“We Were All Wrong”

When a scholar admits “we were all wrong” you just know – bet on it – that he or she is about to get things right. Which is what we find in Samuel Perry’s newest book, Religion for Realists, and his first chp has those words as the title. Fair enough. Let’s hear him out.

In his PhD at Chicago Perry studied “high-risk” and “high-cost” adoption practices and foster care. He studied this trend because he was told “evangelical families… we're signing up en masse to raise funds and try to adopt as many children as possible, both domestically and overseas. Many were apparently eager to adopt children with physical or behavioral special needs.” His family was one of them. Furthermore, adoption was also explained as reaching others for Christ. The chp is no criticism of adopting or parents who adopt or who enter into foster care. Not at all.

That “en masse” got him going. Some spoke of a “menacing” crusade to adopt among evangelicals, not least by homeschooling families. This was the narrative: “sincere religious faith was driving individual behavior; some rediscovered ‘theology of adoption’ was directing their sincerity into effective actions; and this was largely a grassroots, bottom-up phenomenon.” Some claimed to be reducing the number of children available in half (in Colorado, for instance). “Faith was propelling sacrificial obedience. God's ideas about what true Christianity looks like we're transforming hearts. And those transformed hearts were transforming society, one child at a time. Nobody questioned this storyline; the only debate is whether the impact was for better or for worse.”

I remember the days when this so-called adoption crusade was going on.

Now the “we were all wrong” bit. “They were all wrong. Nothing was changing. When I looked at the numbers, there was no evidence of a Christian adoption crusade. There still isn't, in fact. Specifically there is no evidence that Christians have moved the needle on adoption and foster care numbers at all, no evidence that Christians’ behaviors have changed in response to all the books, conferences, and sermons. Certainly some change happened anecdotally, at the level of a few individuals, but not to any sort of scale.”

That may stun you, so please read the last two paragraphs again.

For Perry the narrative being told illustrates the reason why religion needs to be studied scientifically, that is, through the grids of social scientific statistics. The issue that he sees is that ideas or theology or doctrines are narrated as the reason for changing people's behaviors. He wants to flip this script, and anchor doctrines in a social group’s ideology. Religion is more than the “interplay of faith, ideas, and agency.”

First, because he is a sociologist and was doing sociological research, Samuel Perry interviewed many people about their adoption practices. When he pressed into the family story, it became clear that in most cases the reason people began to consider adoption was not theology, but fertility issues. The initial move toward adoption then was not ideas but family desires.

Second, the centrality of family among evangelicals made having children a status marker, the more the better. What would not be honoring more than having a few children of your own and then adopting a couple more? “What drove them was a combination of social identity and group norms, in this case, the (sometimes unspoken, sometimes explicit) understanding that ‘people like us’ have children and are defined by parenthood.”

Third, why didn’t the admit these truths when they were asked why they adopted? The Anglo-Protestant assumption: “religious action is driven by faith in some theological idea. On the contrary, as is more the rule than the exception, theology came later.” I will put it this way: theology was the legitimation description of the group’s worldview.  Here’s how he says it in different ways: “they began to learn and reproduce the theological language to narrate their own journey to themselves and others.” And, “their motives had to be articulated in faith-centric terms when the context made their Christian identities salient.” And, “but these were reinterpreted accounts of their actions retrofitted to community expectations by people who share those same expectations.” Finally, “most of these families were adopting or fostering for the same reasons such families have always done so: to have children that they couldn't have through more traditional means.” And that means the adoption “is less about theological belief and more about the deep culture of community norms and social identities.”

Fourth, a kicker in all this is demographics, which Perry has in his command. The facts support this conclusion: the demographics of adoption by evangelical parents, including fostering children, map neatly onto the adoption and fostering in the general population of the country. In other words, there was no special adoption movement among evangelicals that altered the demographics of adoption in the United States. It could be said that evangelicals aligned themselves with an existing adoption movement in the USA. In fact, “religious groups, just like their religious movements, grow and decline largely as a consequence of population dynamics.” Laws and policies generated the adoption demographic changes during this period, and evangelicals were able to find a narrative that legitimated it theologically. When other nations shut down the ability of Americans to adopt internationally, a decline occurred in the USA.

Finally, adoption became a status symbol among evangelicals; the committed adopted and fostered. Adoption told others who they were and with whom they belonged. The success story then was about how such persons, and evangelicalism in particular, were perceived and talked about in the public square. “They adopt. They foster. They are compassionate.” Thus, adoption practices “allowed evangelicals to think differently about their own faith within a broader context that increasingly stigmatizes evangelicals as anti-everything.”

Religion “is really more about sacralized group identity” than practical change. “Social movements aim to change the world. Religious movements aim to change the group and its status within the world.”