In its issue of January 3-9, 2015, The Economist published a story describing a political dispute over Yellowstone National Park. (The Economist, in my opinion the best general newsmagazine anywhere, is blessedly free of the anti-American animus that is common in European journalism. It reports objectively and in depth about developments in the United States. But it also shows occasional wonder at the more bizarre aspects of the American scene.) The three issues involved in this dispute concern the release of wolves since the 1990s into Yellowstone in order to reduce the huge number of elk (who apparently are choice ingredients of wolf cuisine), the roaming rights of bison, and the access of snowmobiles. This sharply pits ranchers (who are anti-wolf and anti-bison because wolves and bison threaten their cattle), and environmentalists (who cherish “unspoilt nature”, including all free-roaming wild animals, but detest snowmobiles).
Justin Farrell, a Yale sociologist and author of the book The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict, saw the class angle of the dispute, between people who have gun racks on their trucks and those who have bicycle racks. He also saw the religious angle, as indicated by the subtitle of his book. Many ranchers are conservative Christians, who believe in God-given property rights and some of whom refer to the Biblical mandate to man to exercise dominion over the animal world. And a significant sector of the environmental movement cultivates a nature mysticism that received strong impulses from Asian spirituality and from a (mostly imagined) Native-American worldview. The Economist story features a cartoon, showing a confrontation in a winter landscape between an angry-looking man wearing a cowboy hat and a boy hugging a bison, with a wolf lurking in the background.
This dispute is of course yet another episode in the ongoing culture war between conservatives and progressives that has been a prominent feature of American life for several decades. It would be a mistake to see this as a war between two armies, each wearing distinctive uniforms and having clear ideas on what the conflict is all about. Culture is a much more complex phenomenon and the ideas of most people are much more muddled. If one can speak of cultural conflict in America, progressives and conservatives can be recognized as having distinctive differences—these are cues that indicate which side an individual basically belongs to, for example on the environment. Look at someone’s coffee table for such cues. A conservative is more likely to have hunting magazines, a progressive journals advocating animal rights. Conservatives are more likely to vote Republican, progressives Democratic. But there are quite a few “cross-dressers”: progressives who are in favor of American military power, and conservatives who are devoted to at least some animals.
As a result of historical accidents, the two major political parties have different frequency distributions of conservatives and progressives, but this was not always the same as today’s distributions, and this may change again in the future. As the Economist article points out, religion is involved on both sides of the Yellowstone dispute. The ranchers, quite apart from their obvious economic interests, come out of a culture of rugged individualism believing in God-given property rights, and in that part of the country have many members who are Evangelical Christians who adhere to the Biblical view that man was given dominion over creation and the animal kingdom. Today’s environmentalists generally operate with a progressive and indeed anti-capitalist discourse.
It wasn’t always that way: Traditional organizations to preserve the pristine beauty of the West were founded and supported by successful businessmen who wanted to breathe fresh air (at least on vacations), away from what they thought of as the physical and demographic pollution of cities full of industrial fog and undesirable immigrants. On the environmentalist side there are also Christians who go on about the “preservation of the planet”, but also there is a sizable community adhering to the nature mysticism that I mentioned before.
In the late Roman Empire, Asia Minor was the place of origin from which every variety of exotic mysticism invaded Rome and other cosmopolitan centers (early Christianity must have been perceived by educated Romans as part of that invasion). Hence Asia Minor was known as the “vagina of the gods” (vagina deorum). I think that California merited that title in the middle of the twentieth century. It is quite appropriate that I first encountered the new nature mysticism on a visit to northern California. It was at a faculty party at UC Davis. I had just returned from my first visit to Africa, where I was engaged in a sort of sociological tourism. On my return I was still under the impression of the exotic encounters I had on a trip that stretched from Senegal via Uganda to Tanzania. At the Davis party a passionate young woman kept on with a harangue against the loggers who, she asserted, were despoiling the awesome beauty of the Redwood forests. I asked whether she was bothered by the loggers cutting down so many trees. She hesitated, then said that this is not all that troubles her. Rather, the loggers were offending the very essence of treeness. It struck me that she thought of trees as living beings—part of an animistic worldview as different from my own sense of reality as anything I had encountered in Africa. Not long afterward I politely turned down an invitation from a colleague to join him for a session at a Native-American sweat lodge.
What does all this have to do with Pope Francis I? There has been a report that Francis is urging Catholics to be concerned about global warming. And it has been officially announced that he is working on an encyclical about the environment (which presumably will include the issue of global warming). Is Francis greening? As well as moving to the Left? I’m beginning to worry. Perhaps his choice of name was appropriate, suggesting a closeness to Francis of Assisi rather than to Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. Is Pope Francis finally coming out of the closet as a full-fledged Franciscan? He keeps talking about a Church for the poor, he has shunned the luxurious fringe benefits of the papacy, and he has said nasty things about “unfettered capitalism” (which in fact exists nowhere in the world today except in China). When Francis talks about the poor, he alludes to the “preferential option for the poor”. This phrase can be interpreted in different ways: What is good for the poor? The short answer is economic growth in a market economy. But the phrase came out of Latin American Liberation Theology, with its neo-Marxist utopian view of socialism. I don’t think that the saint from Assisi had socialism in mind when he extolled poverty, but the Catholic Left has so interpreted his title of “il poverello”. And one can certainly detect green affinities in his preaching. Today green ideology leans toward the Left—supposedly it is industrial capitalism that is the major agent in bringing about the global catastrophe that is predicted by the green prophecy. When it comes to global warming, the mantra accompanying the prophetic rhetoric keeps repeating, “The science is all in”. I rather doubt it. I am not a climatologist; but neither is Pope Francis. One may recall that the Church was wrong before in endorsing the pre-Copernican cosmology.
The plot thickens. A special advisor to the Pope on the planned encyclical is Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian Franciscan who has been one of the main advocates of Liberation Theology. And recently Francis had a cordial meeting with Gustavo Gutierrez, the Peruvian Dominican who is regarded as the founder of Liberation Theology, who coined the phrase in his 1971 book with that title. Both Guetierrez and Boff were important figures in the early years of that movement, but they are still associated with it and, as far as I know, have not basically changed their views. But now the story gets a rather bizarre twist. The current head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (which in its earlier and notorious history was called the Holy Office of the Inquisition), is the German Cardinal Gerhard Mueller. The CDF continues to be the official guardian of theological orthodoxy in the Roman Catholic Church. Mueller has recently been in the news for the strong position he held in the recent Roman synod on the family. A major topic at that conference (which will continue in the fall) was the question whether Catholics who had been divorced and remarried should continue to be barred from receiving communion, as they are now under Roman canon law. Progressives at the synod were in favor of lifting this provision; Pope Francis, while he did not participate in the debate, gave signals that he too was of the same opinion. Mueller proposed that the present provision of excluding from the sacrament of the altar those in canonically illicit second marriages should be retained, as a necessary witness to the Church’s doctrine of the sanctity of marriage. I must confess that as a non-Catholic I have never thought about this issue; as we say in Texas, I have no dog in this fight. But I find this combination in one man of conservative theology with what looks like a flirtation with progressive ideology somewhat alarming. Apparently Mueller and Gutierrez have been friends for a long time. What do they talk about? The place of political “liberation” in Catholic social teaching? The historic role of the Dominican order in the staffing of the Inquisition? (They used to be called “the dogs of the Lord”—literally, as their name says, “Domini canes”). Or, of course, they may just be reminiscing about times when they were younger, as we more elderly people like to do.
In general I am sympathetic with cross-dressers who refuse to be put in a box. Like LGBT activists for fiscal conservatism. Or Tea Party Republicans for abortion. When I was younger and enjoyed shocking people (in this case New York intellectuals), I spread the rumor that I was running for chairperson of Lesbians for Reagan. But I have great respect for the Roman Catholic Church (though I am not in the least tempted “to go swimming in the Tiber”), and I worry about its possible future evoked by this particular vision of cross-dressing. It is a vision of the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada sporting a Che Guevara t-shirt.
