The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (12 page)

Warren brought both presidential candidates in the 2008 election, Barack Obama and John McCain, to Saddleback for one of the church’s trademark “Civil Forum” discussions. There, he got both politicians to commit to the idea of an emergency plan for the global “orphan crisis,” similar to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), championed by President George W. Bush. That year Saddleback made orphan care one of its “signature issues,” announcing its goal to adopt one
thousand children among its congregation. In 2010 the church dedicated its Civil Forum explicitly to orphans and adoption. “Orphans and vulnerable children are not a cause,” Warren said on the occasion, but rather “a biblical and social mandate we can’t ignore.”

Another watershed moment for the movement had also come in 2008, when Medefind became head of the White House office of faith-based initiatives. “It was kind of a perfect storm,” said Tom DiFilipo, president and CEO of the Joint Council on International Children’s Services (JCICS), an influential secular adoption lobby group that works extensively with the Christian Alliance. “We hit that moment when a movement really starts to ramp up, and get the attention of the public, and become more effective. People were in the right place at the right time.”

Within a few years a number of movement books followed. Although there had been some earlier, fairly obscure books on the subject, like Michelle Gardner’s 2003 memoir,
Adoption as a Ministry, Adoption as a Blessing,
the books riding the wave of the movement began to roll out one after the other, creating a growing library of books about “orphan theology.” In addition to Russell Moore’s
Adopted for Life
, there was Bishop W. C. Martin’s
Small Town, Big Miracle: How Love Came to the Least of These
(2007), Tom Davis’s
Fields of the Fatherless
(2008), Dan Cruver’s
Reclaiming Adoption
(2010), Cheryl Ellicott’s
This Means War: Equipping Christian Families for Fostercare or Adoption
(2010), Randy Bohlender’s
The Spirit of Adoption
(2010), and Tony Merida and Rick Morton’s
Orphanology
(2011). Scores of evangelical adoption or “orphan care” conferences were organized as well, passing orphan theology on to Christian activists.

Thousands of churches began to participate every November in “Orphan Sunday,” an annual multimedia event that was originally created in Zambia but grew massive in the United States. On Orphan Sunday pastors dedicate their sermons to orphan and adoption issues and many screen a special concert organized by the Christian Alliance. Tens of thousands of Christian parents and youth groups participate in the Alliance’s “Orphan’s Table” activity, preparing a simple meal of mail-order boiled grains, letting children eat for a night the type of food that orphanage children typically receive. Other churches host orphan-empathy slumber parties in suburban parking lots to help teens understand what homelessness feels like.

In 2009 Moore helped codify the growing movement for at least a portion of its advocates when he drafted and helped pass a Southern Baptist resolution, “On Adoption and Orphan Care.” This resolution called upon all sixteen million members of the denomination to become involved in
adoption in one form or another, whether by adopting children themselves, donating money for other families’ adoptions, or supporting the thousands of “adoption ministries” flourishing around the country.

The effect of all these developments on adoption agencies’ business was evident within a few years. In 2010 the mammoth evangelical adoption agency Bethany Christian Services—the largest adoption agency in the United States, secular or religious, with total revenues in 2011 of almost $75 million—announced that its overall adoption placements had spiked 26 percent during the first half of the year, its international adoption numbers had increased 66 percent over the same period in 2009, and general adoption inquiries were up a whopping 95 percent. They attributed the leaps largely to the mobilization of churches around adoption and Bethany’s own deepening partnerships with groups like the Alliance, Saddleback Church, and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). “We expect adoptions will continue to rise as new movements within the Christian community raise awareness and aid for the global orphan crisis,” announced Bethany president and CEO Bill Blacquiere, who is also a Christian Alliance board member. In 2010 the agency joined the SBC to begin subsidizing pastors’ adoption costs—the SBC through an endowment to provide $2,000 grants to adopting pastors and Bethany by granting $1,000 each to the first 25 that the SBC had approved, provided those pastors use Bethany for their adoption. In response, 140 Southern Baptist pastors and missionaries applied for the grants’ initial round—double what organizers had anticipated.

Since its founding in 2004 the Christian Alliance has grown into a powerful coalition of more than one hundred “formerly competitive” conservative Christian organizations, including parachurch groups like Focus on the Family and Campus Crusade for Christ, adoption agencies like Bethany, adoption and orphan-care ministries like Hope for Orphans, as well as a nationwide network of churches like Saddleback. Even UNICEF, so often the target of adoption advocates, has felt compelled to reach out to the growing coalition, hosting a closed discussion in 2010 with six key US evangelical adoption leaders in an apparent effort to find common ground.

The movement has had influence outside the church as well. Adoption has become a moral asset on both sides of the political aisle: a way for liberals to neutralize abortion debates by proposing adoption as a “common ground” compromise as well as a way for conservatives to demonstrate their compassionate side, making their antiabortion activism seem more truly “pro-life,” or “whole life,” as one Bethany staffer coined it.

In 2008 megachurch Pastor Joel Hunter, a moderate evangelical frequently courted by Democrats, was featured in the
Wall Street Journal
when he called on federal programs to reduce abortions by promoting adoption. The same year the
Journal
’s trend-watching “Taste” section advised that Senator John McCain highlight his adopted Bangladeshi daughter as a way to boost his appeal with evangelicals. The girl who had once been the target of an ugly smear campaign during the 2000 Republican primary, when the Bush camp spread rumors that she was McCain’s illegitimate black child, was now a political asset among the “values voters” flocking to adoption.

Two years later, at a 2010 conference at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, neo-Pentecostal leader Lou Engle, cofounder of the political prayer movement The Call, voiced a political goal as well, as investigative journalist Sarah Posner reported. “There is an explosion of adoption. If you talk to the millennials, they’re all thinking: care for the poor, adoption. It’s all in their DNA,” Engle said.

“If the megachurches of America did this,” he proposed, “[entering] the foster care system, we would be the answer, and we would get moral authority in this nation.”

MOORE AND OTHER
evangelical theologians are crafting an extensive orphan theology to undergird the movement, disseminating their ideas through Christian groups like the Family Research Council (FRC), Focus on the Family’s political advocacy arm. Beyond the ubiquitous citation of James 1:27, which calls caring for widows and orphans “pure religion,” is the notion of vertical and horizontal adoption: that Christians are adopted by God when they are born again (vertical adoption) and that they mirror this through their physical adoption of children on earth (horizontal adoption). Before adoption, all are equally orphans; afterward, all are Christian brothers. It’s an idea taken from the biblical letters of the Apostle Paul, who wrote about Christians receiving “adoption as sons” and becoming heirs to God. As the first tenet of the SBC’s 2009 adoption resolution put it: “In the gospel we have received the ‘Spirit of adoption’ whereby we are no longer spiritual orphans but are now beloved children of God and joint heirs with Christ.” Or as the FRC put it, introducing a 2012 public lecture by Moore, “Adoption is a special topic for Christians. All who have united their lives to Jesus have something at stake in the adoption issue precisely because Jesus does.” Adoption, advocates conclude, is the salvation message of the gospel itself, “the very heart of God.”

However, Moore, a rising star in the SBC and perhaps the foremost leader crafting the ideas behind the movement, warned that the movement must maintain a balance between theology and practice. Without a theological grounding, he wrote, the adoption cause risks becoming “like one more cause wristband for compassionate conservative evangelicals to wear until the trend dies down.” And without a practical, boots-on-the-ground expression of that theology, he warned, “the doctrine of adoption too easily becomes mere metaphor, just another way to say ‘saved.’”

But in many ways, it has become a way to say saved, and Moore’s book in effect popularized the evangelical metaphor—a long-standing tradition in some denominations, but new to others—that Christians are adoptees of God. As C. J. Mahaney, a prominent evangelical pastor, asserted in the preface to Moore’s book: “I was adopted when I was eighteen years old. I wasn’t an orphan, the way most people think of that term. . . . But I was in a condition far more serious: I was a stranger to the family of God.”

That’s also the message of Dan Cruver’s contribution to the movement library,
Reclaiming Adoption: Missional Living Through the Rediscovery of Abba Father
. In it Cruver argues that vertical adoption is just shorthand for believers’ union with Christ. It’s a deceptively simple argument, but in reviewing
Reclaiming Adoption,
conservative Biola University theologian Fred Sanders suggested that the ideas Cruver and his peers are exploring “may have the momentum to reinvigorate evangelical systematic theology.” This could push back against “an uncommonly mushy doctrine of God’s universal fatherhood,” which Sanders sees in liberal churches, with a more discriminating theology. The idea of fatherhood is a recurring theme in the movement’s repeated references to Abba, or father, as in a special 2010
Christianity Today
adoption issue, “Abba Changes Everything: Why Every Christian Is Called to Rescue Orphans,” or in the hypnotic chorus of the 2010 Christian Alliance Summit theme song, in which a worship leader led the conference in repeating, “Abba, I belong to you, I belong to you, Abba, Father, God.” The thrust of orphan theology is a reorientation or clarification of the idea—the “uncommonly mushy idea,” as Sanders harrumphed—that all people are children of God, made in His image. Instead of this poetic standby, Sanders suggests that orphan theology enforces a higher standard, that only proper believers are actually God’s children—adopted into the family when they are born again. If so, then adoption movement theologians are making the question of spiritual salvation inextricable from the worldly efforts of the evangelical adoption movement. Christian adopters are in this light the image of God, assuming His role to the children they adopt, with no distinction between taking a child in and
saving her soul, the two a concurrent act. As Rick Warren explained, “What God does to us spiritually, He expects us to do to orphans physically: be born again and adopted.”

It’s an issue that’s close to home for Moore. In 2002 he adopted two boys from what he describes as deplorable orphanage conditions in a mining town in Russia. The infant boys came from a country where some orphanages live up to the nightmare images that emerged from Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, when Romanian children were found dumped in emotionally sterile and physically squalid warehouses, neglected to the point of psychosis. Moore’s experience meeting and later returning to pick up his sons in Russia seemed to shake him deeply. He wrote in
Adopted for Life
that adoption is on the one hand gospel, part of Christians’ mission and inheritance from God, and on the other hand “war,” a spiritual battle against unseen, evil forces (or “satanic powers,” in the SBC resolution) that would obstruct the salvation of children like his, who are born into original sin and saved only by their adoption by God. (“Our birth father has fangs,” Moore wrote. “And left to ourselves, we’ll show ourselves to be as serpentine as he is.”)

When Moore left his boys in the Russian orphanage to return home until the adoption paperwork was completed, he laid his hand on their heads in their cribs and quoted Scripture, John 14:18, when Jesus tells his disciples: “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” He said the words came to him instinctively, that he hadn’t intended to channel Christ. But to those reading about Moore’s journey, his words weren’t evidence of a savior complex; they were a roadmap.

WITH SO MUCH EMPHASIS
on the parallels between saving children through adoption and saving souls through conversion, it’s not surprising to find that the adoption cause has developed an acute missionary angle. In Moore’s own church in Kentucky the emphasis is underscored by a matching set of full-wall world maps that depict the locations both of where the congregation sponsors missionaries and of where the adopted children in the congregation have come from, a gesture of equivalence that Moore believes, “signals to the congregation that adoption is a Great Commission activity.” Dan Cruver is even blunter, writing in
Reclaiming Adoption
that “the
ultimate
purpose of human adoption by Christians, therefore, is not to give orphans parents, as important as that is. It is to place them in a Christian home that they might be positioned to receive the gospel.”

Despite these overt calls to evangelize children, advocates like Moore, Cruver, and Medefind downplay the notion that invoking the Great Commission makes adoption a means of proselytizing. “If all we are doing in orphan care is taking children who are starving and abused and Christless and turning them into middle-class American evangelicals,” Moore warned in one talk, “God help us.” Instead, he elaborated to me, the Great Commission should be interpreted as Christians living in service to their neighbors and the world, spreading Christ’s love by offering practical assistance.