Searching for the Arc of History: The Secularization of American Politics

Michael Rosen's The Shadow of God includes an account of historical theodicy, which is the idea that the arc of history justifies the ways of God. Formulated by the German Idealists, its American expositors influenced the ideas of the nineteenth-century American theologian and activist Theodore Parker. As the orginator of the phrases "arc of history" and "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," Parker's influence extends to presidents and Supreme Court justices, demonstrating the long and influential afterlife of the German philosophical discourses that Rosen explores. But examining this afterlife also challenges the assumption that we can discern the arc of history without the monotheistic presuppositions present in Parker.