The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption Read Online Free PDF Page A

volunteers/vacationing families,” amenities that underscored her understanding of local Dominican adoption residency requirements. The document also described the group’s goal to “equip each child” with the opportunity “for adoption into a loving Christian family” and help them find “new life in Christ.” It asked Christians to pray that God “continue to grant favor with the Dominican government in allowing us to bring as many orphans as we can into the DR.”
    The promise of “new life”—meaning not just a new family but also a new faith—was an undercurrent in the broader crisis. To those who understood evangelical manners of speaking, the term “new life”—the inspiration for naming countless churches and ministries—seemed to cast adoption as one way of making new Christians. The promise of new life was often accompanied by statements implicitly disparaging aid that didn’t take Haitians’ spiritual well-being into account—help that saved only a body but not a soul. As Dan Cruver, head of evangelical adoption advocacy group Together for Adoption, attested at a Christian adoptionconference later that spring, after arguing that shipments of water bottles had only compounded Haiti’s worries by creating a mountain of trash, “Relief, as important as it is, is not the answer. What is the answer is the church.”
    Overt evangelism was common in the many orphanages attempting to evacuate Haitian orphans. A Miami-based orphanage, His House, which coordinated adoptions for children airlifted from Haiti after the earthquake, described its mission as turning children into “Christ-like persons.” The Texas ministry For His Glory Adoption Outreach, meanwhile, considered Haiti to be a country “dedicated to Satan in a contractual form,” a reference to the apocryphal “pact with the devil” that Haiti’s independence fighters are said to have made in exchange for freedom from French rule. For His Glory aimed to fulfill the Bible’s Great Commission mandate, the charge that Christians evangelize the world, by placing orphans in Christian homes. Kim Harmon, president of For His Glory, personally adopted six of her eight children from the Port-au-Prince orphanage Maison des Enfants de Dieu, which her organization supports. “We want our children to be adopted by Christian families because we want them to be God’s servants,” Maison’s director Pastor Pierre Alexis told me. “I know [God] likes it when we are feeding them, but He likes better—He loves—when the children are growing as His servants.”
    These evangelical motivations went largely unremarked in news media coverage of orphanages seeking to evacuate their wards. It was as if a consensus had been reached that Haiti—a seeming hellscape where children were fed mud cakes by their starving parents, or were sold into child slavery as restaveks * in a country whose very name evoked voodoo, the underworld, and death—might need a level of evangelism that wouldn’t be tolerated in a more developed country. In some cases journalists were explicitly embedded with evangelical orphanage workers. That spring, with the help of Christian film producers from Discover the Journey, an advocacy-oriented documentary group that creates videos about subjects like child soldiers, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien made a TV documentary, Rescued, about an evangelical orphanage in Haiti called the Lighthouse. There, volunteers came, she wrote, “moved by a desire to leave behind their plastic lives, grasp meaning, and pursue God’s grace.” In a special preview for a group of evangelical adoption advocates, a Discover theJourney staffer asked the audience to help spread the word about the film, offering in exchange her winking assurance that O’Brien will “come out a believer.” *
    Despite the public fervor to adopt “earthquake orphans,” the logistics of the adoptions themselves proved difficult. The quake had destroyed the Port-au-Prince building