Adoptee Theology is NOT Adoption Theology
When I discuss my academic work and research interests with people, I’m very intentional about calling my work “adoptee theology” and not “adoption theology.” When people try to refer back to what I’ve just mentioned, they often reply by calling the work “adoption” work. I think it’s important to be clear on why I consider the work I do to be “adoptee” and not “adoption” work.
First and foremost, I think the distinction is key because “adoption” is a separate theological concept from the modern child welfare system. The theological concept of “adoption” primarily refers to ways that people have thought about and understood our inheritance of eternal life & the Kingdom of God through Christ’s salvific acts. In other words, theological conversations about “adoption” are concerned with a spiritual sense of adoption and not on our modern understanding of legal structures to create nuclear families.
Secondly, “adoptee” is an identity and as such adoptee theology is identity and context based work. Adoptee theology is necessary because it centers and considers the ways in which God works & speaks about the forms of violence & trauma as well as joy & healing that are innate to the adoptee experience. Adoptee theology has the capacity to discuss family-making, kinship, and attachment but it is not primarily preoccupied with setting up a basis for the existence of the adoption system as a whole.
Many non-adopted people focus on normalizing child adoption through spiritual adoption concepts. Although there is a good intention at the root of promoting the idea that “all Christians are adopted and so this adopted child is no more or less adopted than the rest of us” — this is ultimately unhelpful in practice and oftentimes viewed as dismissive and ignorant by adoptees.
Adoptee theology does not seek to explain or justify the existence of adoption (and thus the validity of adoptees to exist). Rather, adoptee theology starts from the reality that adoptees exist and have real spiritual lives separate from their adoptive families that are in dialogue with God and reveal Christ in the world. This base allows us to imagine that the lenses and lives of adoptees have something real and efficacious to reveal to the whole Church about Christ’s work in the world. Adoptee theology seeks to give something liberating back to adoptees who have largely been framed as an object, rather than an acting subject, in their own story. This ongoing project of unveiling our role in God’s story is also part of the larger movement of theological work that is decolonizing and removing the glorification of Empire from our modern reading of God’s word.
Adoptee theology, much like Liberation Theology, Queer Theology, or Womanist Theology — is not just meant for adoptees. It is meant for the Church and its leaders to take seriously so that we create a healthier spiritual future for each and every member of the Body of Christ.
