The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (9 page)

As he drove, Eric grew intent as he continued talking. Before he became a pastor, both he and Wendy had spent years in a spiritual wilderness, “pagans in the best sense,” he said with a nostalgic sigh, living wild lives, separate from God. The minivan climbed over eighty miles per hour on the dark highway, and as he cornered a bend too fast, he grinned and deadpanned, “We’re about to find out if we were right about the whole Jesus thing!”

He isn’t sure about all the aspects of BridgeStone’s ministry. He does realize that the $20,000 spent just on airfare for every group that comes to BridgeStone could probably make a larger impact in Ukraine—when he’s gone there, Ukrainian officials have told him as much. However, he’s also wary of critics who condemn a mission like this without doing anything themselves. But on the larger picture Eric has no doubts. “The Bible really talks about how we’re adopted as sons because we’re grafted in [to God’s family] after we were separated because of our sin and our selfish nature,” he said. “All we’ve ever done is sin and transgress the
things He really wanted us to be, and He still loves us. The love of the father is unconditional.”

When he talks to people about adoption, he tells them what he thinks is true: Christians aren’t just called to adoption; they are commanded to it. Christians who don’t get that, he began to reflect, and then stifled himself—he doesn’t want to say “bad Christians.” He thinks for a minute and starts again: “We seem to be known for everything but how we love.”

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Interestingly, the ideological battle at stake in this mission has carried over even to how it is named. Many US advocates refer to the mission as “Operation Pedro Pan” to depict it as a local Cuban initiative to send their children out of harm’s way, while many Cubans refer to it as “Operation Peter Pan” to underscore what they see as its imperialistic roots in the United States.

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“Voluntourism” has been criticized in recent years for doing more harm than good. A 2010 report by the Human Sciences Research Council on AIDS orphan tourism in Southern Africa found that global trends of voluntourism often centered around orphanages, with wealthy Westerners paying to spend time on their vacations or mission trips playing with institutionalized children. Too often, wrote report coauthors Linda Richter and Amy Norman, the emotional needs of the tourists are the key focus of these trips, as visitors seek personal fulfillment by forging immediate emotional connections with orphanage children. But after the tourists leave, the children suffer yet another abandonment, leading to a pattern of intense connection and loss that is detrimental to their emotional well-being and development.

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Restaveks are children sent to live as unpaid domestics for relatives or other families.

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O’Brien seems to have become a believer in at least one sense, repeating in an essay on
CNN.com
a motivational story that has been widely adapted as the driving parable in the Christian adoption movement: the “starfish story.” This tale tells of a young boy rescuing a coastline of beached starfish by throwing them back in the water, one at a time, when a naysaying older man scoffs that he can never save them all. “It matters to the one,” the boy replies in a sentiment that has become the anthem of the movement.

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In 1993 fifty-four Ukrainian children hosted by Christian families in the Chicago area were kept by their US hosts, who had been incorrectly told the children were all available for adoption. The incident led to international diplomatic tensions.

CHAPTER 2

The Touchable Gospel

O
n a rainy morning in May 2012, as I crossed the university-sized campus of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, the voice of Georgia Pastor Crawford Loritts boomed from the ground, turning the damp, empty walkways into an open-air chapel, his sermon piped through concrete speakers shaped like rocks and nestled at the base of palm trees. The Christian orphan-care and adoption movement, Loritts said, is not a passing fad like other social justice causes in the church’s past. The movement cannot be allowed to become a seasonal attraction, rising and fading like a style of clothing, because adoption and orphan care is more than a cause. For many it has become the image of the gospel itself.

Loritts, a longtime staffer for Campus Crusade for Christ and the senior pastor of a megachurch outside Atlanta, was addressing the eighth annual summit of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, the hub and umbrella organization of the burgeoning orphan-care and adoption movement. The claims both Tom Benz and Laura Silsby made about being called by God to rescue orphans don’t sound out of place in evangelical circles. There, it’s hard to overstate the recent ubiquity of adoption and orphan talk, which is guided by several main convictions: that adoption mirrors Christian salvation; that it is an essential part of antiabortion politics; and that it constitutes a means of fulfilling the Great Commission—the biblical mandate, found most notably in Matthew 28:16–20, that Christians spread the gospel.

Like anyone else, church people are susceptible to trends and causes that pass in and out of fashion. These days, perhaps even more so than their secular counterparts. Just before I had turned onto the church compound, where Portola Parkway intersects Saddleback’s “Purpose Drive,” a campus road named for Pastor Rick Warren’s best-selling book,
The Purpose Driven Life,
I spotted a weather-beaten sticker for “KONY 2012,” the momentarily sensational campaign to marshal public support for capturing the brutal warlord Joseph Kony who, for roughly two decades, had forced Ugandan youth to become child soldiers in his Lord’s Resistance Army. The sticker clung to a pole in the median, but the KONY campaign was all but forgotten two months after the instant viral success of its March 2012 video—a short, well-produced documentary that asked teens to spread the word about Uganda’s child soldiers through stickers, Facebook updates, and rubber wristbands.

The impassioned KONY 2012 movement fizzled out almost as quickly as it had ignited, due in part to accusations that the movie (which turned out to be made by young evangelical activists from nearby San Diego, who had downplayed their faith to attract a wider audience) was misleading naive US youth about the facts on the ground in Uganda.
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Other critics charged that the movie’s call to action was ineffective and unethical, encouraging supporters to believe that buying branded merchandise and sharing the video with friends would actually help lead to Kony’s capture. In truth Kony had long since decamped to plague other countries, and these days the surviving population in northern Uganda faces more pedestrian development challenges, issues that do not lend themselves as easily to viral Facebook videos.

But if the Christian adoption and orphan-care movement has become a fad, it’s not one in danger of fading yet. Inside Saddleback’s main worship center—just one of nearly twenty buildings on campus—an estimated two thousand people gathered for the Christian Alliance for Orphans Summit. Many were church pastors and adoption ministry leaders, and the 2012 summit had drawn more people than ever before, up from thirteen hundred in 2010 and thirty-eight at the Alliance’s first meeting in 2004.

“This is the beginning of the end,” Saddleback Pastor Rick Warren, a portly man in his late fifties who first gained fame for his Hawaiian shirt collection, told the crowd as he opened the summit. “It’s the end of orphans in the world.” The next day the audience cheered when Warren declared the route he envisioned for eradicating orphanhood: “When I say ‘orphan care,’” he boomed, “it’s adoption first, second, and last.” After several years of high-profile scandals around international adoption, it was a strong affirmation of the continuing central role adoption plays in the movement.

Warren noted the concerted effort to promote adoption within Saddleback’s own congregation. “Our initial goal was to have one thousand families—five hundred to adopt internationally and five hundred to adopt nationally. We’ve only been doing it a few years, and we’re already over the five hundred mark,” he said to applause. On stage Warren was framed by several hanging panels printed with Bible verses, including James 1:27, which states that helping widows and orphans is “pure religion.” An unadorned wooden cross was hung at stage right in the customary, bloodless style of American megachurches, a lonely nod to simplicity among the church’s elaborate array of amenities. Saddleback, one of the largest churches in America, has a weekly attendance of around twenty thousand people, and besides its high-tech worship hall, fitted with multiple cameras and an advanced video production booth set amid the ocean of seats, the campus includes four restaurants and cafes, two baptism pools, a movie theater, a three-wing children’s complex as large as an elementary school, auxiliary adult classrooms, basketball and beach volleyball courts, and a skate park, not to mention the freestanding world headquarters for Saddleback’s global-development arm. A full band setup for the worship team waited at stage left, and on the floor below it stood twelve easels displaying portraits of children of diverse racial backgrounds: orphans of the world, in need of Christian care.

Sitting in the large audience or standing to the side of the seats by the room’s floor-to-ceiling wall of windows were scores of young, white parents who had taken part in this mission. They jogged black babies in Ergos and slings, the infants’ hair braided competently or left natural. The men wore cause-related T-shirts and jeans. The women were variously in heels and $100 tans—classic Orange County style—or shredded jeans and camisoles hanging off tattooed shoulders. Youth volunteers scurried in packs, clad in oversized blue T-shirts that read, “ORPHAN,” and from various vantage points in the aisles and risers of the worship hall video cameras streamed Warren’s message out to many thousands more.

Together, Warren, his wife, Kay, and Saddleback Church are among the vanguard of what has become a national movement to end the “orphan crisis,” one child at a time, while simultaneously exposing adoptees to Christianity. “If just one church in every four churches got one family to adopt, there would be no more orphans in America,” Warren proposed. His Saddleback staff, some of whom have become national leaders in the movement, have an even larger equation in mind. As Elizabeth Styffe, director of Saddleback’s Global Orphan Care Initiative, put it, “There are 163 million orphans [globally], but there are two billion people in the world who call themselves Christians. If you do the math, this is doable in our generation.”

Although the Southern Baptist Convention has dominated the theological direction of the Christian adoption cause to date, and Saddleback is a Southern Baptist church, the movement represented at the summit cuts across evangelical distinctions. All groups and denominations, from Methodists to charismatic Christians to parachurch groups to homeschoolers, take up the mantle in their own way. Individual ministries and grant makers abound, with names like Redeeming Orphans, Orphan’s Ransom, or The ABBA Fund, which, like many evangelical adoption organizations, references the Bible’s Aramaic name for father. The ministries help born-again Christians pay the “ransom” of $20,000 to $35,000 or more in adoption fees by spreading the cost among the rest of their church or providing no-interest loans.

At the local level churches report a “contagious” spread of “adoption culture” that inspires fellow congregants to adopt, with even smaller congregations witnessing as many as one hundred adoptions in just a few years. Often parents adopt multiple children, and many adoptive families swell to eight or ten kids or more. The growth of adoption in churches is so rapid that it’s led some Christian leaders to muse that church planters—Christians who help establish new, franchise-like branches of a church community—could build congregations this way.

The viral effect is intentional. Addressing an audience at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2010, The ABBA Fund’s director of ministry development, Jason Kovacs, had counseled the crowd that the key to building a church-wide “adoption culture” is to “Get as many people in the church to adopt, and adopt as many kids as you can.” He added that they should also “Pray that your pastor will adopt,” noting the precedent a pastor can set.

One result has been the creation of “rainbow congregations” across the country, such as Louisville’s Highview Baptist, where movement
leader Russell Moore, author of the 2009 book
Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches
and a leading Southern Baptist theologian, is a preaching pastor. There, with the help of an active adoption ministry, members of the church have adopted some 140 children into the congregation. At a ceremony to celebrate them, Moore recalled, Highview’s many adoptees toddled onto the stage with flags from their home countries. What brought Moore to tears was realizing that “most of the kids didn’t recognize the flags [they were holding], but they all knew ‘Jesus Loves Me.’”

Between expert-level pre-conference meetings and two days of main conference events, the May 2012 Alliance Summit stretched across half a week. The speaker list was a who’s who of the Christian adoption movement. There was Russell Moore and Jason Kovacs; Dan Cruver, co-founder of the movement group Together for Adoption; Karyn Purvis, an attachment specialist from the TCU Institute of Child Development who’s been called “the hurt child whisperer”; and Steven Curtis Chapman, the Christian contemporary music star and founder of the adoption ministry Show Hope, which gives grants of up to $7,000 for Christian families who want to adopt.

Nearly one hundred breakout sessions detailed many aspects of “orphan care,” a broad spectrum of advocacy including adoption, child sponsorship, and promoting domestic adoption in developing countries. Attendees learned about starting adoption ministries in their home churches, using orphan care to reach the world’s unsaved populations, and lobbying primers on important adoption legislation. At lunchtime a Christian singer-songwriter named Kristin Orphan—not herself an orphan, but an adoptive mother who founded the Finally Home Foundation—sang adoption-themed songs while young adoptees ran around in gauzy, traditional Ethiopian dress and adults browsed rows of exhibition booths, picking up adoption agency swag and Third World gifts: paper-bead necklaces, African coffee, and plush black baby dolls wearing white gossamer clothes. “It’s like a day at the outlets,” a pair of women in their thirties wearing tall heels told me as they lugged overstuffed conference bags, emblazoned with agency logos, back to their car.