Whatever your age, do you sometimes feel like culture is spinning out of control? What are the forces generating this spin, and what can restore stability?
Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #237 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.
Centrifugal force is an established fact of physics. It’s the outward (fictious) “force” that seems to push an object away from the center of a circular motion. It’s the idea that if something moving has no anchor, no hub, no center mooring, it will spin off from the center, moving away in any or all directions.
A car turning a corner such that passengers feel pushed to the outside of the turn. A tetherball flying outward away from the pole. Clothes in a washing machine spin cycle. People riding carnival rides feel pushed to the outside of a merry-go-round or a tilt-a-whirl.
Meanwhile, centripetal forces pull things toward the center or hub. For example, the centripetal force of gravity from the sun keeps planets in orbit. Same with the moon. Gravity holds the moon in orbit around the earth. The moon tries to move in a straight line (because of inertia). Earth’s gravity continuously bends that straight-line path into a curved one, preventing the moon from flying off into space.
During Medieval times, scholars believed religion was the essential glue, or centripetal force if you will, holding society together. They saw social order, morality, authority, and unity as rooted in divine law. Many later scholars worried that as modern secularized nation-states emerged, without religion’s unifying role, society might fall apart, i.e., lose moral coherence and fragment.
But as it turned out, secularization didn’t remove religion; it: privatized it, pluralized it, reduced its political power. Today, many scholars still argue that religion helps bind communities, just not as the sole basis of social order. Religion helps generate forms of “collective moral sentiment,” even if not overtly religious, e.g., patriotism, national celebrations, constitutions treated with symbolic reverence, social solidarities through shared values. These moral sentiments act like what scholars have called “civil religion.”
We know from the study of past empires certain centrifugal forces can tear a civilization apart. The Roman Empire unraveled over centuries due to a combination of internal weaknesses and external pressures: corruption and ineffective administration eroded trust and stability, heavy taxation and debt, barbarian invasions, decline in civic pride.
Question becomes, what can we learn from this history? Certainly, the USA is fraught with a growing list of centrifugal forces: political polarization, deep ideological divisions, increasing distrust between opposing political identities, media echo chambers, debates over immigration and street protests: free speech or lawlessness, anarchy, and planned chaos?
These centrifugal forces reduce social cohesion, make compromise harder, weaken confidence in institutions, heighten social conflict, and reduce a shared sense of belonging. The United States of America are not as “united” and our e pluribus unum maximizes “pluribus” over “unum.”
Thankfully, Americans still widely rely on several centripetal forces, for example, shared national institutions like a single Constitution and legal system, a unified military, a Federal Reserve and unified financial system, mature civil rights legal framework, a common currency, national corporations, national holidays, symbols (flag, anthem), widespread civic rituals (voting, jury duty) that reinforce a sense of belonging to a larger whole. High geographic mobility, marriages across region, religion, and ethnicity, national entertainment, sports, music, and a common language.
The growing belief on left and right that elections are unfair, rigged, subject to fraud, the focus of voter suppression, non-citizen voting, tampering, political bias, foreign influence, or other corruption is a key threat to national unity. This is a huge issue that indeed has come close and could still in the future precipitate a constitutional crisis.
What is that? It would happen if an incumbent elected official, especially the President, rejected an election outcome and refused to leave office. This is banana republic stuff, and we want no part of it in the USA, but our political polarization and overwhelming distrust has us on the brink.
America’s sense of disruption, polarization, chaos, and decline has largely occurred in my lifetime—that is, since the 1960s when Christianity began to lose its time-honored spot at the head of the table. Now, depending upon the social circumstances, like a public university, Christianity is not only not at the head of the table, but it’s not at the table at all.
Christian scholar Henry Van Til famously defined culture as “religion externalized.” In other words, a people’s religious presuppositions will work themselves out in the culture, the way of life, they develop.
“Culture is simply a worldview made evident. It is basic beliefs worked out into habits of life. It is theology translated into sociology. Culture is a very practical expression of the common faith of a community or a people or a nation.”
“What a person thinks, what he believes, what shapes his ultimate concerns, and what he holds to be true in his heart—in short, his faith or lack of it—has a direct effect on his material well-being, behavior, and outlook; on his sense of what is good, true, and beautiful; on his priorities, values, and principles. After all, ‘As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.’”
If Christianity, or what scholars like Peter Berger, Os Guinness, and others cited as America’s historic, “Judeo-Christian moral consensus,” our “sacred canopy” as they called it—when this was jettisoned we lost our glue, our reason for existence, and with it, our key centripetal force holding Western Civilization and specifically the USA together.
But there is still hope.
“In 1905, Max Weber, the renowned political economist and ‘founding father’ of modern sociology…in his classic work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, argued…that faith brought men and nations both liberty and prosperity.”
“The great lesson of history…is ordinary people of authentic Christian faith who are ultimately the ones who best able to shape the outcome of human events or, as G.K. Chesterton said, “The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”
Ultimately, that is our greatest hope for the future. It is simply that a new grassroots majoritarian emphasis on things that really matter–on the Gospel and its fruits–will emerge as we train up the next generation of culture-shapers.
It is that a love for hearth and home, community and culture, accountability and availability, service and substance, morality and magnanimity, responsibility and restoration will capture hearts and minds and lives. It is a hope that may be stymied, obstructed, and hampered–but ultimately it cannot fail.”
So, we as Americans, as Christians, as conservatives, or frankly however you align your beliefs, if we care about passing on to our children and grandchildren a country and culture that is a land of freedom and opportunity, then we need to stand up and speak up, sharing the truth in love, that politics cannot solve our crises. Politics might assist, but politics and political leaders cannot provide ultimate meaning or a vision for tomorrow that perpetuates a shining city on a hill.
As G.K. Chesterton noted, we need ordinary men and women who have accepted the message of the Gospel, who embody its incredible transformative power, who then live out or “externalize” their religious beliefs in their everyday life. We need people who believe in truth because God Is There and He is Not Silent, that he is Truth. We need people who are weary of politicians who mouth platitudes to get elected but then in office go along to get along, never really voting to change anything in the interest of freedom and opportunity. We need people who believe in marriage, family, an outstanding work ethic, and generosity.
We need Christian nonprofit organizations who help the Church help others in both spiritual and humanitarian need—the “truly needy,” as Ronald Reagan called them, people who life has dealt them hard knocks but people who want to contribute to the good of their families and society. We need citizens who affirm right and wrong, law and order, mercy, responsibility and accountability, blind justice.
We need people who commit, with the Holy Spirit’s enablement, to be the light of the world and the salt of the Earth. This is a centripetal force great than all others.
Well, we’ll see you again soon. This podcast is about Discerning What Is Best. If you find this thought-provoking and helpful, follow us on your favorite podcast platform. For more Christian commentary, see my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com, or check my YouTube channel @DrRexRogers.
And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2025
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