Baptizing John Muir

A review of "God´s Wilds: John Muir´s Vision of Nature" by Dennis C Williams. 

John Muir is usually seen as a pantheistic nature mystic heavily indebted to the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau. Dennis Williams disagrees. He argues that Muir was firmly rooted in evangelical Christianity, and that modern Green thinking and counter-culture has misunderstood the point of his writings on Nature.

Personally, I have no opinion on the matter, since I never read Muir's own writings (although I obviously heard of the man).

Firmly evangelical or not, Muir certainly had some ideas modern evangelicals (or Christians in general) would consider rather strange, even heretical. Thus, Muir believed that nature was inherently good and unfallen. Man was a fallen creature, but nature was still in pristine condition, just as God had created it. Love and harmony were the ruling principles of nature. Therefore, humans could learn something about God by studying it, from which follows that nature must be preserved. Muir considered exploitation of nature to be sinful, and seems to have believed that God didn't create it for the benefit of man, something proven by malarial swamps or dangerous predators, which obviously don't exist to benefit humans. And yes, Muir quipped that he would defend the beasts if there ever was a war between humans and animals. There was certainly a streak of nature mysticism in John Muir, but he believed it somehow pointed to the Christian God and revealed something about his character.

Williams believes that the counter-culture of the sixties read Muir's writings through their own, secularist spectacles and turned him into a pantheist. Perhaps.

But is that really so surprising? Somehow, I get the feeling that what Muir really accomplished, was to baptize pantheism...

"God's Wilds" is a scholarly work and could be difficult for the general reader, since it presupposes a great deal of foreknowledge of Muir, his writings and the general intellectual and political climate of 19th century America. Still, the book should be of considerable interest to those who already have a working knowledge of Muir or the relationship between religion and Green thinking.