The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce Page B

clothing, because adoption and orphan care is more than a cause. For many it has become the image of the gospel itself.
    Loritts, a longtime staffer for Campus Crusade for Christ and the senior pastor of a megachurch outside Atlanta, was addressing the eighth annual summit of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, the hub and umbrella organization of the burgeoning orphan-care and adoption movement. The claims both Tom Benz and Laura Silsby made about being called by God to rescue orphans don’t sound out of place in evangelical circles. There, it’s hard to overstate the recent ubiquity of adoption and orphan talk, which is guided by several main convictions: that adoption mirrors Christian salvation; that it is an essential part of antiabortion politics; and that it constitutes a means of fulfilling the Great Commission—the biblical mandate, found most notably in Matthew 28:16–20, that Christians spread the gospel.
    Like anyone else, church people are susceptible to trends and causes that pass in and out of fashion. These days, perhaps even more so than their secular counterparts. Just before I had turned onto the church compound, where Portola Parkway intersects Saddleback’s “Purpose Drive,” a campus road named for Pastor Rick Warren’s best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life, I spotted a weather-beaten sticker for “KONY 2012,” the momentarily sensational campaign to marshal public support for capturing the brutal warlord Joseph Kony who, for roughly two decades, had forced Ugandan youth to become child soldiers in his Lord’s Resistance Army. The sticker clung to a pole in the median, but the KONY campaign was all but forgotten two months after the instant viral success of its March 2012 video—a short, well-produced documentary that asked teens to spread the word about Uganda’s child soldiers through stickers, Facebook updates, and rubber wristbands.
    The impassioned KONY 2012 movement fizzled out almost as quickly as it had ignited, due in part to accusations that the movie (which turned out to be made by young evangelical activists from nearby San Diego, who had downplayed their faith to attract a wider audience) was misleading naive US youth about the facts on the ground in Uganda. * Other critics charged that the movie’s call to action was ineffective and unethical, encouraging supporters to believe that buying branded merchandise and sharing the video with friends would actually help lead to Kony’s capture. In truth Kony had long since decamped to plague other countries, and these days the surviving population in northern Uganda faces more pedestrian development challenges, issues that do not lend themselves as easily to viral Facebook videos.
    But if the Christian adoption and orphan-care movement has become a fad, it’s not one in danger of fading yet. Inside Saddleback’s main worship center—just one of nearly twenty buildings on campus—an estimated two thousand people gathered for the Christian Alliance for Orphans Summit. Many were church pastors and adoption ministry leaders, and the 2012 summit had drawn more people than ever before, up from thirteen hundred in 2010 and thirty-eight at the Alliance’s first meeting in 2004.
    “This is the beginning of the end,” Saddleback Pastor Rick Warren, a portly man in his late fifties who first gained fame for his Hawaiian shirt collection, told the crowd as he opened the summit. “It’s the end of orphans in the world.” The next day the audience cheered when Warren declared the route he envisioned for eradicating orphanhood: “When I say ‘orphan care,’” he boomed, “it’s adoption first, second, and last.” After several years of high-profile scandals around international adoption, it was a strong affirmation of the continuing central role adoption plays in the movement.
    Warren noted the concerted effort to promote adoption within Saddleback’s own congregation. “Our initial goal was to have one thousand