Culture is not argued. It is told.
No one changes their mind about marriage, about money, about what a good life looks like, because a policy paper convinced them. They change because a song got into their head, a film moved them to tears, a novel gave them a hero to imitate before they knew they were imitating anyone. Long before a law passes, someone has already decided what looks noble and what looks laughable, and they did it with a camera, a guitar, or a pen. That is the arts and entertainment mountain, one of the seven spheres of cultural influence described in the Seven Mountains Mandate, and it is the mountain most churches quietly let go of.
Walk the other six mountains and you can point to what Christians built. Church buildings and denominations on the religion mountain. Christian schools and homeschool co-ops on education. Chambers of commerce and family businesses run on biblical principle on the mountain of business. Believers have shown up in courtrooms, statehouses, and newsrooms, even when the reception was cold. But ask a Christian to name the last major film, the last widely heard album, the last novel that shaped how the country thinks about God, family, or justice, made as an act of faith, and most will go quiet. Christians work in every one of those crafts. What the church never built is an institution that treats that work as seriously as it treats law, policy, and schooling.
The mountain does not sit empty. It gets filled.
This is the part that gets missed. A mountain a believer abandons does not stay vacant. Someone else always wants it, and they take it. The songs still get written. The shows still get made. The stories a culture tells its children about what is normal, what is brave, what is worth wanting, keep getting told every single day, with or without a Christian in the room. Abstaining from the arts mountain was never neutral. It was a transfer of the pen to whoever was willing to pick it up.
Fritz Steiger has spent a career building on the other mountains. He was a founding executive of the Wal-Mart Foundation, one of the largest corporate philanthropies in American history, working alongside Sam Walton. He co-founded the Texas Public Policy Foundation, whose ideas have become law in state after state, and it is now among the most-cited conservative policy institutes in the country. He co-founded Children First America, which put school choice on the national legislative agenda, and the Justice Foundation, a public interest law firm. That is business, government, and education, three mountains with real institutions standing on them because someone was willing to spend decades on the work. Arts and entertainment has no equivalent on that list, and that gap is the reason this mountain needs the same kind of builders the other six already found.
Genesis 1:28 did not carve out an exception for storytellers.
The cultural mandate in Genesis 1:28 calls those made in God's image to steward every sphere of creation, and it does not stop at the edge of a soundstage or a publishing house. Matthew 5:13-16 calls believers salt and light, not a quiet minority content to let the culture season and light itself. Salt that never touches the meat preserves nothing. Light kept under a basket illuminates nothing. A Christian who writes brilliant fiction and never lets it reach a shelf, or who can sing but never records, has taken the light and hidden it exactly where Matthew 5 said not to put it.
The Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20 sends believers to make disciples of nations, not just of individuals hunting for a church on Sunday. A nation's imagination runs through its stories long before it runs through its sermons. Psalm 33:12 NKJV says "Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD," but a nation learns what it believes about God largely by watching what its screens and its speakers keep telling it, week after week, whether anyone in a pulpit is paying attention or not.
Serving on a mountain does not start with a boycott.
The instinct many Christians reach for is to criticize what Hollywood or the music industry puts out, and then walk away feeling like something was accomplished. Criticism from the sidelines never once built anything on a mountain. Building on a mountain means someone picks up the instrument, the camera, the manuscript, and does the work with the same excellence and patience that built a policy institute or a school. It means treating a novelist's craft, a songwriter's ear, a filmmaker's eye, as a calling as serious as a lawyer's brief or a legislator's bill, because it shapes just as many lives, arguably more, since a story reaches people who would never open a policy paper at all.
This is the argument at the center of Divine Disruption: Restoring America to God's Providence: engagement across all seven mountains, arts and entertainment included, is the stewardship a nation whose God is the Lord requires, carried through its stories as much as through its statutes.
The mountain is not going to sit there waiting patiently for the church to come back to it. It never has. Someone is telling the story right now. The only open question is whether anyone building from a Christian conviction is willing to pick up the pen and tell it instead.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why single out arts and entertainment as abandoned when Christians work in every industry?
Individual believers working in film, music, and publishing is not the same as the church treating those crafts as a mission field worth building institutions around. Other mountains, like education and government, have decades of Christian-founded organizations, schools, and legal groups behind them. Arts and entertainment largely does not, which is why the culture's stories are shaped overwhelmingly by people with no stake in a biblical worldview.
What does the Seven Mountains Mandate actually say about arts and entertainment?
It names arts and entertainment, meaning film, music, and literature, as one of seven spheres of cultural influence believers are called to engage, alongside religion, family, education, government, media, and business. The framework holds that culture is shaped by the stories a society tells itself, and that abandoning any one mountain simply hands that sphere's influence to whoever is willing to show up and tell the story instead.
Isn't focusing on culture instead of policy a distraction from real change?
No, because policy follows culture more often than it leads it. A nation's laws tend to reflect what its stories have already convinced people is normal or unthinkable. A believer who only engages government while ignoring the songs and films shaping the next generation's assumptions is treating the symptom while leaving the cause alone.
How does this connect to the broader argument in Divine Disruption?
The book argues that restoring America to God's providence requires engagement across all seven mountains, not selective retreat into the ones that feel safest or most familiar. Arts and entertainment is presented as the mountain most in need of believers willing to build with the same seriousness already given to law, education, and business.