You Don’t Need to Be on the Right Side of History
Everyone is sure history is going somewhere. Can we say who is taking it there?
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King Jr. made that sentence famous. He took it from Theodore Parker, a nineteenth-century abolitionist preacher who died before the Civil War. It is one of the most hopeful sentences in the English language, and most of the people who quote it have no right to it.
The sentence claims that history has a side. It has a direction. It is going somewhere, and it is going there on its own, whether you help or not. To be on the wrong side of history is to stand in front of a current that cannot be reversed. That is a statement of faith. It assumes the universe is moral, that morality has a destination, and that something is carrying us toward it. Take God out of the picture, as most people who say it have, and the all-important question remains: Who is driving?
The modern answer has a family tree.
A doctrine of providence with God removed
Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher whose system dominated the early nineteenth century, taught that history is Spirit (Geist) working itself out through one contradiction after another toward fuller freedom. History was rational. It had a plot. Karl Marx kept Hegel’s engine and changed the fuel. The motor of history, he said, is not Spirit but matter: the means of production and the class conflict they generate. Feudalism gives way to capitalism, capitalism creates the working class, and the working class will produce the revolution that ends class society for good. For Marx, this was not a hope. It was a prediction. The workers did not need persuading so much as awakening to what the forces were already accomplishing through them.
The move from Hegel to Marx kept the direction, the inevitability, and the fixed destination. It discarded only the one who bends the arc. What remains is the Christian doctrine of providence with God removed, and the machinery left running. History still has a telos, a built-in end it is climbing toward, but no mind sits behind the movement. There is no one to thank when it goes well, no one to trust when it does not, and no one who knows your name while it grinds forward.
What the Frankfurt School kept
When the revolution failed to arrive, Marx’s intellectual heirs had a problem. The workers of the industrial West did not rise. They bought homes and televisions. The most influential response came from the Frankfurt School, a circle of mostly German Marxist intellectuals from the Institute for Social Research, founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and moved to New York after Hitler took power. Men like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse faced a choice. The working class had declined to start the revolution Marx promised. A weaker movement would have concluded that the theory was wrong. They kept the theory and explained the delay.
Critical Theory, the name for their project, inherited Marx’s framework whole, destination included. The arc still bent toward liberation; the working class had simply been kept from delivering it by forces more subtle than Marx had reckoned, forces like the entertainment industry, the family, mass culture, and even the rationality of the Enlightenment itself. So they ran a single operation on every Western institution: find a hidden system of unjust power, expose how it works beneath the surface, identify the victims it produces, and aim everything at its overthrow. Liberation was still coming. It was only running late, held up by enemies cleverer than the old capitalists.
What the postmodernists threw away
Where the Frankfurt School preserved Marx’s destination, the postmodernists kept their suspicion and threw the destination away. Their root conviction is that there is no neutral truth, no universal reason, no view from nowhere. Every claim to objective truth is a bid for power wearing a disguise. Jean-François Lyotard, a French philosopher writing in the 1970s, summed up the mood as “incredulity toward metanarratives,” the large explanatory stories that claim to make sense of everything, Christianity and the Enlightenment, and Marxism’s own march to liberation among them. Michel Foucault, the most cited of the group, spent his career arguing that the institutions presenting themselves as neutral (the clinic, the prison, the school, the human sciences) are machinery for shaping and controlling people, and that power has no outside, no place to stand free of it. Postmodernism keeps Marx’s instinct that everything is a mask for power. It drops his promise that the mask will ever come off. What remains is the unmasking with nothing to arrive at, suspicion as a permanent condition.
The ordinary Westerner is now heir to two wills that cancel each other. From Marx, through a thousand repeated slogans, he inherited the certainty that history bends toward justice. From the postmoderns, he inherited the certainty that there is no such story and no such justice, only rival arrangements of power. He says “the right side of history” and “there is no objective truth” in the same conversation, and never hears the crash. He wants the comfort of an arc while having dismissed the only One who could bend it.
The arc has a name
The 1689 London Baptist Confession answers the question that the slogan cannot. God, it says, “doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures and things, from the greatest even to the least, by His most wise and holy providence, to the end for the which they were created” (Ch. 5.1). History is going somewhere. On that bare point, the Christian and the Marxist agree. But that’s where the agreement ends. One account of history is governed by a Person, the other by a process.
The Confession also refuses a cheap escape. It does not pretend that material forces are nothing. God, it says, “ordereth [all things] to fall out according to the nature of second causes” (Ch. 5.2). Economics moves nations. Money, labor, and power are real levers, and they really pull. Marx noticed the levers. He also noticed something true and very old, that the strong forever dress their own interests up as eternal truth, that the comfortable tend to believe whatever philosophy flatters their comfort. Scripture condemned that sin long before Marx called it exploitation.
From a few real observations, Marx built an atheist religion. Matter is all there is. Human beings are products of their economic conditions. Evil lives in social arrangements rather than in the human heart. Abolish private property, and you heal what is wrong with us. Every plank of it is false, and the twentieth century paid for the error in something near a hundred million lives, in the Ukrainian famine, the Chinese countryside, and the Cambodian killing fields. This was not a modest mistake about metaphysics. There are first causes and second causes. Marx absolutized the second and denied the first, and a world made of nothing but second causes leaves no one above the suffering and no one to cry out to.
That refusal is also why the whole project, in every form it takes, can only tear down. The operation answers to no standard above the critique itself. It exposes and delegitimizes, but it cannot be appealed to, because nothing stands over it. The secular arc has a direction and no judge. Biblical providence has what the Marxist engine can never supply.
Comfort, not only metaphysics
Someone will object that this is merely one more grand story, the exact kind Lyotard taught us to distrust, no safer than Marx’s. The objection has force. The Christian account is a grand story about where history is going. The difference is the timing. The Marxist arc is always future. The revolution is always coming, always being rescheduled, always betrayed by the present generation that failed to bring it in. The Christian claim runs backward instead of forward. The decisive event is already behind us, on a particular Friday and a particular Sunday outside Jerusalem, in public, before witnesses. “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23). The worst act in human history, the murder of the Son of God, was at the same moment the most carefully governed act in human history. If providence held there, it holds anywhere.
This is what makes the doctrine a comfort and not cold mechanics. The Marxist engine has a use for you only while you serve its direction. You are a moment in the dialectic, and the dialectic does not mourn its casualties. It files them under the cost of progress and moves on. Providence runs the other way. The God who governs the rise and fall of empires has numbered the hairs of your head, and not one sparrow falls to the ground apart from your Father (Matt. 10:29-30). The hand that steers the nations holds the sick believer in the dark. Joseph said it to the brothers who sold him into slavery: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20). Paul said it to a suffering church: God “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11), and works them together “for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28).
You do not have to get on the right side of history. In Christ, history is on your side, because the One who drives it has already shown you His face, and it is not the face of a force. It is the face of a man who was crucified for you and walked out of His grave. That is who drives history. He knows exactly where He is taking it, and along the way, He knows your name.