism.”

The museum will also allow the Greens to expand beyond the story told in “Passages,” with its culminating focus on the King James Bible. One of Steve’s favorite artifacts in the collection is a Bible published by Robert Aitken in 1782—“the first and only Bible commissioned by the U.S. Congress,” he explains. The Aitken Bibles were commissioned by Congress in response to the shortage of Bibles from Britain during the American Revolution. “It gives the picture of the environment of the founding of this country,” Steve says, “and I think that today there’s probably a different picture viewed, but this is a way of going back and seeing maybe what the attitude at the time might have been.”

In keeping with its scholarly ambitions, the museum will house a research program: the Green Scholars Initiative. The initiative will allow undergraduates to collaborate with leading researchers to study and publish items in the collection that have not yet received scholarly attention. “This,” Steve concludes, “is a way of getting some of that information out quicker and at the same time mentoring students to have a love for the scholarly work—and it may give them a passion to pursue that opportunity as a vocation.”

“This Place Is Like a Tree”

Steve Green is currently scouting sites for the Bible museum in three cities: Washington, New York, and Dallas. (Washington would have the highest attendance, he says, but that is not the only factor in the decision.) With “Passages” touring and his hands full with planning for the museum, Steve does not envision any other big philanthropic projects soon.

He grins. “But we may wake up and read the paper and feel we need to get involved in a project.” One thing is certain: the Greens will continue to do both business and philanthropy as a family.

Steve and his wife, Jackie, have six children. Mart has four. Following in their father’s footsteps, Steve’s two adult children work for family enterprises: one for Hobby Lobby and one for the Green Collection. Not all family members are obliged to join the business, of course. “If they feel this is not what their calling is and they want to go do something else, then they’re free to do that. But if this is what they feel their calling is, as I did, we want to provide the opportunity.”

The next generation is also learning to participate in the family’s giving. “They don’t vote necessarily on the bigger family decisions,” Steve says, “but they are able to have a little bit that they are directing themselves, to give them a sense of the decision-making that the family goes through.” For example, some of the third-generation family members are supporting Christian orphanages overseas.

Ultimately, the Greens view Hobby Lobby, and the philanthropy it makes possible, as a work of long-term stewardship and investment. “If you want to work here, you’re welcome,” David Green tells his kids and grandkids. “But you’ll only get what you earn. This place is like a tree that can bear fruit if it’s taken care of. In the final analysis, it doesn’t belong to you, or even to Mom and me; it belongs to God. We all have to give it our best attention so that the tree stays strong and healthy for decades to come.”

His words call to mind those of another David, some 3,000 years ago. “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,” sings King David in Psalm 1. “He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.”

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This article was originally published in Philanthropy‘s Summer 2011 issue.