Monday’s post asked what kind of national memories they intended to create. The second part of this question follows the question: What kind of faith can perpetuate that memory? The guide here is unlikely and largely forgotten, but as it turns out, timely.
Faith quickly becomes wrong when politically expedient.
The current fashion for Christian nationalism comes with the usual bells and whistles: flags, slogans, bad history, and the comforting idea that it would be easier to understand if the gospel were a political platform. If Jesus had come to overthrow Rome, categorization would have been easy. But if his threat had failed, he would not have been crucified.
When we think of the best in faith and politics, names like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama are familiar. They understood that spiritual seriousness was not about withdrawing from politics, but about refusing to be swallowed up by politics. Their greatness lay in that difficult balance.
Helen Constance White was not a figure of that magnitude, and if it were based on fame or historical results, the comparison would be unreasonable. But she belongs to the same moral conversation about how we can hold on to our faith in a political crisis without politicizing it in other ways.
I didn’t expect Helen Constance White to join this company. A student of mysticism and literary imagination, she is not usually placed there. Born in 1896, she was the first woman to become a major Catholic literary scholar and writer and a full professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She wrote about devotional literature and metaphysical poets, produced historical fiction shaped under pressure by a Christian conscience, was twice awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and won Notre Dame’s prestigious Raetard Medal, given annually to an American Catholic whose “genius has ennobled the arts and sciences, exemplified the ideals of the Church, and enriched the heritage of humanity.”
Since I came to White late, meeting her might be the right way. Being anonymous spared her the humiliation of being turned into another slogan. White’s learned historical fiction to the ends of the world Taking place in the midst of the French Revolution, it becomes more than just a tale of persecution and loyalty. Politics determines the conditions: abandon the inner life or be treated as an enemy of history.
Its central figure, Michel de la Tour d’Auvergne, was not just an enemy of reform. He can respect the promises of the revolution while rejecting its demands for the submission of the church, conscience, and inner life to the state. As the revolution intensifies into terror, Michel’s vocation is stripped of its romance. The Abbey of Cluny is dissolved. Priesthood becomes fugitive, real, and dangerous. The public drama of history becomes intimate. Family, fear, loyalty, sacraments, and conscience are all under pressure.
The setting is historical. Temptation is not like that. Every era produces disillusioned strivers who despise what shaped them and yearn for an ideology big enough to replace it. White realized how quickly moral language becomes permission. States need not silence conscience if they can make it sound like loyalty.
Given the patriotic and pious misuse of the name of Jesus and the faith that now frequently comes out of Washington, White becomes another spokesperson for a religion true to itself. She rejects the liberal habit of reducing faith to ethics and enlightenment, and the conservative habit of reducing it to order, inheritance, and national destiny. She doesn’t show us a caricature of the latest fad of recidivism that treats the separation of church and state as a mistake.
White recalls what Jesus was about to say. It is not the overthrow of Rome or a republic cloaked in piety, but the promise and claim of the kingdom of God among a people that no nation can have.
“My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus said. he didn’t say otherwise for This world. His kingdom does not ignore politics. It denies politics any claim to ultimateness and entrusts politics to God’s judgment and mercy.
Faith does not eliminate the need for prudence, law, courage, and compromise. But it prevents politics from becoming ultimate. Immigration, gender, belonging, and who counts as one of us are more than just debates over laws and policies. It is the place where the necessary power of the state meets both the person who should never possess it and the truth by which it is judged. White’s own life bears this out. She helped lead a lay movement that defended the separation of church and state, and publicly opposed Sen. Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare.
White’s students gave her the nickname “Purple Goddess,” in part because of her enthusiasm for purple clothing. She never apologized for the habit. “When I get on a plane for a weekend appointment, everything automatically matches up.” The “goddess” part may also have something to do with her height. She was over 6 feet tall, but that grandeur is kept behind the desk in the photo above.
Aside from being an attractive color, purple is also a majestic, even noble color for Norking’s Day. White writes about the loss of dignity when power treats conscience as a threat and honesty as dishonesty.
Faith may judge politics, but it cannot be its mascot. Politics can govern, but it cannot determine people’s worth. Her testimony is a besieged monastery. When times call for surrender, memory, worship, conscience, justice, and mercy come together.
Amen.
notes and reading
Helen C. White to the ends of the world (1939). White’s historical novel is out of print in its original edition, but if lending access is available, it can be borrowed digitally through the Internet Archive’s Open Library using a free account. Recent paperback reprints are also available in bookstores.
For more background on White, see Helen C. White, Cluny Media, and Priests in the Face of Revolution. imaginative conservative (May 23, 2026). To learn more about White’s work, including her church-state work and opposition to McCarthy, read her obituary below. Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin, June 8, 1967).
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Dorothy Day was instrumental in increasing White’s contemporary relevance. In 1962, Day wrote that White “confessed that he wrote this song for our times.” Day read the novel as a contrast between the clergyman who escapes and seeks armed intervention, and the clergyman who remains in prison and continues to learn, suffer, and serve. White’s novel is not a piece of royalist nostalgia, but a warning against a faith that seeks security through force. —Dorothy Day “Learn more about Cuba” catholic worker (July 1, 1962).
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Willa Cather’s Death comes to the Archbishop (1927) and Graham Greene’s power and glory (1940) is a useful comparison. Ms. Cather is concerned about Catholic life taking root. Greene works gracefully through the compromised “Whiskey Priest” in his anti-clerical persecution novel. White’s concern is that the church is under pressure. The church is divided, in crisis, and forced to decide how to remain faithful as politics demands submission.
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John J. Diulio, Jr., Religious Freedom: The Foundation of Liberal Democracy (Religious Freedom Institute, 2016). Mr. DiIlio, a Pennsylvania political scientist and nonpartisan former Princeton University professor, treats religious freedom not as a personal preference or sectarian claim, but as one of the disciplines that keep liberal democracy honest. In other words, the state must leave room for conscience without claiming ownership of it.
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robert audi Religious commitment and secular reasons (2000). Rather than excluding religion from public life, Audi, the Notre Dame philosopher, advocates for civil self-restraint. Faith can shape public debate without becoming state-imposed. Also, Is this God’s country?: Religion and democracy in America (2024).
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addison hodges hart practical mystic. Hart’s phrase is useful here because it rejects the false choice between contemplation and practice. Hart, a retired priest and writer on spirituality, the Bible, and the arts, treats mysticism not as an escape from the world, but as seeing more clearly in it. White’s good companion. Inner depth is tested not by withdrawal but by faithfulness under pressure.
Simone Weil waiting for god (1951; also published as) waiting for god): “To stay relevant, you have to say things that will stay forever.” This line captures a kind of relevance for White: not keeping up with the times, but staying true to the truths that politics are always tempted to exploit. See also Weill’s The need for roots.
martyrs of memory
what is not
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
