the john muir exhibit - john_muir_newsletter - christian persepective
Baptized into Wilderness: A Christian Perspective on John Muir
A review by Dennis Williams
(Reprinted from the
John Muir Newsletter
,
Vol. 2, No.2, Spring 1992)
[Editor's note: We will now review books and other materials of
interest to readers of this Newsletter, including older books of
significance as well as newly published books, articles and videos.
If you are interested in reviewing for us, please contact the
editor.]
Baptized into Wilderness: A Christian Perspective on John Muir
by
Richard Cartwright Austin.
Atlanta: John Knox Press.
1987
103 pages. notes, index.
ISBN 0-8042-0869-7.
Reviewed by Dennis Williams
Texas Tech University
Since Lynn White, Jr. published his seminal paper on the roots
of the environmental crisis in 1967, Christianity has taken a
number of blows meted out by academics and environmentalists who
blame Christian theology and philosophy for ecological disaster.
As the patron saint of the environmental preservation movement,
John Muir has undergone radical reinterpretation since Frederick
Badè assumed Muir's orthodoxy. Recent students of Muir, accepting
Lynn White's thesis, have removed Muir from the context of
Christianity and have placed him within religions of the Far East,
which are perceived to be more environmentally responsible -- a
perception not wholly supported by the facts.
More recently Ronald Limbaugh and others have suggested that
interpreting John Muir as a Taoist, Buddhist, or adherent of some
other Far Eastern philosophy enhances the myth-making about John
Muir for modern activists, but does not accurately contribute to
our understanding of his life and work.
In
Baptized into Wilderness
, Richard Austin attempts to establish a dialogue with
Muir that would suggest ways in which Christians could become more
ecologically responsible.
Austin depicts Muir as a prophet in the stripe of Isaiah or
John the Baptist. Muir's divinely ordained duty was to call late
nineteenth-century American society into a correct relationship with
God and the environment. Austin suggests that Muir's message --
"that God wants humans to care for nature and not destroy the
systems of life" (86) -- is just as applicable today as it was a
century ago, perhaps more so. Throughout the book, Austin attempts
to make John Muir's environmental ethics germane to modern Christians.
That is perhaps the most significant weakness of the work. By
emphasizing Muir's relevance to the modern world, Austin fails to
concentrate enough on how Muir's philosophy fits into the
historical context of the late nineteenth century. John Muir is
easily made to be relevant. His writings, like Christian
sculpture, can be made to prove almost anything. More important
than relevance is whether or not the individual portrayed by Austin
or any other biographer is the real John Muir or a mythical
imposter--a caricature made to speak lines removed from the context
of his time and constructed to fit the author's notion of
environmental ethics. A survey of writings about Muir would
testify that such ahistorical methods have often been used on John
Muir. Even so, Austin's portrayal of Muir is fairly accurate, and
the dialogue he establishes with Muir is within the tradition from
which Muir's ethics emerged. However, since Austin emphasizes
modern relevance so much, a reader unfamiliar with Muir's life
would need to read Linnie Marsh Wolfe's
Son of the Wilderness
or Frederick Turner's
Rediscovering America
to fill in the detail of
Muir's life and provide the internal context necessary to
understand Muir the man. All in all, Austin's exploration of
Muir's contribution to environmental theology is a necessary
contribution to Muir scholarship and should not be overlooked.