Religious organizations play an outsized role in foster care and adoption in the United States, often discriminating against members of the LGBTQ community while receiving tax money and, despite being registered as non-profits, running themselves essentially like businesses. One massive evangelical adoption agency, Bethany Christian Services, had an annual budget of 9.1 million dollars in 2010, only 694,000 dollars of which was spent directly on serving children, according to journalist and researcher Kathryn Joyce’s powerful exposé The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption.
Evangelicals who adopt children often do so in the spirit of a missionary project, and organizations like Bethany—which has issued its own statement condemning the policy of separating children from their families—have a long record of engaging in highly deceptive and manipulative practices, including pressuring birth mothers into signing away their children.
How seriously, then, should we take evangelical criticisms of Trump’s child separation policy? Will the white evangelicals, who may end up adopting some of these essentially trafficked children, shed any tears for their brown birth mothers as they alienate them from their cultural heritage and funnel them into their program of “raising up warriors for Christ?” More likely, they will carry on pushing America toward a Gilead-style theocracy without ever owning up to the harm they have done in supporting the current president. Blessed be the fruit.
