Father-Driven Adoption
Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, 19 October 2012
We live in polarized times, and it shows up in many issues. One of
the unfortunate consequences of this is that if you say that a
particular course of action might have any negative consequences
anywhere, you must be against that course of action. You must be an
enemy of it. If you think home schooling, for example, could ever end
badly, you must be against home schooling. This does not follow, and if
the sensitivities of our illogical age are honored, the results will be
increasingly bad.
We have gotten to the point where knowledge that some people flunk
math classes is taken as a deep conviction (on the part of the person
who knows it) that math classes ought not to be taken. No . . perhaps a
person should enroll in them with an accurate understanding of what it
is going to take. Trying to get people prepared is not the same thing as
scaring them off.
I say this because I want to urge a central caution about adoption,
and I want to do so as someone who honors and respects those who have
counted the cost and who have done it right. May their tribe increase,
and God bless all of them.
There are numerous other issues that flow out of this one concern,
and perhaps I can develop them further some other time. But as I have
watched Christian couples adopting children (over decades), I have come
to a conclusion, and I would ask every prospective adopting couple to
consider this deeply, and here it is. Is the adoption desire and process
being led and driven by the father?
This is not the same thing as asking if he is okay with it. This is
not the same thing as wondering if he has signed on. I am saying that if
the energy for the adoption is coming from the mom, the chances of
long-term difficulties in the family are greatly increased. The kind of
adoption that is modeled for us in Scripture is an adoption that results
in us crying out "Abba, Father" (Rom. 8:15).
It should also be noted that this is not the same thing as checking
whether the couple would say that the whole process was driven by the
father. In our conservative Christian circles, we know what the
appropriate language is concerning headship and submission, and so there
are many families where mom runs the show, and yet everybody dutifully
keeps up the appearances. So if you were ask them if this were a
"father-driven" adoption, the answer would come back "absolutely." But
everybody who knows the family knows that it isn't true. If we held a
conference for men, and we had two registration lines -- one for
hen-pecked husbands, and the other for men who were not -- we might
discover that half the guys in the non-hen-pecked line were there
because their wives told them to stand in that line. What we do and what
we say we are doing are not necessarily the same thing.
Of course I am not belittling or disparaging the important and
influential role of the mother -- but her role is the same as it is with
her natural children. She is the church -- the place of nurture,
comfort, acceptance. If all that comfort is offered without a decisive
and genuine decision from the father, all that sentiment will simply
provide abundant raw material for that place to become a place of
turmoil. The father's decision must not be pro forma. He must not be
rubber-stamping anything.
He must not be driven in this thing; he must
drive. And if he isn't driving, then don't go.
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