Jesus Land

Julia Scheeres' memoir Jesus Land chronicles her life with her two adopted brothers, both black, and her severely Calvinist parents. The parents adopted the younger of the boys, and Julia's best friend and confidante, David, because they felt that adopting a black boy when they wanted a white child would demonstrate their Christian generosity. They adopted their older son, Jerome, so David would have someone "like him" to play with, though Jerome was violent and too traumatized by his early life to prove as obedient as David was.

Throughout, Scheeres describes her parents' rigorous Christian values and demonstrates how their love of God seemed more often than not to get in the way of their love of their children--adopted or otherwise. Throughout, they also received seemingly endless praise from their church community for their selfless, Christian behavior.

This for me pinpoints exactly the danger of the idea that religious devotion in and of itself proves one's qualification for parenthood. It also highlights that the love or lack of love parents have for their children is not dependent on biological relation.

Frequently, I think international adoption is seen as a more humanitarian gesture. This is in part because frequently people adopt from countries with less extensive health, social, and economic security than is in the U.S. It is also, I think, because that child requires more effort. The love from internationally adoptive parents is assumed to be greater because they worked harder for that child, in theory. That child is more of a burden, though the parents would probably never frame it as such. In this instance, however, David's "burden" on his parents is that he is black. That was their benevolent Christian gesture. As Scheeres writes,

My parents didn't set out to adopt two black boys. They wanted the white kid on my sister's pediatric ward.
...But the adoption agency peristed. There were scads of other children who needed homes, they said: black children.
...To reject a black baby would have been un-Christian, a sin. God was testing them. This was a chance to bear witness for Jesus Christ, to show the world that their God was not prejudiced and neither were they.
...Years later, I learned that the first time my mother touched David, she feared "the black would rub off on her hands."

In contrast to the foster homes that felt obligated only to keep him alive and collect a check, Julia Scheeres parents "would keep him alive and save his soul." Soul harvesting seems like a crappy reason to adopt a neglected child.