The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (15 page)

But practically speaking that means the SBC is addressing its racism most prominently not by talking to black adults, who may have endured the effects of the church’s institutional bias, or by making its congregations more appealing to people of color but instead by adopting children from other races and cultures—frequently, these days, from Africa. For Moore, who wrote dismissively about multicultural critiques of adoption, this is not a problem. “That’s adoption,” he wrote, describing his own approach of raising his adopted Russian sons to recognize that their heritage is no longer Russian but now Mississippian, trading Dostoevsky for Faulkner, borscht for red beans and rice. “We’re part of a brand-new family, a new tribe, with a new story, a new identity.”

The same idealism has undergirded interracial adoption since the 1970s, when white liberals were eager to have their families reflect their integrationist principles. “In the late 1960s,” a UNICEF report on international adoption noted, “adoption became tinged with the ideology of ‘solidarity with the Third World’ then current in industrialized countries, implying practical manifestations of sharing responsibility for the burden facing the newly decolonized nations.” By the ’70s adoption had begun to resemble “mass exportations” of children, and agencies had arisen to broker the transactions. In response, leaders from foreign nations described the export of their children as a tragedy. And in 1972 the Association of Black Social Workers famously declared that emerging trends of interracial adoption of black children by white parents seemed more like theft than solidarity, and that white families, blind to the variety of oppressions nonwhite people face, could not adequately prepare black children to live in a racist world.

The statement was a foundational declaration in the competing narratives around adoption: as either rescue or kidnapping. “There was this fledgling attempt to make interracial adoption a good thing in the public view,” recalls historian Karen Dubinsky, author of
Babies Without Borders
, “with white liberals saying that integrating our families is making our families look like how we want the world to look. When all of a sudden these cranky black social workers say, ‘Stop stealing our children.’ That’s the way the history has tended to be remembered: that ‘kidnapping’ came along and spoiled all the fun.”

Today’s Christian adoption movement is meeting the same critique that secular, liberal interracial adoption met years ago: that rescuing children through adoption can leave them unrooted and estranged, caught between dueling identities and never quite at home. Lisa Marie Rollins, a performance artist, academic, and a transracial adoptee with Filipino and African American birth parents, was raised by conservative white evangelicals in Tacoma, Washington and experienced the disconnect that the black social workers had warned against. “My parents didn’t have a language for racism,” she said, recalling how her own adoption paperwork had obscured her black heritage, passing her off as part Mexican instead, leading her well-meaning parents to assure her that “You’re not really black” when Rollins encountered prejudice. It’s an attitude that Rollins calls a “veil of whiteness,” which often lasts only until children grow into adolescence and begin to encounter for themselves America’s systemic hostility toward people of color. In this context Russell Moore’s quip about swapping his children’s borscht for fried catfish seems not so much amusing as an erasure of heritage, not to mention a more seamless assimilation—of white adoptees blending into another white culture—than that which is available to adoptees of color. In any case, most adoptees these days aren’t trading in their borscht but rather their fufu, injera, and rice—as well as the cultures behind these staples, each already long marginalized in a world dominated by the West.

Forty years later the same debate continues, as the evangelical adoption movement follows in the footsteps of its secular forerunners in attempting to deal with the conflicts inherent to cross-cultural adoption. Despite the overt racism present in some threads of US conservatism, most mainstream evangelical churches are eager to embrace diversity. In these churches there is often a concerted “color-blind” rhetoric that could put liberal college campuses of the 1990s to the test. However, the postracial ideal of colorblindness that originated with white liberals has largely
been discredited—research has found that those claiming to “not see race” are more likely to engage in casual racism—in favor of recognizing structural racism and focusing strongly on how people’s race affects their experiences and privilege. (To that point, evangelicals claiming “colorblindness” are equally vulnerable to overlooking obvious offenses, as in the case of one white adoption agency director, Merrily Ripley of Adoption Advocates International, a Christian mother of eighteen who runs a side business selling “golliwogs,” black-skinned fabric dolls with exaggerated racial features in the minstrel tradition.)

But when adoptees or others raise questions about the new mass adoption of black children into white churches that, just a generation ago, defended segregation, many Christian advocates dismiss them as racists in their own right. In Russell Moore’s words, such critics are “[George] Wallace’s progressive heirs . . . standing in the orphanage door.”

Other advocates simply dismiss questions of cultural sensitivity out of hand, like Tony Merida, coauthor with Rick Morton of
Orphanology
, who warns adoptive parents to expect opposition to their mission and implores them to not let themselves be swayed. “As our level of obedience to God increases,” Morton explains, “so will the attack of the enemy.”

The vision of adoption as a stepping stone to racial reconciliation goes beyond the SBC. In other churches, as in Moore’s vision, adoption fills a multipurpose agenda: addressing race, abortion, evangelizing, and the need for Christians to do good works. In late April 2010, at Liberty University—a school founded by segregation defender Jerry Falwell—neo-Pentecostal “prayer warrior” Lou Engle, the preacher who described adoption as the ticket to gaining moral authority, led a group of charismatic Christians in a call for racial diversity at the Freedom Federation Summit. Engle brought on stage Bishop W. C. Martin, a white-haired African American pastor from a Texas hamlet called Possum Trot. Starting in the late nineties, Martin’s church of two hundred members had followed the pastor and his wife in adopting seventy-two children out of foster care after Martin began preaching regular sermons that “God commands us to take care of the orphans,” a story told in Martin’s 2007 book,
Small Town, Big Miracle,
published by Focus on the Family press.

On stage in Lynchburg, Engle, a thin, mustached man whose weathered face crinkles easily to tearful exhortation, beseeched Martin “to pray right now all across this way for the most outrageous adoption movement to be released through the church.” Martin took a microphone and belted out a prayer to the low throb of a bass guitar. A white crowd swayed,
hands held aloft, as Engle directed them to break down into small groups to pray. “We’re not starting with ending abortion. We’re starting with praying to God for crisis pregnancy centers, pregnant mother’s homes, and an adoption movement that will sweep the nation that the church leads to greater history. . . . Go ahead, pray to God. You’re moving heaven tonight.”

______________

*
As the criticism mounted, the activist who directed the documentary had a public breakdown and was hospitalized, further harming the film’s credibility, if unfairly.

CHAPTER 3

Suffering Is Part of the Plan

W
ith adoption becoming a cause on so many levels—tapped to solve the complicated questions of global poverty and child care, make restitution for racism, and give evangelicals a more positive way to express their antiabortion values—it was easy to miss an elemental problem: how the very language of the Christian adoption movement reinforces a claim of predestination, thereby aligning prospective adopters’ desires with the will of God. The way Christians spoke about adoption began to justify the tragedy at its root. One ubiquitous figure of speech in adoption-land, that parents have “found” their children—meaning they were struck by a sense that a particular child they saw a picture of was “meant to be” their son or daughter—assumed a literal interpretation, as though the children had been misplaced in another family. Matthew Hutson, author of the 2012 book
The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane,
diagnosed a form of “magical thinking” common to adoptive parents who felt so strong a connection to their adopted children that it feels “as if the universe conspired to make it happen.” Hutson labeled this expression of magical thinking benevolent—the seemingly harmless idea that, as one recent adoption memoir put it,
Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other
. But in the Christian adoption movement that sort of comforting declaration, that adoptive families come to love their adopted children so deeply as to make the relationship seem fated, was becoming a source of theological assurance for adults who might otherwise question how adoption creates families in the wake of tremendous loss.

As the Heart for the Fatherless Ministry put it, adoption is “a costly, complex, emotional journey in which a child whom God has meant for a particular family from before the foundation of the world comes home.” God, the author continued, “intended adopted children to be in the family that adopts them the same as children who come biologically.” Many in the Christian adoption movement accept this argument so unquestioningly that they wrote about the children they were hoping to adopt as though the adoption was divinely scripted.

The claim to predestination is an unwitting description of one of the most significant problems with both domestic and international adoption: the enthusiasm of would-be parents for adoptable children has become a demand in search of a supply, a demand met by an industry that sometimes separates willing biological parents from their offspring, artificially creating “orphans” for adoptive parents to take in. That magical thinking has become so routine that an infant daughter requested by American parents can be labeled an “orphan” even as she kicks in her mother’s womb. Most often these days this supply is found in the world’s developing nations, but the story of the modern Christian adoption movement starts much closer to home.

IN JANUARY 2000
Reanne Mosley entered the New Beginnings Home for unwed mothers in Puyallup, Washington, ten miles southeast of Tacoma. At the time Mosley was nineteen and seven months pregnant, and her parents sought to distance her from the boyfriend who had impregnated her.

In a photograph from a scrapbook she began compiling while she was there, Reanne sits in an armchair reading a book on her first day at the home. She smiles widely at the camera, a pretty girl with thick, curly brown hair and a scrubbed complexion. Two months later, hugely pregnant, she posed with her mother the day before she gave birth. “I look sad,” she said, studying the scrapbook, each page ornately decorated with gingham wrapping paper background and cutouts of Christmas trees and presents to mark holidays and special occasions. There is neat cursive text written in a square border around pictures of the son she gave birth to, repeating what the home told her he would be if she gave him up for adoption: the gift of life, “A Gift from God.”

When I finally met Reanne in person in May 2012, after several years of phone calls and correspondence, the son she had had while at New Beginnings—and who had been adopted the next day—had recently turned twelve. Though Reanne, now a thirty-two-year-old hair stylist living in
southern California, has since gotten married to a gentle and good-looking man named Josh and had two more children—aged seven and three, with a third on the way—she still counts her life by years out from that loss.

We met at a restaurant in an upscale outdoor mall in Irvine, California, so Reanne could talk out of earshot of her children, whom she feels are still too young to be told they have another brother. She had driven an hour from her home in Temecula, a handsome two-story stucco in a city of endless subdivisions ringed by the Santa Ana Mountains and halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. The family had moved there two years before to be closer to the industry Josh worked in; he composes musical scores for the entertainment industry. Six weeks into her fourth pregnancy, Reanne looked like a Southern California bombshell, wearing a pink faux-lace-up shirt that matched her nails, sparkly hoop earrings, and her long brown hair in a blowout that fell into soft curls at her chest. As we walked to the restaurant a passing group of guys nodded, looking her up and down, and Reanne rolled her eyes. Picturing her twelve years younger was easy, but a lot has changed since then.

ON THE WEBSITE
for the thirty-year-old New Beginnings Home and its sister organization, Youth With A Mission’s Adoption Ministry, photographs of residents, a smiling sorority of young pregnant women wearing matching denim overalls and forming human pyramids, make the home look casual and even irreverent. One expectant mother is pictured in a T-shirt that reads, “I’m not fat, I’m knocked up.”

A fundraising video for the home’s benefactors offered a seamier narrative about the women being reformed within New Beginnings’s walls, painting them as promiscuous or drug addled or caught up in “the college/youth lifestyle,” as one former resident put it. But these hadn’t been Reanne’s problems. “There was nothing wrong with me,” she told me when we first spoke in 2009. “I could have taken care of my child easily. I wasn’t on drugs or an alcoholic. I was just young.”

Though it’s larger now, New Beginnings was then a compound of just two buildings: a southern-style farmhouse, where the houseparents’ family slept, connected by a breezeway to a renovated barn, where resident pregnant women lived. On a cupola above the resident’s home a weathervane in the shape of a stork carrying a bundled baby turned in the wind.