Richard Land has itched my trigger for a long time, and now he’s itched everybody else’s trigger in AdoptionLand
Land. the president of Southern Evangelical Seminary and former head of the Southern Baptist Conferences’ Ethics and Religious Liberty Committee, published a preposterous pierce of adoptionist propaganda the other day in in the Christian Post, entitled Adoption: The Best Answer. Written in honor of National Adoption Awareness Month, of course.
Land spouts his usual heretical driviel, and then slides headlong into a short course on adoption theology and soul saving, but for married couples only.
Frankly, I can think of no more “Christian” act that Christian married couples could perform than to adopt a child who is in desperate need of a mother and a father, and who will raise that child, or children, in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (Eph. 6:4 ). After all, aren’t all of us as Christians God-adopted? When we accepted Jesus as our Lord and Savior, God declared us His children. As a result of our Heavenly Father having adopted us, we have a loving, forgiving, perfect, divine Father as illustrated by Jesus in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15).
We all know Rosie O’Donnell’s adoption theology: God put you in the wrong tummy, now I have to fix it.
Land goes Rosie one better patriarchly declaring that you not only flew into the wrong tummy but you got the wrong dad, to boot! What a clumsy sot you are!
Ethicist Richard Land
Keeping the baby is almost never preferable to allowing a baby to be adopted into a solid, faithful Christian home. A single mother who keeps her baby is quite often denying that baby the father that God wants for that baby, and every baby, to have. Furthermore, in most circumstances, keeping the baby circumscribes and forecloses both the mother’s and the baby’s economic futures in tragic and unfortunate ways.
What in the hell was God thinking? Perhaps he was distracted by somebody begging him to win one for the Gipper or to score a some good rock for him..
I read Land’s lament to a friend of mine, and he asked, “Does this mean that the adoptive father should divorce his wife and marry the birthmother?” Hey! I saw Bette Davis and Henry Fonda in a movie like that once only the wife died.!
Ironically about the same time Land was dithering his dick over bastards, Daniel ibn Zayd was publishing a wonderfully informative deconstruction of adoption theology, :Doesn’t it Say to Adopt in the Bible? , part of his own Anti-adoption month: 30 answers to 30 questions on adoption,” a series I recommend to anybody interested in the global-economic-cultural agenda of world child shuffling and its relationship to various capitalisms.
Daniel, who knows more than Richard Land about the Bible, Q’uran, and how language can de-contexturalize and agendize meaning left our SBC boss in the dust. I don’t want to be guilty of being simple-minded myself, but I’m taking a snippet here to illustrate Land’s simple-minded declaration v historical meaning:
The main point still holds true: The modern-day notion of adoption, as practiced in primarily “First-World”, capitalist nations, has no precursor from Biblical times that would allow the imposition of this more-current notion on Biblical readings or texts–it’s current use is a fabrication of modern-day needs and conceits. It thus becomes disturbing the lengths to which current interpreters of the Bible will go to twist the language and the stories to suit their purposes, such as a recent example found in Cruciform Press’s Reclaiming Adoption. Sadly, the precedent here is similar to the previous use of Biblical verse to justify slavery, and the divine right of kings, among other traditions and actions that we dismiss today, as well as the revival of such tropes, such as slavery disgustingly recategorized as a salvational experience for slaves
Read Daniel and then go over and read Land and leave a comment. The guy has been taken to task and exiled to the woodshed.
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