EVANGELICALS AND OTHER Christians involved in adoption and “orphan care” ministries have often evoked Paul’s use of adoption as a metaphor: God “adopts” us into the family of God, so we should adopt children as a manifestation of the gospel.

But New Testament scholar Erin Heim, a U.S. domestic adoptee herself, has raised questions about Pauline adoption metaphors. “The thing that always gets said — ‘contemporary adoption is a horizontal expression of God’s vertical adoption of us’ — there’s something at face value that is a little bit comforting about it, but that doesn’t sit very well for very long,” Heim said in a podcast about her research on these metaphors.

Adoption by nature is a vertical relationship, Heim explained, referring to power inequities between parents and children and between cultures. “There’s no such thing as horizontal adoption,” she said. “When we make mini vertical things that [try to] look like what God does in the Bible, it’s idolatry.”

Christians were pioneers in the establishment of international adoption to the United States in the 1950s and later spurred an orphan care movement during the peak of international adoption in the early 2000s. Since 1948, roughly 1 million children globally have been placed in new families, far from their original families and culture, through intercountry adoption, according to demographer Peter Selman — more than 380,000 of them between 2000 and 2009.

While faith has guided Christians in promoting adoption, religious narratives also have upheld harmful power structures and practices. “White saviorism” and racial hierarchies have led to the separation of children from their cultures of origin. Adoptees who are now adults have shared stories of struggle within families and societies that deny or misunderstand these dynamics.

Today, some international adoption providers have shifted more attention toward preserving original family and community ties and addressing social factors that can lead parents to relinquish children to adoption. Meanwhile, some adoptees and other advocates seek healing and redress for those affected by illegal or unethical adoption practices.

How have Christians applied new theology to these tasks as they’ve wrestled with past religious narratives?

Birth of a movement

DURING THE KOREAN WAR, which ended in 1953, more than 100,000 children — from both South and North Korea — were orphaned, and their desperate situation sparked the birth of an international adoption movement led largely by Christians, evangelicals in particular. In her 2021 book Adopting for God: The Mission to Change America Through Transnational Adoption, Soojin Chung, a professor of practical theology at Azusa Pacific University, explains how and why Christians advocated for adoption from Korea. She describes the emergence of “child sponsorship” programs, in which sponsors sent money to support the needs of children overseas — a strategy of “virtual adoption” that struck a chord with American evangelicals.

Robert Pierce and Everett Swanson, who went on to found World Vision and the Everett Swanson Evangelistic Association (now Compassion International), respectively, were pioneers in the child sponsorship approach. Two evangelicals from Oregon — Bertha Holt and her husband, Harry — were inspired by a World Vision film depicting the plight of the Korean children, particularly those fathered by U.S. soldiers in Korea, to adopt eight children and lobby for special legislation to permit their immigration. In 1956, Bertha — who became known as “Grandma Holt” and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame — and Harry formed the Holt Adoption Program (now Holt International) to find more adoptive families for children around the globe.

Because of their conviction that all people are God’s image-bearers, some adoption pioneers decried racist arguments against forming interracial families. But Chung points out in Adopting for God that the way Pierce and Swanson framed the issue of Korean adoptions made “Asians objects of tragedy in need of Western rescue.” Pierce and Swanson emphasized evangelism through child sponsorship, and the Holts did the same with adoption, selecting only “born again” Christian parents who would raise children to “accept Christ as the Lord.”

David M. Smolin, director of the Center for Children, Law, and Ethics at the Cumberland School of Law (and an adoptive father), rebukes this “cultural hierarchy” approach to international adoption. Smolin argues that “taking children out of their nations and cultures and bringing them to the United States in order to evangelize them ... is entirely contrary to the original and recurrent Christian vision of the faith being planted and developing indigenously and incarnationally within every culture and nation in the world.”

In the last chapter of her book, Chung describes the continuity of the theological narrative of orphan rescue between current evangelical adopters and their predecessors. “In this story of salvation, Christian Americans who hold deeply traditional family values are the solutions to family breakdown, single motherhood, teenage pregnancy, illegitimacy, institutionalization, and at-risk children,” she wrote. “The problem with this religious narrative is the innate power inequality between the adoptive parents and the children, not merely within individual families, but also in the larger social and global context.”

Jedd Medefind, president of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, acknowledges that the orphan care movement has been motivated at times by misguided compassion. “The movement really overemphasized the beauty of adoption and not the complexity and costliness of it,” Medefind told Sojourners. “That would include moving swiftly past the journey of the birth parent,” he said, but also providing inadequate support to adoptive parents in the complicated process of raising a child who has experienced serious loss, potentially including developmental health conditions.

Repairing the damage of the ‘white savior’ narrative

THE UNEXAMINED PRIVILEGE of “white savior” adoption narratives ignored the importance of identity and belonging that begins with one’s origins — and blindly accepted shoddy social work or presumed that poor women had a real choice in the relinquishment of their children.

In some cases, the obliteration of one’s original identity was literal. As some Korean adoptees have searched for their families, they’ve discovered that phony identities were created for them — agencies had swapped their identities with children who had died in orphanages or processed them as fake “orphans” when they actually had living family.

In late 2022, the South Korean government agreed to investigate the adoptions of dozens of adoptees born from the 1960s to the 1980s. Dutch attorney Peter Møller said he plans to sue Korean Social Service and Holt Children’s Services in Seoul due to their unwillingness to open their records. (Holt International is independent from HCS in Seoul and did not control who the latter put up for adoption; it did work with them to place children with families abroad.)

In 2021, the Dutch government briefly suspended international adoptions after concluding that, over a 30-year period, there were too many abuses, including child trafficking. (In November 2022, the Dutch reauthorized adoptions from six countries.) Recently, Switzerland and Belgium have also investigated their own responsibilities for failures in international adoption.

In response to the trauma inherent in any adoption due to the loss of connections with biological parents, and particularly in abusive and illegal situations, post-adoption services have proliferated to fill the need for mental health and community support, and many adoption agencies have grown more savvy to these problems. But many people still seek public acknowledgment or apology for the ways adoptions were prioritized over birth family preservation and became a source of trauma for many parents and children.

Last fall, a number of U.N.-affiliated human rights offices issued a joint statement to promote a “human rights-based ... approach to preventing and eradicating illegal intercountry ... adoptions” and address “deficiencies in child protection systems.” The report recommended reparations for past wrongs in adoption practices. Reparations could include economic restitution, medical and psychological care, legal and social services, public disclosure of the truth, and the commemoration of victims.

A shift in emphasis

IN 1993, the Hague Adoption Convention, an international agreement that “protects children and their families against the risks of illegal, irregular, premature, or ill-prepared adoptions abroad,” was a step toward providing common standards to safeguard the practice of international adoptions. A guiding point of the Hague Convention: Countries of origin retain the authority to determine whether solutions for children in need have adequately been sought within their communities first. Intercountry adoption is considered a last resort.

Yet, it has been hotly debated how to apply this principle. One tension, according to Medefind, is whether the social working process should be fast — ensuring children can leave an orphanage sooner — or slow — safeguarding children from the risk of an inappropriate placement. Locating biological parents or extended family members takes time, and in some cultures adopting children with no existing family connections isn’t practiced. But the risks of developmental delays and difficulty attaching to a new family increase the longer a child stays in institutional care. There are no simple answers or ideal solutions.

Still, Medefind admits that in some cases in the last two decades, “[Agencies were] moving to the solution of adoption when other solutions might have been possible.” The Christian Alliance for Orphans, which Medefind said formed in 2004 when 39 agencies felt “a special energy” around intercountry adoption, has lessened its emphasis on adoption. Though some agencies have supported children within local programs for decades, as international adoption numbers have gone down, more agencies began to emphasize nutrition programs and economic empowerment for parents, family reunification, kinship care, and foster care.

In the countries where Holt works, the agency reports that domestic adoptions now outnumber intercountry adoptions. “The culture has really shifted in many countries where local adoptive families are more open to adopt children who are not blood related to their family,” Thoa Bui, Holt’s vice president for programs and services, told Sojourners. Local couples willing to adopt most often choose healthy babies, which means agencies usually only turn to intercountry adoption to help place older and special needs children.

Bui, who began work for Holt in Vietnam in 1996, said that governments around the globe have better policies and more resources for strengthening families, and this opens opportunities for nongovernmental organizations to work with governments in support of children. “If a birth mother brings a baby to us and says, ‘I cannot afford to raise this baby,’” Bui said, “then we try to understand why she has the intention of relinquishing the baby, and we offer options.” For example, Bui explained, sometimes when parents cannot afford school fees, they place their children in orphanages to get an education. Holt now has income-generating programs that provide grants for a parent to begin a small business, acquire livestock for supplemental income, or receive training to begin a new job.

Many options for vulnerable children overlap with traditional development efforts, such as World Vision’s education, health, food, and economy-building programs. To support this work, the Faith to Action Initiative is a coalition of organizations — including the Christian Alliance, World Vision, and World Relief — that prioritizes family care. “That’s where we should spend the most energy and money,” said Medefind, who is on the board.

Theological resources for a new approach

SMOLIN (OF THE Center for Children, Law, and Ethics) told Sojourners that, since he published his first journal article criticizing adoption practices in 2005, he’s watched adoption providers widen the spectrum of practices to better support parents and their communities — Christian agencies more so than mainstream ones. “Some of the agencies are remarkable in how they’ve reworked their understanding of adoption,” Smolin said.

Some of the change is practical, rather than ideological, he said, and “whether they did enough switching of the script, I don’t know.” Perhaps that depends on how well a new theology of family roots in people’s hearts.

Both Smolin and biblical scholar Heim challenge some scriptural interpretations often applied to modern adoption. The apostle Paul, for example, probably had Roman adoption law in mind when he used adoption as a metaphor. In ancient Rome, wealthy or powerful men adopted male heirs in the absence of a living son. Legally, the heir received a new name, but their family or clan name typically remained in some form. Practically speaking, the relationships with their old families continued even as they added new roles.

In contrast, adoption today generally amends a child’s birth certificate to show the adoptive parents as the “real” parents. Legal paperwork, according to Smolin, often “den[ies] that ‘birth’ mothers and fathers are truly parents, leaving adoptive mothers and fathers as the only true parents.” Further, original birth certificates are often sealed and remain unavailable to the adoptee as adults, though there are current efforts to change this. “The American system, which characteristically hides and destroys the adoptee’s connection to their original lineage, appears contrary to scriptural norms,” Smolin said.

Where in Paul’s adoption metaphor are natural mothers? Amber Jimerson, a Christian domestic birth mother pursuing a career in adoption-informed therapy, told Sojourners that with the salvation narrative of adoption, “it is awfully hard not to hear, as a birth mother, the implication that I was the darkness and evil that my son was rescued from.” When we use the salvation narrative, “we feed this expectation of closed and full adoption — that your family of origin is in the past and your adoptive family is the future.”

In the New Testament, when James tells early Christians to “look after orphans and widows,” they should be thought of as one unit, lacking a husband or father. No biblical stories removed orphans from their widowed mothers. Heim observed that this meant that no one gets to be the savior: “That’s not the goal. We have one Savior. We don’t need mini saviors all over the place.”

Amid declining numbers of international adoptions and governments investigating past abuses, Smolin believes that it’s time to end the current era of intercountry adoption. Though many have worked tirelessly to build a more ethical international adoption system, Smolin says he’s not sure it’s worth continued attempts at reform. Jimerson says she hopes “the church becomes as passionate for family preservation as they presently are for modern, American adoption.”

Medefind feels that all options, including international adoption, should remain on the table, while acknowledging that the more desirable solutions include strengthening families through economic programs, finding kinship or local foster care, and other “upstream” strategies. Bui of Holt International agrees, pointing out that children with special needs comprise 65 to 75 percent of those in need of support, and that many of these children do not get adopted in their countries of origin.

At best, approaches could be “additive” rather than “subtractive,” Smolin said. In the case of vulnerable children, foster care or legal guardianship can be solutions that give children stable support and the dignity of being connected with their family of origin.

Christian theology provides an impetus to care for the vulnerable and to honor natural parent-child relations, Smolin said. “I’m optimistic that by necessity — open adoption and birth searches with international adoptions and reunions — we’ve got to come up with a theology big enough to accommodate both of those impetuses.”