The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (14 page)

In 2012 Medefind told me he agreed that the movement had engaged in misleading statistics. In response, that July he released a white paper from the Christian Alliance for Orphans discussing how the numbers should be used in the future. In it Medefind warned that the statistics and even the term “orphan” were problematic, “reveal[ing] nothing about the distinct needs of individual children” or potentially misguiding churches, ministries, and everyday Christians seeking a good way to take action.

But other advocates have little use for clarification. Dr. Jane Aronson, a pediatrician whose work with adoptees has earned her the nickname “The Orphan Doctor,” is also the founder and CEO of Worldwide Orphans Foundation, an active advocacy organization that frequently pairs with celebrities to spread awareness of the orphan crisis. She dismissed a question about the numbers in a letter to the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, writing in response to an article by journalist E. J. Graff. “As
for how many, I am, frankly, impatient with this question,” Aronson wrote. “There are millions—probably hundreds of millions—of children living in this world without parental or familial care. Isn’t that enough to know?”

For many followers of the movement that claim is more than enough. Online, Christian adoption and orphan-care advocates blog in numbers too great to follow about their family’s “adoption journey,” under titles like “Redeeming Orphans,” “Adopting God’s Dreams,” “Addicted to Adoption,” “We Have Room,” “Throwing Starfish,” or “Orphan’s Ticket Home.” Some indicate the range of countries evangelicals are adopting from: “Digging a Hole to China,” “Blessings from Ethiopia,” or, more recently, “Countdown to Congo.” In this wide community enthusiasm for the movement is overwhelming. “Am I Showing Yet?” asked one prospective adoptive parent, describing her “adoption pregnancy.” Another made an “ultrasound” image out of a map of China. Another blogged about a gap in the family portrait she had taken with her six children: an empty space that indicated there was another member of their family out there, waiting to be found. “I cannot get past that hole,” she wrote. “But who? From where?” One ministry simply declared, “Adoption is the new pregnant.”

Bloggers and readers raise money for their adoptions by selling custom T-shirts and soliciting donations “to help take one orphan out of the count by Orphan Sunday” or to “Bring an orphan home TODAY!!!” Many encourage each other as they go through the stressful international adoption process—often taking as long as two to three years to process paperwork and receive all approvals. Many write about orphans as a corporate entity: the plight of “the Orphan,” as in, “the poor.”

They defend each other and the cause. One Christian blogging couple was criticized for their story about destroying the Buddhist charm their adopted son was given as a memento from his orphanage caregivers. They responded by calling their critics an “orphan-hate group.” Another used the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr. Day to complain about growing “intolerance” among global development organizations for the viewpoint that international adoption is a valid solution to the orphan crisis.

Offline, members of the adoption community, hoping to spread the movement at a grassroots level, gather at workshops for adoptive mothers, family adoption camps, and small-scale meet-ups put on by groups like Together for Adoption. Some even sign up for lifestyle options like the annual Ukrainian orphan missions cruise arranged by HopeHouse International, a Franklin, Tennessee, ministry that takes up to fifty US Christians on a river cruise of ten orphanages along the Dnipro River.

The momentum feeds on itself. In a Tuscaloosa, Alabama, church, fourteen families adopted simultaneously and formed a church adoption support group. One parent explained to the
Tuscaloosa News
, “It wasn’t like a bunch of us got together and said ‘Let’s all adopt.’” Instead, she suggested, “I strongly believe it’s the Holy Spirit working.” It was a demonstration of the “contagious” adoption culture that movement leaders want to foster, as more and more Christians begin to feel “burdened” to bring home an orphan after reading or hearing about others’ adoptions. Even Justin Bieber, the teen pop icon who has traded on his mostly wholesome Christian image, announced in 2010 that he hoped to travel to Romania to “show love to orphans.”

A common savior narrative emerged on the blogs. Some parents seemed almost to fetishize the disparity between themselves and the children they sought to adopt. As one blogger wrote, “No one can get any poorer than our Bethie is. . . . We, by contrast, have all the power in the world.” That focus seemed to slide from acknowledging poor children’s struggles to denigrating kids the adoption movement kept referring to as “the least of these,” as when another adoptive mother to six described herself as “a dumpster diving orphan lunatic” who was still “afflicted with my Orphan Obsession” after adopting four kids and birthing two. “I am already part of a tribe of women that by much of the world’s standards have a disorder,” she wrote. “We wake up at night with visions of orphans going through our heads” and are fixated, she continued, on “match-making” their friends with orphans they had seen pictures of online. “Like the woman diving headfirst for the day old bread and barely ripe red bell peppers we dream and obsess over capturing and saving human treasures from being thrust into a decaying dump where they will be lost forever.”

SOMETIMES THE MOVEMENT’S
focus on American Christians saving developing nations’ orphans leads followers to extremes. In 2011 Katie Davis, a twenty-three-year old evangelical homecoming queen from the rich Nashville suburb of Brentwood, published an “as-told-to” memoir,
Kisses from Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption
, that detailed her move to Uganda after high school and her “adoption” of fourteen girls in the community where she volunteered—more than a dozen children for whom she has become legal guardian. Some of the girls aren’t much younger than she is, making her motherhood of some of the children a theoretical question. On the cover is a picture of Davis, a pretty, young brunette, in a gray T-shirt, walking through a rural Ugandan
village while thronged by smiling black girls with shaved heads, as deep-red dirt roads stretch behind them.

The book, praised by movement leaders like Jedd Medefind and Dan Cruver, is filled with the ostentatious modesty Christian pop literature often stumbles into, a cover-to-cover humblebrag. “I have absolutely no desire to write a book about myself,” Davis nonetheless wrote. “This is a book about a Christ who is alive today and not only knows but cares about every hair on my head.”

That tone changes, however, when she describes meeting the orphanage children in Uganda. Like the blogger above who compared adoptees to stale bread, Davis was acutely aware of her wards’ destitution even as she strained to insist that she saw them through Christ’s eyes:

I think many people would have looked at them and seen only their filthy clothes, the ringworm on their heads, or the mucus that ended up in a crust around their nostrils. . . . I didn’t see these things. The truth is, I saw myself in those little faces. I looked at them and felt this love that was unimaginable and knew that this is the way God sees me . . . small and dirty at His feet, and He who sits so high chooses to commune with me, to love me anyway. He blinds Himself to my sin and my filth. . . . I just sat right down on that cold, hard floor and snuggled my nose into their dirty necks and kissed their funguscovered heads and didn’t even see it. I was
in love.

She rhapsodized about the children’s large brown eyes, their chocolate-colored and ebony skin. She reveled in the fact of her “beautifully filthy” daughters, and she saw Jesus in the faces of her Ugandan neighbors, whom she believed were so desperately poor that they had become spiritually rich—rich enough to be satisfied with their lot. It’s a romanticization of developing nations’ poverty that, although it may be forgivable in the young, is endemic to the larger movement as well: praising the holy poor and implicitly praising oneself for entering their world. On more than one occasion Davis describes how recipients of her charity fell to their knees and reached out to hold a piece of her clothing. And as a crowning gesture of humility, after attesting that God doesn’t see skin color, Davis declares, “in heaven I am going to be black; I have already asked God for it.”

One of the most obvious undercurrents to the Christian adoption movement is the massive rise in transracial adoptions in white, evangelical communities, most conspicuously to churches in the South. Becca
McBride, a political science scholar and evangelical from the Nashville area who is studying the movement from the inside, said the viral effect of adoption demonstrated in her own church (home church to Steven Curtis Chapman) and in a number of other central Tennessee congregations has led to “a sort of wild side effect”: the integration of churches solely through white members’ adopted children of color. McBride told me that in one neighboring church in Brentwood, the same suburb Katie Davis hails from and the proposed location of the Christian Alliance’s 2013 summit, the “bottom-up” growth of an orphan-care ministry in the church started after a few people adopted. Within five years fifteen or twenty more families had adopted, almost all from African countries, bringing a sudden racial diversification to the church. “The diversity that exists in many churches is imported diversity,” McBride noted. “It’s not because there are a lot of black families in our town, but because people have adopted black children.”

But the distinction McBride recognizes—that adopting children of color into an otherwise white congregation is different from a locally integrated church, where adults are meeting each other on equal footing—seems lost on many international adoption advocates. In one session at the Christian Alliance for Orphans Summit at Saddleback, The ABBA Fund’s Jason Kovacs told the audience enthusiastically, “God is the first transracial adoptive dad, did you know that?” repeating a common refrain in the movement that, in adoption, as in the gospel, there is “no Greek, no Jew” but only people who have joined God’s family. “The world’s largest transracial adoptive community is going to assemble in heaven,” Kovacs added, beaming.

Rick Warren echoed him, criticizing people who don’t adopt because of “pride of race.” “God could not care less about human bloodlines,” Warren said. “You’d better thank God that He isn’t interested in bloodlines, because you couldn’t get saved, because you’re not a Jew, and they’re the chosen people and we’re not. . . . We have been grafted in—adopted into the family.”

I had heard this message before. On a Friday night in late February 2010, Russell Moore preached an electric message in the campus chapel at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. It was the opening night of the “Adopting for Life” conference, a weekend meeting convened around the message of Moore’s book. There, on a quiet campus with its own Christian bookstore and formalwear shop, a charismatic Moore wore jeans and a sports jacket, joking in a cool Mississippi drawl about Johnny Cash and Viagra and teasing the earnest Christian
singer-songwriter serving as conference worship leader over his taste in music. An audience of around six hundred young Christians, overwhelmingly white and middle class, laughed comfortably—a different generation from the buttoned-down Baptists of yesteryear. Moore had a modern message to match: denouncing evangelicals’ historical antipathy to civil rights and the evangelical churches of his parents’ era that had turned a blind eye to racism while focusing on “the fundamentals” of the faith.

“There was a time when a group of people could stand around a room like this, maybe even this room,” Moore preached, “and say, ‘We’re not going to worry about civil rights because we are going to simply preach Christ and Him crucified. We’re going to focus on the gospel.’ . . . When in reality, if you are not standing up and saying to people convinced they are superior to other people by virtue of the color of their skin, then you are sinners in need of a common salvation through a common savior. You are not preaching the gospel.” The same spiritual call that should have compelled Southern Baptists to support civil rights, Moore said, commands the contemporary church to get involved in the orphan crisis. Around the chapel audience members clad in fleece jackets and denim, efficiently tending to babies in the back pews, offered sober Amens.

It’s a message that cuts close to home in the SBC, a denomination founded in 1845 in defense of slavery, when the Southern Baptists split from the abolitionist Baptists of the north. After the Civil War and for much of the twentieth century the SBC was a home for white supremacist thought, but for the last two decades the SBC, now the largest Protestant denomination in the United States and the second-largest Christian denomination after Catholicism, has been trying to rehabilitate its image. In 1995 it issued an apology for its historic support of slavery and segregation, and a number of resolutions since then have called for individual churches to increase black membership and leadership. In 2012 they even approved a voluntary name change for churches that want to distance themselves from the SBC’s legacy of racism—from Southern Baptists to Great Commission Baptists. At the same annual convention New Orleans Pastor Reverend Fred Luter Jr. made history when he became the denomination’s first black president.

On that Friday night in February 2010 Moore seemed to have the same goal in mind. “One of the reasons that the civil rights movement is a shame on evangelical churches,” he preached in Louisville, “is because the civil rights movement had to stand and speak to people who claimed to believe in inerrant bibles and say, ‘You are hypocrites. You do not believe
what you say you believe, because if you believe that all of humanity comes from one blood, as you so vehemently say you believe, then how in the world could you claim to own another being?’”

In the reserved but emotional atmosphere of the seminary chapel, Moore’s message seemed clear: evangelicals have a second chance to get it right—and in a specific way: by throwing themselves into an adoption movement that preaches a message of “one blood” under a God who doesn’t see race, just Christians adopted into a “common culture.” Moore wasn’t the only one to see the opportunity. As Rick Morton, Moore’s onetime SBC seminary colleague, wrote in
Orphanology: Awakening to Gospel-Centered Adoption and Orphan Care
, the orphan crisis “affords the church a tangible opportunity to live out a God-based ethic of racial relationships and to engage in racial reconciliation to its utmost.”