Five Reflections on Evangelicalism and Adoption

I spent the past weekend at Together for Adoption, which was a strong and refreshing dose of teaching and instruction on gospel-centered adoption.

It’s been a while (too long, too long!) since I’ve posted over here at Evangel, having been busy slavishly beating the publicity drums for my own contribution to the evangelical world.  But after I put these original reflections together, I realized that they might find an audience here that would be interested enough to challenge me, and hopefully to take them further.

With that in mind, then, I offer the following reflections  on evangelicals and adoption.

1)  The conference was deeply theological, which was a good thing.  Yet the main stage speakers focused almost exclusively on the motivations for adoption and orphan care, rather than the shape of adoption or orphan care.  While the breakouts were primarily practical, the divide gave off the implicit feeling that theology ends precisely where reflection about what adoption should actually look like in practice begins.

But the Gospel does not simply provide us the proper set of motivations to do what everyone else in the world does.  Instead, it provides us unique insight into the structure of morality (Christ is our wisdom), such that we can open up new possibilities for action rather than staying within the framework provided to us by the world around us.  The Gospel is not only an internal reality that helps us to get our hearts in the “right place” with respect to adoption.  It is an external reality that should help us discern who we adopt and how we go about it.

In other words, I would have loved to have seen some theological ethics with respect to adoption being worked out.  A lot of people are very passionate about adoption, and that’s great.  But not all attempts at helping those in poverty actually succeed, and it is the task of theological ethics to help those who are considering adoption discern how their proper motivations should take shape in the world.  Some people will (rightly) say “no” to adoption,  and theological ethics will help those in the adoption movement counsel those couples and churches wrestling with the practical dimensions more effectively.

2)  It is a perennial temptation, I think, to frame the doctrine of adoption as a fundamentally individualistic doctrine (as opposed to a doctrine about individuals).  In adoption, God saves us as individual persons.  But he saves us within a web of relationships with others, with the world, and even with myself.  Like it or not, that web that simply does not go away at the moment of adoption (which is why, I think, in Romans 8 our adoption is framed as the final redemption of our bodies).  Consequently, the line between the “old man” and the “new man” is a lot more blurry than we might like.  We are never autonomous, never free-floating about the relationships that defined us (even when we deny them in order to follow Jesus).

In other words, orphans are not autonomous individuals, or atoms that have somehow achieved social isolation.  They still exist within a social network, even though their birth parents are no longer around.  In fact, the orphan is defined not by social isolation but by that absence, an absence that new parents simply will not fill in the same way.  A new spouse may stand in the same relationship as the first, but as long as the person is different than some absence will be noticeable.

In that sense, then, I worry our language about adoption is too individualistic, that we are not attuned to the fact that adopting the person means bringing that web of relations into our home.  The closest someone got to acknowledging this on the main stage was Bryan Lorrits, whose excellent talk highlighted the fact that adoption doesn’t make a black child any less black.  And the unique set of social relations that come with that simply do not go away.

3)  Proclaiming adoption as a doctrine is insufficient without its corollary:  a theological account of the nature of childhood.  What is the life we are adopting people into?  What is the good news we have to show children?  Is it simply better material comforts, better educational possibilities, the safety of living in a stable society?  If it’s hearing the good news about Jesus, what difference does that make to children as children?  A deeper and more comprehensive understanding of what childhood is will also help us understand what is uniquely destructive about orphanhood.  I would love to see the adoption movement (and evangelicals generally) spend more of their time reflecting about this.

This request for addition, I’d point out, is similar to the first one that I raised.  It is one thing to say that the Gospel grounds our adoption, while it is another thing to say what those Gospel-shaped adoptions actually look like.  Similarly, it is one thing to say that our adoption makes outsiders our own children, but another to say what the life of the child that they have now received looks like.  While there was a strong emphasis on parenting, we should also reflect about what sorts of things parents are raising.

4)  Adoption is one (important) strand of orphan care, but is not the whole of it.  And the emphasis on adoption as a means of caring for the child should not preclude our concern for children in impoverished areas and our efforts to correct the causes of poverty and adoption.  I didn’t make it to the (few) breakout sessions where economics were substantively addressed, but it would have been good to see some of those concerns more fully treated from the main stage as well.

Obviously, the conference primarily draws people interested in adoption (though the theme was care for orphans this year).  But even there, the economic aspects of adoption should play into our decisions about who to adopt and where we adopt from.  It may be better, for instance, in some emerging economies to not adopt children out of them, but to find better indigenous solutions to the problem.  Taking into account the economic dimension of adoption is incumbent on those who want to do all we can to ensure our helping doesn’t hurt.

5)  Related to that, I think while it is more difficult to think through the systemic causes of where orphans come from, the adoption movement doesn’t help foster such thought.  Most of the banners for the organizations represented, for instance, had faces of individual children or pairs of children.  We don’t see the system:  we see the face, and as such it is easier to think of adopting a child as a solution than addressing the problems in the social network that caused that child to be orphaned.

Which is why we should make sure our presentation on adoption is accurate:  it’s not a solution per se to orphanhood, even if it is a means of caring for a child and bearing witness to the reality of the Gospel.  We can still bear witness to the Gospel in working with orphans, but such care may not take the shape of international adoption.

Did you go to the conference?  Where are the above thoughts wrong?

Note:  An earlier version of this was originally posted at Mere Orthodoxy.  The above is slightly modified from that one.