Hobby Lobby is giving away half a million copies of the book The Case for Christmas in the latest example of the nationwide retailer making the Christian faith an essential part of its day-to-day operations. 

In an X post on Dec. 3, author Lee Strobel announced that Hobby Lobby is giving away half a million free copies of his book The Case for Christmas at its stores nationwide ahead of Christmas Day: “I’m praying God uses them to point people to Himself!” 

Strobel clarified in a follow-up X post on Dec. 6 that Hobby Lobby will continue to give away free copies of the book until 500,000 copies are handed out.

Strobel released a “completely revised and updated version” of The Case for Christmas: A Journalist Investigates the Identity of the Child in the Manger in September.  The Amazon description of the book states that Strobel uses the “latest, most up-to-date scholarship and research” while “evaluating and organizing the biblical, historical, and textual evidence” of the birth of Jesus Christ. 

The Case for Christmas is one of several books Strobel has written since the publication of his best-selling book The Case for Christ in 1998, which documents how his attempts to disprove the existence of Jesus led the then-atheist to come to the opposite conclusion and embrace Christianity. 

“As far as I was concerned, the case was closed,” Strobel wrote in the introduction of The Case for Christ. “There was enough proof for me to rest with the conclusion that the divinity of Jesus was nothing more than the fanciful invention of superstitious people … Or so I thought.”

Strobel elaborated on his past as an atheist and how he came to embrace Christianity when accepting the Museum of the Bible’s 2023 Pillar Award for history, which is given to those “who reinforce the Bible’s history by discovering, preserving and communicating the authenticity of God’s Word to the world.”

“I was an atheist for much of my life, and I lived a very immoral and drunken and narcissistic and profane life,” he shared in his acceptance speech. “I never could have anticipated, first of all, coming to faith. I thought religion was a crutch, that it was based on make-believe. I thought faith was believing in something even though you knew in your heart it couldn’t be true.” 

Attributing his efforts to disprove the existence of Jesus in response to his wife’s conversion to Christianity after meeting their new neighbor, who invited her to church, Strobel recalled how “I thought maybe I could rescue her from this cult that she’s gotten involved in if I could just disprove the resurrection of Jesus.”

He described how he discovered after two years of research that “based on the avalanche of evidence that points so powerfully toward the truth of Christianity, it would take more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a Christian.”

“God changed my values, my character, my morality, my worldview, my philosophy, my attitudes, my marriage, my parenting, my relationships,” he said. “I never could have anticipated what God would do, and so I give Him all the glory.”

Hobby Lobby, which has over 1,000 stores in the 48 contiguous U.S. states, has developed a reputation for its support of Christian values and causes over the years.

The company identifies its mission in part as “honoring the Lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with biblical principles” as well as “providing a return on the family’s investment, sharing the Lord’s blessings with our employees, and investing in our community.” In light of its strong adherence to the Christian faith, the retailer is closed on Sundays.

The chain was at the center of the 2014 United States Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, where the justices ruled that the arts and crafts chain could be exempted from being required to provide a healthcare plan that covers abortion-inducing drugs.

Hobby Lobby has placed Christmas and Easter ads in newspapers across the U.S. for three decades as part of what it characterizes as efforts to provide “testimony” about the “meaning of the holiday.”

This year’s Christmas message features the words “Jesus is the Gift” accompanied by a reference to the Bible verse Luke 2:11 and a picture of a young girl looking into a snow globe containing a Nativity scene. The Bible verse states, “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”