Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth
By Debra Rienstra
Fortress Press, 2022

The “refugia” mentioned in the title of Calvin University English professor Debra Rientra’s new book Refugia Faith is a term for the small enclaves into which life often retreats in times of crisis. The crisis forming the backdrop of Rienstra’s book has never been more obvious: awareness of the climate change crisis facing the early 21st century has penetrated even the most paleo-retrograde sections of the public consciousness, and that climate picture will almost certainly get dramatically more obvious this coming summer, with more hurricanes, more wildfires, more drought, and more record-breaking heat. 

Every survey on the subject shows that young people across the entire political spectrum recognize this situation and are alarmed by it, understandably, since they’re the ones who’ll have to try to live in the hellish new world reality becoming increasingly visible in 2022. This sense of urgent alarm brings them into direct conflict with the elders of their own faith communities, many of whom tend to belong in the aforementioned paleo-retrograde sections of society. 

As Rienstra and her many sources observe, those young people end up feeling like strangers in their own conservative faith communities. “Parents and elders who taught the faith refuse to listen to their concerns about the future of the planet,” Rienstra writes. “The youngers perceive an obvious connection between faith and the call to address the climate crisis, but the elders – having succumbed to the politicizing of all things climate – at worst dismiss their concerns as ‘fake news’ and at best exhort them to keep such matters out of the church.”

Those hidebound elders could very much benefit from reading Refugia Faith, although the book will clearly be more valuable to those poor orphaned younger readers who love their religious faiths but who also feel Scripture’s call to good stewardship with an unprecedented urgency. And both of those groups will find Rienstra’s book a marvel of intelligent compassion, a vital call for Christians to abandon the rabid partisanship of the current age and listen instead to the better angels of their call to faith. “In the United States, many American Christians have been seduced by Christian nationalism, militarism, and wealth,” she writes. “They imagine that their faith compels them to establish a theocracy at any cost, apparently immune to suggestions that the impulse to dominate may not be the way of Jesus.” 

“We are soil creatures,” Rienstra reminds her readers, and although humans have often used plowshares to colonize other humans or poison the land, the faithful “have always been promised outpourings of grace that looked, at least in part, like healthy agriculture.” Refugia Faith presents readers with a series of aids to that outpouring of grace, community steps they can take in that work of faith agriculture – and it also gently presents them with the challenge of going out and taking those steps. Passivity on the subject ought not to be an option for Christians, and Rienstra gives them a compassionate and useful game plan. 

-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.