All Aboard the Orphan Train! — The Revealer

We wrote our new book, Religion Is Not Done With You, with the express intention of helping readers learn to identify and understand how religion shapes the world around us—even (maybe especially) when many of us are not religious ourselves. The book offers a number of examples to show religion at work in the world: shaping maps, calendars, laws, healthcare, even airports! The point isn’t just to show that individual people use religion to do some truly horrific and also spectacularly wonderful things—though that is certainly true—but to encourage more folks to pay attention to systems, particularly systems forged out of white Christian nationalism, that toxic blend of white supremacy, Christian supersessionism, and American exceptionalism.

Religion is easier to spot in some systems than others. It’s hard to miss religion shaping the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, when six of nine justices are Catholic. But what about systems in which the workings of white Christian nationalism are harder to spot—systems we often assume are doing good, kind, and important work? What about, for instance, adoption?

Adoption, especially but not exclusively in the United States, is a system that works to support and expand a white Christian nationalist agenda. Of course, this is not all adoption is! In many cases, adoption allows children who need care to find loving homes; adoption can expand families for folks unable to conceive. And let’s get something straight before we go any further: we are not anti-adoption. This issue is both professional (we are scholars of race, power, and religious minoritization) and personal (Ilyse is an adoptee; Megan’s older brother is an adoptee). But, as we’ve explored this season on our podcast, to understand the full picture of adoption, we must account for its white Christian nationalist roots, goals, and operations.

Understanding Adoption

Before we can dive into how adoption has worked and is still working to make more white Christian Americans and keep America a predominantly white Christian nation, we need to go over the basics.

Adoption transfers the legal guardianship of a child, usually but not exclusively from a legally recognized biological parent to another adult. This includes stepparent adoptions, foster care adoptions, private adoptions, and international adoptions. Americans adopt roughly 150,000 children each year; recent figures estimate there are 5-7 million adoptees currently living in the U.S. Adoption is also an industry: IBIS World estimates that the Adoption & Child Welfare Services industry netted $25.2 billion in 2023 alone.

Estimating how much gets spent on adoption is easier than estimating the number of adoptees, however. Most U.S. adoptions (and many adoptions around the globe) are plenary adoptions, which legally and permanently sever ties between biological parents and adoptees to such an extent that adoptive parents are listed on an adoptee’s birth certificate, making it difficult if not impossible to provide an accurate reckoning. Adoptees have vociferously criticized the plenary adoption model, the effects of which irrevocably shape the course of their entire lives.

“Adoptee” might be an unfamiliar term, but it’s an important one: it signals a shift away from focusing on the process itself as something that happens to a person who lacks agency (adoption/adopted) and toward centering the agency of the vulnerable person most affected by the process (the adoptee). Historically, the narrative of adoption privileges the adoptive parents, assuming children cannot fully understand their own experiences, should and will adapt to their new circumstances, and will be grateful they’re receiving care at all

Adoptees who share their experiences are often silenced—and even attacked—by adoption advocates who insist the process is inherently beneficial for all involved. As Adoptee Mentoring Society Program Director amanda paul put it, “I can’t think of any other groups of trauma survivors who are told to be grateful for that traumatic experience.” Transracial Chinese and South Korean adoptees like paul and Joel Kim Booster are spearheading the push to center adoptees and their unique vulnerabilities in conversations about adoptions, particularly because transracial adoption (which boomed in the latter half of the 20th century) strips adoptees of their nationality and in some cases renders them stateless.

But even for adoptees whose adoptive families share similar backgrounds, the experience of adoption is imbued with harm and alienation. Severing ties between biological parents and children affects adoptees emotionally, mentally, physically, and socially—and often also ethnically, racially, and religiously. (We’ll come back to this last bit in the next section.) In what’s now the United States, that harm and alienation occur in the service of making more Christian Americans—preferably more white Christian Americans, and, failing that, more Christian Americans raised by white parents.

Religion and Adoption in the United States

The largest adoption agencies in the United States are Christian-affiliated, and the relationship between Christianity, whiteness, and American-ness is both well-established and challenging to untangle. Adoption was used as part of genocide and continues to be used in practices of “dekinning” in politicized populations, like migrants. Adoption was used by federal and state governments to destroy “undesirable” families in the name of “saving” the most vulnerable among us. Many Christians pitch adoption as a missionary strategy.

Adoption still is a factor in criminalizing racialized minorities, especially those struggling financially. In 2024, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that since 2022, children facing poverty and homelessness across Georgia were removed from their families over 1,800 times. We know that people of color are more likely to be policed, more likely to be reported to departments of child welfare as well as more likely to have their children removed, and more likely to be of lesser financial means than white counterparts—which is to say the risk of losing your child, temporarily or forever, are significantly higher for people of color. We also know that white parents are overrepresented in the foster care system and comprise nearly three-quarters of adoptive parents.

There is far more to be said about the entanglements of religion, race, nationalism, and adoption than we can adequately cover here, but just to survey the historical and contemporary landscape:

Orphan Trains

In 1853, minister Charles Loring Brace proposed a solution for the estimated 30,000 “street Arabs” (largely Jewish and Catholic children) who slept outdoors in New York City. Please note that the term “street Arabs” marks the children in question as both not-white and not-Christian, and thus in need of “saving.” Some were orphans; some were solo immigrants; some just found sleeping outside preferable to cramped tenement accommodations. Brace’s answer to this problem? Orphan trains. This man packed a quarter million mostly Catholic and Jewish children onto literal trains and shipped them out west as a source of cheap labor for nice white Christian families. Brace, like many of his time, saw work within the context of a family outside a city as a way to rehabilitate moral failings and their genetic predilections—a way to make religiously and racially inferior children more white, more Christian, and therefore more American.

The Baby Scoop Era

During the Baby Scoop Era (1945-1973)—and yes, that’s Source link