Some Children See Him: A Transracial Adoptee's View of Color-blind Christianity 2 Journal of Christian Legal Thought 2012

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2 J. Christian Legal Thought 15 (2012)
Some Children See Him: A Transracial Adoptee's View of Color-blind Christianity

handle is hein.journals/jchlet2 and id is 15 raw text is: ABSTRACT
Some Cl idren See Him:
A Transrac aAdoptee's View of
Color-hi nd Christianity
By JaeRan Kim

n a chilly February evening in 1970, I
arrived at White Lily Orphanage. The
Sisters of the St. Paul Chartres, a group of
French apostolates, established White Lily in Korea
in 1888 to take in orphaned children. In 1991, the
orphanage shut down and a daycare center was
established in its place. A few months later I was
transferred to Ilsan, an orphanage run by Harry
and Bertha Holt, the evangelical Christians who
propelled Korean adoption to the U.S. While I
was at Ilsan, my adoptive parents were reading the
Adoption Program Information Letter from the Holt
Adoption Program.
Dear Friends, the letter begins, We are happy
to have received your inquiry about adopting a child
.... From the beginning we have felt that this was
God's work, and we enter into this correspondence
with you trusting him to lead you and us to the
best decisions. It is for this reason that we share
with you at the outset, our desire that as many of
these children as possible go into Christian homes.
Theirs was a Christian home; I arrived in July 1971.
I am one of an estimated 200,000 South Korean
children placed in the arms of a family in North
America, Europe, or Australia since the mid-1950s.
Modern adoption history in the U.S. has been
fraught with criticism that adoption is tantamount to
commercial baby buying. Social work and adoption
professionals speak of finding families for children,
not children for families to emphasize the focus of
adoption on children. However, as much as adoption
has and continues to be socially constructed as a
service for children, adoption has always been more
about the needs and desires, including religion, of
the adoptive parents.
Growing the congregation
The concept of adoption in the United States as
a means to grow the spiritual family is not new and
has often been met with resistance or controversy
when adoption changes the religion of the child
from his or her biological family to that of the
adoptive parents. Christianity played a major role

in the advancement of fostering and adoption in
the United States. The Native American boarding
schools, Indian Adoption Project, orphan train
movement, and maternity homes for unwed mothers
have all been evangelical projects and all have been
critiqued as projects to reform children and families
that did not comply with the dominant, Anglo-
Saxon Protestant, traditional, two-parent worldview.
The current evangelical focus on orphans
exemplified by Both Ends Burning, the Orphan
Sunday movement and popular Christian authors
and scholars such as Russell Moore is the twenty-
first century's, high-tech, multi-media version of
evangelical humanitarianism, popularized over fifty
years ago by organizations such as World Vision.
If Dan Cruver and Russell Moore have become
contemporary spokespersons for the evangelical
response for international adoption, Harry Holt was
their prototype, capitalizing on the dual salvations
Christian adoptive parents provide for children:
material and spiritual rescue and salvation.
Harry and Bertha Holt became famous for
adopting eight Korean children in 1955. In 1954,
the Holts attended a World Vision presentation in
their hometown of Creswell, Oregon. From the
beginning, providing material and parental resources
was only one of Holt's goals.To tap in to prospective
evangelical adopters, Harry used a method still
employed today.
Descriptions and photographs of the unsanitary
and impoverished conditions of orphanages or
congregate care facilities in which children are
living equate adoption as the rescue of children
from hell on earth. In 1955 Harry Holt wrote,
The little boy or girl that may be, by the
grace of God, in your home by this time next
year is right now lying on the floor in the cold
Korean winter, huddled under whatever covers
they happen to have. They are always cold and
there is never enough to eat. Most of them are
weak with malnutrition and sick with colds and
dysentary, and many others with the beginnings
of tuberculosis.
continued on page 16

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