A few days ago a crude and philistine Ron Paul fan (is there any other kind?) made a video advertisement for his (or her) chosen candidate that made fun of a rival candidate for the Republican nomination, Jon Huntsman, for his adoption of a Chinese girl (and an Indian girl) from his time overseas as the United States Ambassador to China. Apparently it is mistakenly thought to be acceptable for candidates or their surrogates to engage in “yellowface” pantomimes and mocking of a man who helped to save unwanted girls from terrible fates.

As someone who both deeply opposes the abhorrent practice of child sacrifice to the idol of convenience, which we call abortion, I feel that we often ignore adoption in our public discourse for the sake of false dilemmas. After all, people can feel an easier conscience if the choices are letting unwanted children be raised by people who are often unfit to take care of the children or in killing them in the womb. However, when people recognize that there are millions of people who wish to be and are able to be loving parents but are simply unable to have children themselves for whatever reason, then they have to deal with the fact that there is a better option than the false dilemma set up by others, a principled third way to ensure what is best for the innocent child.

Too often many of us (and I speak for myself here as well) are born into families of chance, with people that we often don’t get along with very well in unhealthy relationships where generation after generation simply does not know how to properly love or care for their spouses or their children, because no one taught them. These existing difficulties are made more difficult when such families (as they often do) are places where alcohol, chemical substances, and children are abused. In such families of chance there is little beside DNA and self-defeating strategies of manipulation to force any sense of unity among such squabbling and bickering families of chance.

On the other hand, adoptive families are families of choice. People choose to adopt–they are not stuck with children they do not know how to love or care for, but rather they choose to care for others. Even if a child growing up in such an environment might long to know their birth parents for understandable reasons, they know love and it is better to know love from someone unrelated to you than to know hatred and abuse by your blood family, if you have to choose between the two, as is often the case.

We who consider ourselves to be Christians ought to consider ourselves particularly sensitive to adoption because the Bible refers to the relationship between God and ancient Israel (see Hosea 11:11, Isaiah 1:2) as well as between God and the Church (see Galatians 4:4-7, Romans 8:14-17). God adopted Israel and He adopts us as believers, taking us from often abusive and unloving families of chance and bringing us into His family by His choice so that He may love and care for us as His adopted children.

And yet all too often those of us who are in God’s family by His choice think of each other as spiritual families of chance, with our cliques and our favoritism and our general lack of love and concern for our brethren and our lack of interest in their well-being. We should help each other out, encourage each other, do what we can to network and build each other’s successes. (Naturally, we should do that with our own physical relatives as well.) And yet instead we sit together for a couple hours a week, and otherwise don’t know or have much interaction or interest at all in our fellow brethren among the body of Christ. We were chosen to be family with God and with each other by His will–we should not take that choice lightly or think it unimportant in how we treat our brethren.

I must say that by nature I am not a person who finds intimacy and closeness very easy. Rather, my life has led me to keep most others at a distance because of lack of trust. Nonetheless, there are people who are friends that I consider to be brothers, to whom I pour out my deepest concerns, and listen patiently to theirs. Such people I consider closer than the vast majority of my blood relatives (which, sadly, is not a very high standard of closeness to beat). Such people are close because they are families of choice–my choice–and I choose not to be burdened by disloyal and manipulative relatives who fail to recognize the mutuality of obligations in love. If they choose to repent and change then my choice would be different. But the choice is ours. One cannot create families by fiat–one can only do it by time and by love and building up of trust and affection. That’s far easier said than done.