Arissa H. Oh

 International adoption is in the news almost daily, but its numbers are in decline and the tone of the conversation around it has darkened. Celebrity adoptions and heartwarming stories of orphans finding "forever families" in the U.S. have given way to more skeptical coverage that emphasizes the underside of international adoption: the profit motive that leads to illicit practices and the lack of regulation and oversight in a vast system that shuffles children around the world.

The American evangelical crusade for international adoption has received particularly sustained attention. Since the middle of the last decade, evangelical churches and organizations have encouraged their members to adopt children from abroad, often providing funds to help with the high costs. They have promoted a culture of adoption by publicizing a “global orphan crisis,” a disputed concept in itself. Children—many not actually orphans—are adopted hastily by well-intentioned but ill-prepared parents. Horror stories of fraud and abuse abound.

Much of this is not new. International adoption did not begin in the 1990s, or even in the 1980s. Americans began adopting children from abroad at the end of World War II, mainly from places with significant U.S. troop presences, like Germany and Japan. Systematic international adoption began in Korea after the Korean War (1950-1953) as a way to remove mixed-race “GI babies,” the children born of Korean women and foreign military personnel. It quickly grew to include non-mixed-race Korean children, and then spread to other developing countries: most notably Vietnam in the 1960s, Colombia in the 1970s, Guatemala and India in the 1980s, and China, Romania, and Russia in the 1990s.
   
Nor have evangelicals become focused on international adoption only in the last several years. A central reason why adoption from Korea became systematized was the intervention of American evangelicals. They publicized the plight of Korean children in need of rescue, lobbied Congress for the changes in immigration laws that made these adoptions possible, and promoted the practice among their friends, churches, and communities. American evangelicals considered international adoption a form of missionary work long before the megachurch leaders of the 21st century began to cultivate an adoption boom.

The current reporting on evangelical adoption overlooks the importance of race in international adoption. The vast majority of these adoptions involve white parents and non-white children. In the 1970s, as Americans faced a white baby “famine” at home, a hierarchy of desirability became firmly established in which non-white children from abroad were preferable to African-American children. These children were not white, but they weren’t black either. That they could be rescued from poverty and backwardness heightened their sentimental appeal. Today, Americans cross the color line more readily to adopt black children from African countries. Their blackness is mitigated by their perceived exoticism and victimhood.

Consumerism and humanitarianism have always been uncomfortably entangled in both domestic and international adoption. Regardless of their reasons for adopting, would-be adopters have had to venture into the marketplace in order to obtain a child. Americans long ago declared in principle that children cannot be assigned a market value, but adoptive parents, especially those adopting internationally, engage in what looks like consumerist behavior: selecting children priced according to race, sex, age, disabilities, and country of origin.

These market dynamics explain why the corruption that has captured the attention of many journalists today is not new. Baby-hunting, trafficking, and stealing; document forgery; unclear relinquishments; coercion of birth parents (usually mothers); substituting one child for another—all of these practices have shadowed international adoption since it began. The unintended consequences of international adoption also follow the practice wherever it goes, especially the vicious cycle of orphanage expansion and child abandonment, and foreign governments’ use of international adoption as a substitute for domestic child and social welfare.

Reforms to make international adoption more ethical are decades overdue. The process needs to be more stringent, uniform, and transparent. Americans also need to rethink its purpose. Should international adoption be about finding families for children, or children for families? This all-important question lies at the troubled heart of international adoption, and it demands an answer from all Americans, not just evangelicals.

Arissa Oh is an assistant professor in the history department at Boston College, where she teaches classes on race, gender, and immigration in 20th-century U.S. history. She is in the process of publishing her first book, Into the Arms of America: The Korean Origins of International Adoption.

Alastair Jamieson, "Germany's Angela Merkel teaches history class on Berlin Wall anniversary," NBC World News, August 13, 2013

German Chancellor Angela Merkel drew on her Communist-era experiences to teach a history class at a school on Tuesday - the 52nd anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall.

Merkel, who is campaigning ahead of next month’s general election, gave a 45-minute lesson as a "substitute teacher" for a 12th-grade class in east Berlin.>>>

Sacha Cordner, "Lawmaker Considering Legislation To Cut Down 'Islam-Bias' In Fla. School Textbooks," WFSU-Tallahassee, August 5, 2013

A Florida lawmaker is considering legislation that would give the public input on the content found in Florida school textbooks. His overall aim is to cut down on what he calls the “Islam-bias” in state schools.

Melbourne Republican Representative Ritch Workman says Prentice Hall’s “World History” book not only puts an inaccurate spin on Islam, it also dedicates a whole chapter to the religion.>>>

E. C. Gogolak, "Using Baseball History to Teach Children Big Lessons," NYT blog, August 7, 2013

On a recent morning in the Longwood neighborhood of the South Bronx, residents on Fox Street were starting their day. Reggaeton played from a second-story window. A man whistled a nursery rhyme while briskly pushing a toddler in a stroller. A woman stood on the corner with rollers in her hair, smoking a cigarette. And in a room at the end of a hallway on the first floor of 830 Fox Street, about two dozen children, ages 6 to 12, sat before a big-screen TV mounted on the front wall.>>>

Ryan Arciero, "1912 eighth grade exam: Can you score highly on a revealing history test?" Examiner, August 12, 2013

A 1912 eighth grade exam is having quite a few students and adults alike this week wonder whether they can score highly on a test that many Americans’ ancestors may have had to take when in the single-school classroom. Thanks to a history museum’s donation of a test that’s over 100 years old, Web Pro News shares this Monday, Aug. 12, that some may be surprised at how much this exam truly reveals.>>>

Matthew Albright, "Delaware school district considers class about Bible," USA Today, July 24, 2013

WILMINGTON, Del. -- A school board in Delaware will vote Thursday on a proposal to offer a high school class examining the Bible's role in society and history, tying the state into a national debate over the limits of religion in schools.

Supporters say the elective class would not be a religious Bible study class discussing matters of faith, but would focus instead on the text's influence on history and society. Students would read the Bible and an accompanying textbook.>>>

Steven Cromack

What was life like for those living during the time of Martin Luther? Is Western Civilization on the eve of another Reformation? Modern society certainly indicates, at the very least, that people are speaking up and speaking out.

In the United Kingdom a rapidly increasing number of people are flocking to the “emerging churches.” Led by people like Peter Rollins (How [Not] to Speak of God) and other renegade pastors, these “churches” meet in bars, at skate parks, and other profane places. The theology of the emerging church takes a postmodern approach to Christianity and conceives that institutional churches have lost the true meaning of the Christian faith because people are too focused on following prescribed, meaningless rituals. Instead, emerging Christians sit together and read the Gospels and talk about Jesus the Christ.

Across the Atlantic in the United States, scholars, theologians, journalists, and ordinary people are launching their own assault on mainstream Christian practices. In his 2011 controversial book Love Wins Rob Bell indicts “traditional” Christianity on the charge of using the concept of Hell as a means of social control. Accept Jesus, or you go to Hell. Complete this Christian checklist, or you go to Hell. Go to church, or burn in Hell. This notion, Bell argues, runs counter to the crux of Christianity, which is that love wins because God’s love is infinitely more expansive than the box in which we place it, along with Heaven, Hell, and our own narrow conception of God. Bell goes even further to say that Hell will be empty because God’s grace extends into Hell itself.

Theologians from many of the divinity schools have entered the fray. In her book Almost Christian Kenda Creasy Dean, a theologian at Princeton Theological Seminary, argues that teenagers practice a “mutant form” of faith called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” and that conventional American churches and their members are responsible for its cultivation. “After two and a half centuries of shacking up with ‘the American Dream,’” Dean writes, “churches have perfected a dicey codependence between consumer-driven therapeutic individualism and religious pragmatism. These theological proxies gnaw, termite-like, at our identity as the Body of Christ, eroding our ability to recognize that Jesus’ life of self-giving love directly challenges the American gospel of self-fulfillment and self-actualization.”

Andrew Sullivan published an article in Newsweek entitled “Christianity in Crisis.” In it he argues that Christianity has been destroyed by modern culture and the American Dream. He urges Christians to embrace Jesus, not American, get-rich evangelism. People’s priorities have become mixed up, Sullivan asserts: fundamentalist Christians support the torture of terror suspects and oppose homosexuality and abortion despite the fact that Jesus said nothing about these matters.

In 2012, Ross Douthat came out with Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, in which he writes that “America’s problem isn’t too much religion, or too little of it. It’s bad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place.” Indeed, Joel Osteen, the mega-church pastor who insists that God wants you to be happy, healthy, and rich has published a new book awkwardly entitled Everyday a Friday.
 
In many ways, religion has become a dirty word. People now take “religion” to mean organized Christian churches--along with their scandals, hypocrisy, and backward and fading traditions.  In 1999 a Gallup survey asked Americans “Do you consider yourself spiritual or religious?” 54% responded that they were “religious but not spiritual.” By 2009 only 9% of Americans affirmed such a statement.

Is Western Civilization overdue for another reformation? 

From Life magazine, May 18, 1959.

Jennifer Schuessler, "A Religious Legacy, With Its Leftward Tilt, Is Reconsidered," New York Times, July 23, 2013 (Got a shout out in this piece about another blog I help edit, Religion in American History. Hooray!)

For decades the dominant story of postwar American religious history has been the triumph of evangelical Christians. . . . But now a growing cadre of historians of religion are reconsidering the legacy of those faded establishment Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, tracing their enduring influence on the movements for human rights and racial justice, the growing “spiritual but not religious” demographic and even the shaded moral realism of Barack Obama — a liberal Protestant par excellence, some of these academics say.>>>

James P. Byrd, "Was the American Revolution a holy war?" Washington Post, July 6, 2013

Holy war can seem like something that happened long ago or that happens far away — the Crusades of medieval Europe, for example, or jihadists fighting secular forces today. But since their country’s founding, Americans have often thought of their wars as sacred, even when the primary objectives have been political.

This began with the American Revolution. When colonists declared their independence on July 4, 1776, religious conviction inspired them. . . .>>>

Brantley Gasaway, "American Civil Religion: Never Leave the Country Without It (a photo essay on God, liberty, and democracy in the American passport)," Religion in American History blog, July 26, 2013

As I recently discovered when I renewed my passport, the State Department completely redesigned the American passport in 2007. Our post-9/11 world necessitated this update, as the new passport contains security features that include a computer chip with the owner's digital image and biographical information. Yet the State Department not only incorporated new technology. It also replaced the bland interior pages that had faint state seals in the background with striking images and quotations in support of the passport's theme: "American Icon.">>>

Paul Waldman, "Christian Identity Politics on Fox," American Prospect, July 29, 2013

I try, with only partial success, to avoid spending too much time on the "A conservative said something offensive!" patrol. First, there are plenty of other people doing it, so it isn't as if the world won't hear about it if I don't remark on the outrage du jour. But second—and more importantly—most of the time there isn't much interesting to say about Rush Limbaugh's latest bit of race-baiting or Bill O'Reilly's latest spittle-flecked rant or Louie Gohmert's latest expectoration of numbskullery.>>>

Randall Stephens, "High Holy Rollers: A Review Essay," Wilson Quarterly (Summer 2013)

They are as ubiquitous on the American landscape as the split-level home or McDonalds drive-through. Churches with epic names like World Overcomers, Victory International, and Word of Faith International Christian Center are visible from highways throughout the country. Christian television networks Daystar, TBN, and CBN air preachers such as Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, and T. D. Jakes, who promise the spiritual and material rewards of faith. Their books—with titles like Become a Better You and Can You Stand to Be Blessed?—are sold in Walmart stores.>>>