Recently Rod Dreher, a conservative Catholic journalist, wrote a column for National Review in which he noted his surprise discovery that many of his tastes in food were “liberal.”

That is, he prefers to get his organic vegetables at the food co-op and (gasp!) make his own granola (to which a friend of Dreher's responded, “Ewgh, that sounds so lefty.”) Dreher then went on to note that there were a number of other tastes and preferences he had that are somehow associated with a leftist worldview such as jazz, hard country, bluegrass, Cuban son and funky old houses in non-Republican-looking neighborhoods.

This discovery elicited a volcanic response from Dreher's readers, who buried him in mail full of their own “secret pleasures” that do not fit the “conservative culture” template. Tofu, folk music, quiches, you name it. There was a gush of therapeutic confession. (“Yes! I do think solar-design homes are kind of cool! I like Bruce Cockburn and the Indigo Girls!”)

The left, it seems, does not have a corner on such odd tribalism. And indeed, even “conservative Catholics” are not immune from it.

For one does get the impression from certain people that in order to be a “real” Catholic (that is, somebody who assents to the teaching of the Church without revision) one must also smoke cigars, eat red meat, eschew NPR, avoid words like “spirituality,” “charismatic” and “ecumenical,” steer clear of a taste for any song in the OCP hymn-book and reject ritually defiling contact with unapproved books and/or media.

The apotheosis of this sort of thinking on the Internet is a certain Catholic Web site that “grades” other sites for “fidelity” and uses as criteria (among other things) which sites you happen to link to. Thus, perfectly orthodox Catholics I know have gotten warnings from this vigilant guardian of orthodoxy that they would be “downgraded” for fidelity simply because they link to articles on sites deemed questionable by the guardian. Similarly, I have received e-mail from people “warning” me that I am dallying with heterodoxy because I don't see a big problem with Harry Potter books and I kinda liked The Matrix.

All of which got me, a Catholic who tries to think with the Church, thinking. For another glitch in the so-called “conservative Catholic” cultural paradigm that has received quite a bit of neglect is that a giant in the “conservative Catholic” pantheon — J.R.R. Tolkien — had a view of the sacredness of creation that was sacramental and Christian and yet, if articulated by any Catholic today, would in all likelihood be derided without trial by “conservative Catholics.”

What do I mean? Basically, that it is very hard to speak about the sacredness of nature without instantly earning the reputation of a “tree-hugger” or a Gaiaworshipping pagan from many conservative Catholics. And yet Tolkien was nothing of the kind. He was simply a Catholic who took seriously the sacramental character of the created world while steadfastly refusing to worship it.

That makes him and those like him square pegs whose views are often overlooked in the American political and religious landscape. Tolkien deeply distrusted the “there it is boys, take as much as you want” materialism that sees nature as one vast warehouse of raw materials to be exploited at will. Tolkien's dim view of nature at the mercy of a rapacious technology is indeed well known. As movie viewers saw in graphic detail in Peter Jackson's The Two Towers, nature also wreaks its vengeance by the hand of Treebeard and his army of enraged trees.

This is more than merely Ludditism and vastly more than doltish Gaia worship or “earth first” twaddle that mistakes the creature for the Creator and hates human beings as a sort of plague on the face of the earth. Tolkien despises nothing truly human and, indeed, it reflects a healthy and profoundly Christian apprehension that nature, though not our mother, is in very truth our sister because she has been made by the same God who made us. It also reflects the deeply Christian faith that nature is not just atoms and energy to be exploited at will but a sacrament and the medium through which God reveals himself. For Tolkien, as for Genesis, we have dominion over nature as stewards, not as tyrants. We are, at best, caretakers of God's garden, not absolute masters.

To be sure, this view of our relation to nature has been bowdlerized by the pagan eco-spirituality crowd (which sees nature not as a sacrament but as a goddess). But the reaction to this bowdlerization by many conservatives is often just as wrong-headed because it does not distinguish between a sacramental approach to nature and a pagan one.

Tolkien points the way. It is a way that restores nature to her place as our sister and a sacrament, not as our mother or a goddess, and that is as hostile to the denigration of nature as to its worship. Such a view will only help us regain a proper Christian view of nature by giving us a less reactionary and more intelligent view of creation that is defined neither by the lunatics of the earth goddess crowd nor by the mere reaction to them that often typifies “conservative Catholic” culture.

Indeed, it might lead us to rethink the ever-more-meaningless categories of “liberal” and “conservative” when applied to the Catholic faith. For as Pope John Paul II has proved for 25 years, such labels typically substitute for thought.

Mark Shea writes from Seattle.