Prominent evangelical Christians are urging churchgoers to strongly consider adoption or foster care, not just out of kindness or biblical calling but also to answer criticism that their movement, while condemning abortion and same-sex adoption, does not do enough for children without parents.The article doesn't mention whether race is being discussed in this context, but perhaps it should be. On more than one occasion, I have seen a commenter named Bruce B. at VFR mention the growing trend of white evangelical couples adopting nonwhite children. This is something I have seen in my own circles as well. Usually it is done after the couple already has a few biological children of their own; that is, they "round out" their family by adopting a nonwhite child, but sometimes in the case of fertility difficulties the couple will adopt nonwhite right off the bat.
If one were being cynical, one might say that their motivations are pecuniary in nature; we all know that it is much more expensive to adopt a white baby than a nonwhite, thanks to the laws of supply and demand. One would be wrong, however, for the demand among these white evangelicals is very much for nonwhite babies. A couple in my church adopted a toddler from India, after having talked for some time about how they felt God was calling them to do so, and about their frustration with the obstacles they were encountering (to put it bluntly, India wants its orphans to be adopted by Indian parents, not white ones.) If they had had the money, they could have more easily adopted a higher-demand white baby, and they certainly could have spent less and had less bureaucracy to deal with if they had been willing to spring for a nonwhite American baby. But they really wanted an Indian child.
Evangelicals these days are quite enamored of Revelation 7:9-10, which reads:
After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: "Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb."This is taken to be not only a picture of heaven but a picture of the one unified world we should be striving for on earth. And as I have said elsewhere, their "love for other cultures" usually involves a negative attitude toward their own culture. Another couple in my church adopted a little boy from Thailand, and one Sunday the wife gave a testimony about it. In it she expressed reservations about having brought the boy from a land of deprivation and spiritual darkness into the land of X-Boxes and other forms of material excess. This kind of statement is quite common from missionaries as well, this idea that, while they don't have Jesus, non-Western cultures overall are to be commended for their greater authenticity or down-to-earthness.
I don't know whether there is yet any formal movement within evangelicalism to advocate for adoption of nonwhite babies by white couples, but the trend is there. Just one more reason why, contrary to popular belief, evangelicals aren't reliably conservative.
