National Adoption Month: How Religious Freedom Makes Adoption Possible

During National Adoption Month, let’s talk about how religious freedom is crucial to making sure children find a home.

In Matthew 25, Jesus tells his followers, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Throughout its history, the church has paved the way in caring for vulnerable members of society. Among the most vulnerable members of our society are children who are awaiting families, whether because their parents have died, they have been placed for adoption, or their families are currently unable to care for them. 

Children in need of families include children in foster care, as well as babies whose mothers are facing unplanned pregnancies and choose to place their child for adoption. To be pro-life is to value and cherish the life of every individual, regardless of age and regardless of place. This doesn’t end when the baby is born. Recognizing that every life has value because every person is created in the image of God shapes our attitudes toward children who are adopted or in need of adopted families, families who adopt, and biological mothers who place their child for adoption. While not every family is called to adopt, to be pro-life is to be pro-adoption.

Adoption is a beautiful picture of the gospel. We serve the Father to the Fatherless who, in Christ, has adopted us and given us an inheritance. We are called to live out this fact by how we treat those around us. One of the ways that we are called to live out the gospel is by caring for orphans and widows in their distress. This is a call that Christians have been living out in a tangible way in the U.S. within foster care and adoption. As Ryan T. Anderson has observed, 

Research has... found that practicing Christians may be over twice as likely to adopt compared to the general population, with Catholics three times as likely, and evangelicals five times as likely. Practicing Christians are also 50 percent more likely to become foster parents—and almost twice as likely to consider becoming a foster parent.

This is wonderful news, as is the news that over 250,000 children exited the foster care system last year, either returning to their families of origin or being placed in an adoptive family last year. However, the need still exists in a very real way. 

Nationally, there are 437,000 children in foster care, 125,000 of whom are waiting to be adopted. On any given day, there are approximately 10,050 children and young adults in foster care in Minnesota, and as of August of this year, there are 905 children in Minnesota who urgently need adoptive families. Just within the past two years, the number of children in Minnesota in need of families has increased by 14%.

There are unique pressures that come with foster care and adoption, and regardless of whether or not you and your family choose to foster or adopt, you can care for children in crisis by helping care for the families who are serving them by meeting physical needs, as well as offering encouragement and supporting them through prayer.

Finally, caring for vulnerable children well means caring for the communities and families around them. Vermon and Dennae Pierre write,

If James 1:27 is calling us to look after the vulnerable children suffering in our midst, it requires thinking not only about the children, but also the families and communities these children come from. It challenges us to consider not just the adopting of children, but also the reconciling of children to their original biological families when possible.

Sometimes a child whose parents are living cannot be reunited with their biological family out of concern for the child’s safety. Most of the time, though, the goal of placing a child in foster care is ultimately to reunite them with their family of origin. Often one of the most tangible ways to help children in crisis is by coming alongside of their families and communities as they work to break cycles of brokenness.

Seeing the need in adoption and foster care puts into perspective why religious freedom matters. Recent years have seen an increasing hostility toward adoption and foster care agencies that choose to take a stance defending biblical marriage. Losing these agencies hurts children in crisis. In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Russell Moore drew attention to the harmful effects of pushing out faith-based providers, writing,

It’s no secret what happens when faith-based providers get pushed out. A year after Boston stopped working with them, the percentage of youth in foster care who left the Massachusetts system because they aged out rose more than 50%. With fewer available homes to place children in, aging out is one of the worst outcomes as it increases a child’s likelihood of homelessness and unemployment. The rate still has not returned to pre-2006 levels. In 2011 Illinois passed a law discontinuing its partnerships with faith-based agencies—then lost more than 1,500 foster homes between 2012 and 2017. All this when the world desperately needs more providers.

The Heritage Foundation has noted that faith-based agencies often specialize in finding homes for children who are difficult to place, such as sibling groups, older children, and children with special needs. Resources that would otherwise have been available to children in need of forever families would be taken away if religious freedom is not protected. 

The Department of Health and Human Services recently put forward a new rule that protects religious freedom for foster care and adoption agencies on a federal level. This is wonderful news, but as Christianity Today pointed out, the federal rule does not prevent discrimination on state or local levels. New Hope Family Services is a current example of this. After 50 years of faithfully serving children in New York, New Hope Family Services was targeted by the New York Office of Child and Family Services (OFCS) for taking a stand in defense of biblical marriage and sexuality. OFCS ordered New Hope to violate their religious beliefs or close their doors. New Hope’s complaint against the OFCS was dismissed by a federal district court earlier this year and is currently before the Second Court of Appeals. Thanks to an emergency order issued earlier this month, the children currently being served by New Hope will be able to continue to receive care until the court ruling.

The New Hope case is not unique. Similar legal battles are currently unfolding in Michigan and in Philadelphia, and eight states currently have policies targeting foster care and adoption agencies that do not embrace homosexuality. 

Foster care and adoption are tangible ways that the church lives out the call to love the least of these, and are a vital part of the pro-life movement. Seeing the way that faith-based adoption and foster care agencies put into practice the call to love the fatherless and meet the needs of their communities highlights the importance of religious freedom. When there are thousands of children in the United States waiting for families, it doesn’t make sense to attack faith-based agencies that are meeting those needs.