America's Best Days Are Still Ahead
I have spent fifty years at the intersection of faith, enterprise, and public life. I have seen the worst this country can produce and the best. The best is still ahead.
From Fritz Steiger
Reflections on faith, culture, and the work of American restoration.
I have spent fifty years at the intersection of faith, enterprise, and public life. I have seen the worst this country can produce and the best. The best is still ahead.
God sometimes uses unconventional instruments to accomplish His purposes. The believer's task is not uncritical allegiance — but it is not retreat either. Here is how I think about it.
Real estate proved initially successful, and then the 2008 recession brought me to the edge of bankruptcy. What came out the other side was clearer and more durable than what I had going in.
At 25, I was Walmart's corporate affairs director. One afternoon Sam Walton pulled me into a photo with him and Bud. It was an unplanned moment — and it taught me something about how the best leaders see the people around them.
In 2023, I was baptized in the Jordan River — the same place Jesus was baptized. Nothing in my life has compared to walking where He walked. Here is what I brought home.
My great-great-grandfather arrived in America in 1858. Our name means "to climb." When I stood at the summit of Devil's Tower at 65 with two of my children, I finally understood what we had been carrying.
My father was offered the chance to run for Congress from Wyoming. He turned it down to focus on his family and the ranch. That decision shaped every one of his children.
From the Pilgrims to the Founders, there is a thread running through American history that is not coincidence. It is an invitation — and it runs straight through to this moment.
I have spent five decades learning to spot character quickly. The test I now apply without thinking — I call it the Lewis and Clark test — and very few people pass it.
In 1968, my uncle, Congressman Bill Steiger, hired a young man named Dick Cheney as a Congressional Fellow. Cheney later told me that Bill Steiger was the reason he entered politics. My uncle died at 40, never knowing what he had set in motion.
In 1989, Jim Leininger and I set out to give low-income parents the power to choose their children's schools. Over the next decade, we helped launch more than 80 scholarship programs across the country, representing $350 million in private giving to families the system had failed.
Christians walked off the arts and entertainment mountain decades ago. Someone else moved in, and now they are writing the story a nation believes about itself.
Christians treat media as the mountain to avoid, but stepping back from newsrooms and platforms doesn't make them neutral. It hands them to someone else.
Family is the mountain the other six run on. Here is what actually restoring one takes, drawn from practical disciplines rather than slogans.
Religion is the mountain every other mountain depends on: the church equips believers for Family, Education, Government, Media, Arts, and Business, not shelters them from it.
Fritz Steiger co-founded the Texas Public Policy Foundation to turn conservative ideas into actual law. Here is what faithful engagement with the government mountain looks like beyond the ballot box.
Founding the Wal-Mart Foundation taught Fritz Steiger that commerce reaches households no pulpit ever touches — the lesson behind the Business mountain of the Seven Mountains Mandate.
The Seven Mountains Mandate is not a political program. It is a call to serve and believers have been absent from too many of these spheres for too long.
I was born into wide-open country, riding horses before I could read, opening gates in a Dodge Power Wagon with my Dad through the Wyoming snow. Those years shaped everything that came after.