We are in National Adoption Month, and I deeply respect The Art of Taleh for inviting me, an adult adoptee, to share my perspective on adoption. It is rare for faith-based content to center or even consider the perspective of the adoptee.
Here are some things to know up front: I’m a mixed Chinese/German transracial adoptee. I was adopted at birth to distant relatives of my first mother, and I love all my parents. The painful things I share here are not an indictment of them, but a commitment to the truth of my experience as an adoptee who still believes in Christ. My situation is unique, and I generally think of it positively. This is the perspective from which I write.
While I believe modern adoption can be affirmed by Scripture, the wrongful use of Scripture to spiritualize the modern adoption experience can be harmful to adoptees in various ways; contributing to feelings of shame when we think about our birth parents or ethnic background, making it difficult to verbalize the painful aspects of our experience, and often walking away from God altogether. To understand this, I want to look at what adoption is in the Bible compared to modern adoption and what problems are caused by comparing the two.
Adoption is a metaphor for salvation
Starting with Scripture, Paul uses the Greek word “Huiothesia”, which means “placing as a son” and translates to “adoption” in English. He uses it five times to illustrate what Christ has done for us in salvation. It’s interesting to me that he uses it in letters to churches with non-Jewish (aka Gentile) Christians whose salvation was disputed because of their lineage and this metaphor helps affirm their salvation. Here is a brief summary of Paul’s use of “huiothesia”.
Romans 8:15*: the God-given “spirit of adoption” contrasts with the “spirit of slavery” that keeps us in fear and condemned.
Romans 8:23: they are “waiting eagerly for our adoption,” aka the future hope of complete redemption when Christ returns.
Romans 9:4: Paul discusses the Israelites, “to whom belongs the adoption” if only they would have faith in Christ.
Galatians 4:5*: “adoption as sons” contrasts with being a slave, a state from which Christ redeems us.
Ephesians 1:5*: God’s choice is highlighted as “He predestined us to adoption”.
*In these chapters, Paul also connects being a child of God with being an heir of God. Predestination and God’s will are also mentioned in Romans chapter 8.
Even in these woefully brief summaries we see familiar salvation concepts highlighted in the adoption metaphor; the change of position before God from a bad state (slave) to a good state (son/heir), and the emphasis on salvation being God’s will and for his purpose, not ours.
Adoption in Roman Law
To best understand Scripture, we should ask what adoption meant to the original, intended audience. A few details about adoption in Roman law show us why Paul’s use of this metaphor is brilliant and will help us see the problems with imposing our concept of modern adoption onto the text.
Adoption was for wealthy men. It allowed a wealthy man (e.g. the emperor) to place a younger man as his son to legally become his heir. Adoption was not about giving a family to unwanted children. Using this metaphor, Paul helps his readers see that our salvation is for God’s purposes and glory, not primarily about our well-being.
Adoptees were adult men. A wealthy man could be reasonably sure a young man in his 20’s had the desired traits for his heir, unlike a child who was still a question mark. Some commentaries say that an adopted son, being chosen, could not be disowned like a natural born son, who might turn out to be a disappointment. As a metaphor, Paul uses adoption to show salvation is permanent and reinforces the supremacy of God’s choice; though he knew how undeserving we were, he adopted us still, just as he had always planned.
Adoption meant transferring from an old authority to a new authority. In Roman law, a son was the property of his father; he had no possessions of his own and the father could sell him as a slave or even put him to death. Adoption transferred a son from the complete authority of one father to another. He could no longer inherit from his first father and old debts were cancelled. Paul uses adoption to emphasize the clear cut transition from being a slave to sin to being a son of God, no longer condemned (Rom 8:1) or obligated to sin (Rom 8:12), but able to call God our Father because of Christ.
More could be said, but I need to mention why this often gets interpreted and applied with a bias before we talk about the how and it’s impact. Well-known theologians, pastors and even Christian podcasters promoting modern adoption are frequently adoptive parents themselves. This tints their view of adoption in a way they don’t readily recognize. They often assert that all Christians are spiritual adoptees and therefore readily understand what adoption ought to mean for their child. Spiritual adoption is described as the true and better adoption, and so Christians inherently have the true or better perspective and experience of adoption. In this way, telling adoptees what to think and feel about their own adoption becomes the parental duty of the Christian.
Looking at the narrative of Christian adoption critically you’ll see the assumed perspective is always that of the adoptive parent; e.g. the belief that we should adopt because God adopted us and that, through the arduous adoption process, we learn a little about what Christ suffered for us. While these assertions are not necessarily bad ones, they carry a potentially harmful bias that cannot be checked without the adoptee perspective.
Imposing spiritual adoption on modern adoption
Originally, Paul used the adoption metaphor to tell us something about God. Turning it around, as if the metaphor tells us about ourselves or mandates modern adoption, doesn’t make sense. Christians do not feel called to vacate charges against the condemned because of Paul’s use of justification as a metaphor. Let’s look at how modern adoption differs from what Paul had in mind and the harm of conflating the two from an adoptee perspective.
Modern adoption should meet the needs of children, not wealthy men. Most people adopt to nurture and love a child in need of a family, not to secure their family lineage like the Romans. However, conflating spiritual adoption (i.e. prioritizing the desires and actions of God as our adoptive Father) with modern adoption makes prioritizing the desires and actions of adoptive parents seem a little bit more permissible. This has caused a huge amount of corruption in modern adoption for over a century.
Centered around the desires of adoptive parents, adoption becomes the response to infertility or their felt calling to help children in foreign countries or foster care. This creates a demand that outweighs supply and children are procured in horrific ways. We know children have been kidnapped and “sold” into adoption. We know predatory agencies coerce and trick vulnerable mothers into electing to adopt. Focusing on adoptive parent’s desires blinds us to how the adoption industry works in opposition to family preservation.
While this was not my reality, it is for many adoptees. Their experience cannot be ignored or dismissed as isolated or non-representative cases. Adoptees often ask “How could God have desired for my family to be ripped apart by lies and deceit so that I could be adopted?” or “Why did God allow this to happen in order to answer your prayer for a child?”. The knowledge that it did not, in fact, have to be this way is a cruel burden that cannot be dismissed by the assertion that it was God’s will.
Centered around the actions of adoptive parents, adoption celebrates their good work and they are often commended on their great faith and obedience in adopting. To the listening child, this makes adoptive parents appear to be their saviors who deserve unending gratitude and obedience just as Christ’s actions should stir our hearts toward similar feelings toward God.
Claiming adoptive parent’s actions are Christ-like may not be wrong, but many adoptees and even non-adoptees hear this and assume the child is obligated to be grateful for their adoptive family no matter what. For me, I realized my adoption had been centered around my adoptive family’s good deeds when I started speaking up about racism. I had relatives (not immediate family) tell me that I was being ungrateful to them for challenging their racist ideas. They attempted to shame me into silence by claiming they had “loved me like family”. It’s clear they saw my adoption as being about them, a validation of their righteousness and implied that I did not deserve their love, which I’ll talk more about in a second.
Expecting an adoptee to respond to their adoption like Christians respond to salvation is cruel. It makes it hard for adoptees to acknowledge or talk about any loss or grief they might feel. Reverend Keith C. Griffith said, “Adoption Loss is the only trauma in the world where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful.”
Adoptees today are children, not grown men. Imposing spiritual adoption, where God knew us and chose us though we did not deserve it, onto modern adoption leads us to a wrong view of vulnerable children. We now know trauma is inherent in adoption, even for a newborn. Adoptees frequently struggle with rejection or abandonment and adoption trauma can manifest at any point in our lives. To even hint at a comparison that, as adoptees (which we had no choice in), we are like the undeserving and wicked sinner, is brutal and maybe even spiritually abusive.
While it is true we do not deserve salvation, we should never state that a child “did nothing to deserve adoption”. Yet I have heard and read this multiple times, even from adult adoptees themselves who have internalized this message. The truth is, no child deserves to lose their family and all children deserve to belong to a loving family.
I was adopted at birth and the trauma of that was hidden from me until I was pregnant with my first child. I suddenly remembered a story my adoptive mom liked to tell about my infant days. I kept pushing her away, she recalls, so she prayed over me and rebuked a spirit and I finally relaxed and let her hold me. This story always made me feel ashamed but I was too young to articulate that. I responded as expected, showing gratitude for my mother’s overcoming love. When I finally understood my adoption trauma I realized my mother’s story is the spiritualized version of a stressed infant, struggling to adapt without my familiar mother and refusing to bond with a stranger.
I no longer feel ashamed by that story. However, I am hurt that, as a child, I was allowed to get the impression that something was wrong with me, when really I was behaving like a normal infant would in that situation. Spiritualizing adoption attempts to make a triumph out of a trauma. Triumph demands praise, but tragedy and trauma require lament in order to heal. I did not begin lamenting my adoption until my 30’s.
Adoption today emphasizes the new family and minimizes, sometimes even demonizes, the first family. Conflating spiritual adoption with modern adoption blurs the lines between God’s family and adoptive families. While we often stop short of equating being under the old authority of sin to the child’s first family, children are good at filling in the blanks. At least I was.
Without ever being told this, I put my first father and the Chinese ethnicity I inherited form him into the place that sin and wickedness occupy in the spiritual adoption metaphor. My child brain took this comparison to places my parents did not intend. In fact, they’d be mortified to read this and would’ve corrected me if I’d asked, but I didn’t. I proceeded with a sense that I should never look back to my first father or Chinese heritage, as God had given me a new life through adoption and I should never turn back to my old life of sin.
As a transracial adoptee already struggling with internalized racism, this was spiritual proof of Chinese people and culture being inferior and suspect. I once imagined my Chinese ancestors had been dragon worshippers, which would explain why I’d apparently been posessed. I fervently prayed God would miraculously trigger the recessive blonde hair and blue eyed genetics of my first mother, so I’d wake up one day no longer brown.
In fact, a current biblical counseling site still tells adoptives parents to minimize the importance of their child’s heritage. Without the adoptee perspective to shed light on why this is damaging, many Christian adoptive parents don’t think twice about that.
I do not see my adoption as a picture of the gospel. It does not look like the adoption Paul was using as a metaphor for salvation. Making my adoption about the gospel left me unable to see how it had truly impacted me. I had pain I did not acknowledge and therefore could not bring to God. When I began to process this, I realized I had to deconstruct my faith so I could cut out the lies and correct half truths. At times I felt like I was losing my faith and I can see why so many adoptees raised in the church grow up and never come back. I don’t believe any Christian adoptive parent would knowingly risk this. This is why we need to #flipthescript on National Adoption Month and start sitting in the uncomfortable truths of adoptee stories.
How can we approach modern adoption faithfully? When I think of spirit led actions to help children in need, I think of passages like James 1:27, “Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.” From my adoptee perspective, I see the emphasis on helping vulnerable families through the hardships that cause family separation instead of assuming family separation and jumping to adoption.
I see the doctrine of adoption as a beautiful picture of what God has done for us, but not as a mandate for how we must show God’s love to others. Surely opening our homes and families to children in need is a Christlike thing to do, but there are many ways to do that. Ethical modern adoption is just one of many options.
Expecting an adoptee to respond to their adoption like Christians respond to salvation is cruel. It makes it hard for adoptees to acknowledge or talk about any loss or grief they might feel. Click To Tweet
