Engineering Influence

The people winning the current cultural moment understand how influence works. Most Christians have never studied it.

Christians hold a truer story, a transformed community, and two thousand years of evidence about human flourishing. What many lack is an understanding of how culture actually moves: how manipulation is built, how it travels across platforms, and how ordinary people with limited resources can push back without becoming what they oppose.

Engineering Influence is a field manual from the inside of that fight. It documents the techniques of social influence, narrative, and community formation that authoritarian governments, ideological movements, and engagement algorithms already use. It then answers them with apologetics, servant leadership, marketplace excellence, and the slow work of faithful presence in workplaces, homes, and the public square.

Inside you will find:

• How social engineering and social media shape what people believe, and why awe spreads as fast as outrage
• A field manual for truth in a post-truth age
• Why the secular world keeps accidentally proving Scripture right
• Why the only Christian work is good work, well done
• How to shift culture without starting a war
• The autistic faithful presence, and the ethical edge neurodivergent believers bring to the church
• A six-session discussion guide for small groups and study circles

Along the way, the research reframes the whole project:

• The first person in Scripture described as filled with the Spirit of God was a craftsman.
• A landmark leadership study set out to find strategy, found character, and arrived at Philippians 2 without meaning to.
• A decades-long family study found that a father's warmth is the strongest predictor of whether faith survives into the next generation.

Every strategy in this book answers to one rule: the ends never justify the means. These tools are instruments of love made operational, and the moment they are picked up for any other reason, they become the thing this book was written to resist. The greatest witness to the culture at large is a life that demands an explanation.

For pastors, leaders, parents, creators, and anyone who works, builds, or speaks in public as a Christian.

About the author: Adam Matthew Steinberger grew up Jewish in Albany, New York, and became a Messianic believer in Yeshua in 2020. He spent his career as a software engineer in AI, cloud, and backend systems, then left fintech to pursue a Master of Divinity in Missiology. He is now a software consultant in South Carolina.