Most people think their civic duty is satisfied at the ballot box. Vote, watch the returns, complain for two years, vote again. That is a real act, and a necessary one. It is also a fraction of what faithful engagement with the government mountain actually asks of a Christian.
Fritz Steiger learned a different model of engagement, and it did not start with an election. It started with an idea nobody in Austin was funding yet, and a decision to build the institution that would carry it anyway. That institution became the Texas Public Policy Foundation, one of several organizations Fritz co-founded, and its ideas did not stay ideas. They became law, in state after state, until TPPF grew into one of the most-cited conservative policy institutes in the country.
Why a policy shop, not a campaign
Here is the part that surprises people who assume government engagement means a candidate, a yard sign, and a get-out-the-vote push. TPPF was never built as a campaign organization. It was built as a policy shop: research, drafting, testimony, and the long unglamorous business of putting a workable bill in front of a legislator willing to carry it.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A candidate wins or loses in a single night. A policy idea, if it is any good, has to survive committee hearings, floor amendments, and a governor's desk before another state legislature even hears about it. Nobody does that work by showing up once every two years. It takes people who treat the machinery of law-making the way a craftsman treats a shop: something you return to every day, because the work does not finish itself.
The family habit of showing up
Fritz did not invent this instinct from scratch. His father, Donald C. Steiger, was a Wyoming patriot who became one of the early builders of the Arkansas Republican Party in the 1970s, at a time when doing so was a minority position in the state and unlikely to pay off within a single election cycle. That is the same pattern that built TPPF a generation later: show up before you know whether it will work, because someone has to be in the room where the decisions get made.
Fritz carried that instinct into a string of institutions built the same way. Alongside TPPF, 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 argues cases rather than merely publishing opinions about them. None of these were single events. Each one was a standing presence inside a system that does not reward people who only show up occasionally.
What faithful government engagement looks like on a Tuesday
Strip away the abstractions and the actual work looks like this. Reading a bill draft line by line before the hearing. Calling a legislator's staffer to walk through an amendment. Writing the one-page summary that a busy committee member will actually read. Testifying, sometimes to a mostly empty room, because the testimony still becomes part of the public record that next session's staff will pull up. Losing a vote and coming back the following session with the same idea, sharpened.
None of that fits on a bumper sticker. All of it is what faithful presence in government actually costs. Government is not neutral ground that waits quietly for someone to notice it every four years. It is shaped every day by whoever bothers to show up. Christians who treat government as someone else's business are not staying pure by abstaining. They are handing the field to whoever else is willing to do the daily work.
The theology behind the day job
Scripture does not treat government service as compromise. Daniel served inside a pagan empire without surrendering what he believed. Joseph administered Egypt's economy from inside Pharaoh's own government. Nehemiah did not write a strongly worded letter about Jerusalem's broken wall. He got the permits, gathered the labor, and rebuilt it stone by stone. None of them treated proximity to power as beneath their calling.
Fritz makes this case at length in Divine Disruption: Restoring America to God's Providence, his book on restoring the seven spheres of cultural influence to God's providence. The government chapter of that argument is not theoretical for him. It is the story of an idea that started in a room in Austin and ended up as statute in state after state, carried there by people willing to do unglamorous work for years before any of it counted for anything.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Texas Public Policy Foundation?
The Texas Public Policy Foundation, known as TPPF, is a policy research organization based in Austin, Texas, co-founded by Fritz Steiger. It researches and drafts policy ideas and works to turn them into actual legislation. Its work has become law in state after state, and it is now among the nation's most-cited conservative policy institutes.
Isn't voting enough for a Christian to engage in government faithfully?
Voting is necessary but not sufficient. Faithful engagement with the government mountain also includes the unglamorous daily work of research, drafting, testimony, and relationship-building with lawmakers that has to happen between elections for a good policy idea to ever become law. Christians who limit their involvement to voting are leaving that daily work to whoever else shows up.
Why does Divine Disruption call government one of the Seven Mountains?
The Seven Mountains Mandate identifies government, alongside religion, family, education, media, arts and entertainment, and business, as one of the spheres of cultural influence believers are called to engage rather than abstain from. Government sets law and public policy for everyone in a society, so disengaging from it does not make it neutral. It simply hands that sphere to whoever else is willing to do the work.
What other organizations did Fritz Steiger co-found besides TPPF?
Fritz co-founded Children First America, which put school choice on the national legislative agenda, and the Justice Foundation, a public interest law firm. He was also a founding executive of the Wal-Mart Foundation. He is now founder, chairman, CEO, and president of the Deltox Foundation, which runs the Alliance for Restoration.