Here are a few thoughts on the conversation that Julian Sanchez started with a post on the American right’s “epistemic closure” problem (i.e. the closing of the conservative mind), and which has subsequently been taken in all sorts of interesting directions by Matt Yglesias, Noah Millman, Megan McArdle, Sanchez again, Jonah Goldberg, and Conor Friedersdorf, among others.

Think of American conservatism as divided into three spheres: There’s the elite world of pundits and intellectuals (consisting of think tanks, policy journals, political magazines like National Review and The Weekly Standard, certain blogs, etc.), the broader world of “the movement” (consisting of populist media outlets like talk radio and Fox News, diffuse activist groups like the Tea Parties, websites like RedState and its imitators, and issue-based pressure groups like the N.R.A. and the National Right-to-Life Committee, etc.), and then the institutional world of the Republican Party (consisting of office-holders, staffers, fundraisers, consultants, etc.). Obviously these spheres blur into one another: pundits and intellectuals show up on Fox News, politicians become movement celebrities and then transition back to being politicians again, some think tanks look a lot like pressure groups, etc. But I think it’s still a useful way of dividing up a sprawling and diverse ecosystem.

On domestic policy, I think the intellectual right doesn’t have nearly as much of a close-mindedness problem as many people seem to think. Even if you don’t venture into the wilder parts of the blogosphere and just stick with National Review, The Weekly Standard, National Affairs (which has made a big difference on this front) and a few other outlets, you’ll find a pretty lively debate about everything from  financial reform to health care to taxes, with plenty of room for diversity and disagreement and heterodoxy. I’m not going to argue that this is a golden age of conservative domestic policy, exactly, but I do think that the end of the Bush administration has opened up space for a lot of interesting conversations, and allowed some impressive younger thinkers come to fore. Jim Manzi, Yuval Levin, James Capretta, Nicole Gelinas, Brad Wilcox, Luigi Zingales, Ramesh Ponnuru, my former co-author … maybe it isn’t the lost early-1970s world of Commentary and The Public Interest, but it certainly isn’t an intellectual wasteland.

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I’m late turning to Jeffrey Goldberg’s mammoth New Yorker story on Mark and Delia Owens, a pair of celebrated conservationists who apparently went vigilante in their struggle against poachers in Zambia’s North Luangwa National Park, but I wanted both to recommend the piece (it’s the fastest-moving 17,000 words you’ll read this month), and to remark on how surprised I was, all things considered, to find myself feeling sympathetic toward its off-the-reservation subjects. The tenor is appropriately prosecutorial: Goldberg builds an extensive, persuasive case that the Owenses’ much-lauded environmental activism in the Zambian hinterland led to at least one murder, and maybe more. The victim was a poacher; the killers were probably game scouts who were trained by the Owenses as a kind of private army (and encouraged to take the fight to hunters) — and the fatal gunshots, Goldberg plausibly contends, may have been fired by Mark Owens’ own son, Christopher. (Remarkably, the murder was captured on camera by an ABC documentary crew sometime in 1995; even more remarkably, it was then broadcast, on an episode of the newsmagazine show “Turning Point” in 1996.)

The whole story has a Conradian flavor, with the cause of environmentalism replacing the 19th century mission civilisatrice, and a hint of the Kurtzian, “exterminate all the brutes” spirit visible in the Owenses’ attitude toward the native populations threatening their beloved animals:

… throughout “The Eye of the Elephant” the Owenses expressed a desire to live in an Eden-like Africa, free of the complications created by the presence of humans. In “Secrets of the Savanna,” they issued a strong call for human population control in Africa. “Unless human numbers are in balance with those of neighboring wildlife populations, the decline of wildlife will continue to be a hard reality,” they wrote. “Despite the ravages of AIDS and a plethora of other diseases, Africa’s populations continue to outstrip the carry capacity of the continental resource base.” Zambia, though, is larger than France, with only one-fifth the population. Mark Harvey told me that the Owenses earned a reputation in the valley for their intolerance of local people. “Their whole attitude was ‘Nice continent. Pity about the Africans,’ ” he said. P. J. Fouche, a professional hunter who manages a hunting concession in a game-management area outside the park, said that Mark Owens developed a proprietary feeling about the park’s wildlife. “He didn’t want them”—the Africans—“to be anywhere near his animals. That’s how he saw the animals, as his.”

Passages like these make me morally certain that I wouldn’t like Mark Owens if I met him across a dinner table, and obviously nothing excuses vigilante murder. But the prosecutorial spirit of Goldberg’s story notwithstanding, its vivid and meticulous reporting also makes it remarkably easy to relate to the Owenses’ trajectory. The endpoint proved deadly, but the couple was working, from the first, in an incredibly difficult situation, trying to save some of the world’s most remarkable animals from destruction with little or no assistance from the Zambian authorities (such as they were). The poachers seemed to have all the advantages: Money, guns, tight connections to the locals, and the gangster-ish ability to cross the legal and moral lines that the conservationists tried to respect, at least at first. To the Owenses, it no doubt felt like they had become players in a Western — Shane confronting the cattle barons, Gary Cooper taking on the Miller gang, Ransom Stoddard facing off against Liberty Valance. And we all know how those stories are supposed to end: With fundamentally-virtuous people doing what had to be done to tame a lawless country, and leaving the delicate ethical arguments about ends and means to the next generation.

This wasn’t a movie, and Zambia wasn’t their country. But if it’s important to stand outside the Owenses’ strange story and pass judgment, it’s also important to step inside it and recognize how understandable every step they took probably felt, how easy it was to justify going to extremes, and how the fine the line can be between heroism and something much darker. And it’s the great virtue of Goldberg’s piece that it allows you to move between these two perspectives, by exposing not only its subjects’ apparent crimes but also the fraught and hard-to-fathom context in which they happened.

I’ve started down this road, so I suppose I might as well go the full distance. Here’s the most significant charge that Hitchens has leveled against the pope, from a column he penned three weeks ago:

Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger, before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church’s own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated “in the most secretive way … restrained by a perpetual silence … and everyone … is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office … under the penalty of excommunication.” (My italics). Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offense could get you into serious trouble. And this is the church that warns us against moral relativism!

… Not content with shielding its own priests from the law, Ratzinger’s office even wrote its own private statute of limitations. The church’s jurisdiction, claimed Ratzinger, “begins to run from the day when the minor has completed the 18^th year of age” and then lasts for 10 more years. Daniel Shea, the attorney for two victims who sued Ratzinger and a church in Texas, correctly describes that latter stipulation as an obstruction of justice.

None of this is true. The letter was not “confidential,” or at least not for long; it was published by the Vatican that same year in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, the official journal of the Holy See, and it’s been available in English translation since at least 2002. Ratzinger did not claim that the church had anything remotely like “exclusive jurisdiction” over sex abuse cases. Rather, his letter clarified how the church’s internal disciplinary process should handle a variety of accusations against priests, sex abuse included, and it gave the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith “exclusive competence” to handle these accusations, in an effort to centralize and expedite the process. (Given that Hitchens has elsewhere implied, with justification, that this process moved too slowly in the 1980s and 1990s, one would think that he would welcome such a change.) Nothing in the document forbade bishops, priests, parents or victims from contacting legal authorities or the press, and the letter certainly didn’t threaten excommunication (a word that never appears in the text) for doing so. It required secrecy (“the pontifical secret” is the technical term that appears) for the canonical proceedings themselves — not an unusual policy, given the privacy concerns involved for accusers and accused alike — but it required no such secrecy from anyone when it came to reporting accusations to civil authorities. (It would be extremely strange if it had done so, given that only a year later, the Vatican approved the American bishops’ 2002 “Charter for the Protection of Young People and Children,” which required that any abuse allegation be reported to secular law enforcement.)

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I do not usually respond to Christopher Hitchens’ attacks on the Catholic Church, but since he begins his latest column with a reference to yours truly, I will make an exception, and examine one of the piece’s more dubious claims:

On April 10, the New York Times… reprinted a copy of a letter personally signed by Ratzinger in 1985. The letter urged lenience in the case of the Rev. Stephen Kiesle, who had tied up and sexually tormented two small boys on church property in California. Kiesle’s superiors had written to Ratzinger’s office in Rome, beseeching him to remove the criminal from the priesthood. The man who is now his holiness the pope was full of urgent moral advice in response. “The good of the Universal Church,” he wrote, should be uppermost in the mind. It should be understood that “particularly regarding the young age” of Father Kiesle, there might be great “detriment” caused “within the community of Christ’s faithful” if he were to be removed. The good father was then aged 38. His victims—not that their tender ages of 11 and 13 seem to have mattered—were children. In the ensuing decades, Kiesle went on to ruin the lives of several more children and was finally jailed by the secular authorities on a felony molestation charge in 2004. All this might have been avoided if he had been handed over to justice right away and if the Oakland diocese had called the police rather than written to the office in Rome where it was Ratzinger’s job to muffle and suppress such distressing questions. [emphasis mine — RD]

There are a number of difficulties here. For instance, Ratzinger’s letter was not urging “lenience” but something like the reverse. The issue of laicization had been raised with the Vatican at Kiesle’s own request: The priest had already been removed from ministry, but Kiesle wanted to be released from his vow of celibacy as well, and in the early 1980s Rome apparently decided, after issuing thousands of easy dispensations in the previous decade, that such requests would only be granted (as Kiesle’s was, in 1987) after a certain amount of time had passed. (Keep in mind that the vows of ordination, like marriage vows, are supposed to be indissoluble, and not something you can automatically walk away from because you’ve proven yourself unfit for public ministry.)

But this is a complicated question, open to varying interpretations, which much of the press coverage has failed to adequately explain. What isn’t complicated is the fact that there was nothing for the Oakland diocese to “call the police” about in the case of Kiesle, or for the Vatican to “muffle and suppress,” because Kiesle had already been tried by the civil authorities for the crime that Hitchens mentions. Read more…

We hear rather less about the looming transformation of America into an evangelical theocracy now that George W. Bush is no longer president, but anyone who remembers those wearying debates will find Mark Chaves’ analysis of political activism in American churches illuminating. It turns out that evangelical congregations, despite all the exertions of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, tend be less politically engaged on many fronts than their mainline Protestant, black Protestant and Catholic counterparts:

… notwithstanding extensive media coverage of political mobilization within conservative churches, conservative white Protestant churches do not stand out in their level of political activity. Catholic and black Protestant churches, overall, are more politically active than either liberal or conservative white Protestants. About three-quarters of Catholics and black Protestants attend churches that engaged in at least one of these eight political activities, compared to about half of white Protestants, either conservative or liberal (Synagogues’ political activity rates, by the way, are as high as the Catholic and black Protestant rates).

The style of political engagement, Chaves notes, varies dramatically by denomination:

… Distributing voter guides is the most common way that white conservative Protestant churches do politics. These churches distribute voter guides at about the same rate as Catholic and black Protestant churches do, but they are much more likely to distribute voter guides produced by Religious Right organizations … Beyond voter guides, black churches are much more likely than white churches to engage in electoral politics by having a candidate or elected government official speak at the church, or by participating in voter registration drives. And Catholic churches are much more likely than Protestant churches to engage in the direct action and pressure group politics of marching, demonstrating, and lobbying elected officials.

This comes via Anthony Sacramone on First Things’ blog, where Joe Carter also comments, comparing politically engaged evangelicals to “a herd of unicorns: powerful and abundant in the imagination while not actually existing in the real world.”

It tells you something about the remarkable power our system has vested in 5-to-4 Supreme Court decisions that the most interesting piece I’ve read about the post-John Paul Stevens court involves the swing-voting Anthony Kennedy, rather than any of Stevens’ prospective liberal replacements. On Scotusblog, Lyle Denniston argues that Stevens’ retirement will only increase Kennedy’s already-enormous influence on American jurisprudence. For one thing, Kennedy will be moving up in seniority, meaning that he’s more likely to be the “assigning justice” on a case that divides the Court.  Denniston explains what this means:

When the Court is divided on any case being decided on the merits, the senior Justice in the majority gets to select a colleague (or take on personally) the task of writing the opinion for the majority.  Depending upon who gets the assignment, that can shape the actual outcome of the case, and also influence its breadth or narrowness.  Also, a colleague whose support may be somewhat shaky can be handed an assignment in order to nail down that colleague’s vote and preserve a narrow majority.

With Stevens gone, Kennedy is now more senior than any justice in the liberal bloc, which means that if he joins the liberals, he won’t just give them the majority — he’ll get to determine which liberal justice writes the final opinion as well. Read more…

As I’ve said before, I don’t like it when Catholic leaders fall back on the “child abuse happens everywhere” defense to excuse the church’s egregious failings and cover-ups. I do like it, however, when mainstream media outlets do their job and report that there’s no evidence that the rate of sex abuse is higher among the Catholic clergy than among any other group. So good for Newsweek for running this piece, even if it’s only as a “web exclusive”:

… back in 2002—when the last Catholic sex-abuse scandal was making headlines—a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found that 64 percent of those queried thought Catholic priests “frequently” abused children … Yet experts say there’s simply no data to support the claim at all … based on the surveys and studies conducted by different denominations over the past 30 years, experts who study child abuse say they see little reason to conclude that sexual abuse is mostly a Catholic issue. “We don’t see the Catholic Church as a hotbed of this or a place that has a bigger problem than anyone else,” said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

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