Why, When I Heard the Beginning of the Haitian Orphan-Trafficking Story On the Radio As I Scrambled Eggs, I Said, ‘Christians.’

Wedged together awkwardly in the Caught Red-Handed column from the weekend’s global crime blotter: Rip Torn, breaking into a Connecticut bank lit, armed, and totally undangerous; ten Baptists from Idaho on a bus in Haiti, trying to spirit away 33 Haitian children, not all of whom were, um, orphans. Is there some hope of doing a Larry Sanders reunion show to capitalize on this concurrence of semi-sweet haplessness?

Only one of the parties in question is pleading good intentions (although Mr. Torn, I don’t think a method-research alibi would be a hard sell). According to Laura Silsby, a member of the New Life Children’s Refuge group, which is awaiting word about whether or not they’ll face child trafficking charges for taking the Haitian children without processing any paperwork, “In the chaos the government is in right now, we were just trying to do the right thing.”

Well, one gold foil star for good intentions, but geez this looks bad. Silsby’s statement amounts to something like, I stole all this stuff because you guys looked really busy at the register.

Her group, hailing from the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho and East Side Baptist Church in Twin Falls, had collected the children, ranging in age from two months to 12 years, and were attempting to move them to a seaside hotel in the Dominican Republic, which they’re trying to convert into an orphanage. They claim not to have been taking the children for adoption, but simply to remove them from harm’s way.

But that isn’t the full story. According to literature quoted in USA Today that has since been removed from the East Side church’s website, the mission to rescue Haitian orphans was designed in part to “share God’s love with these precious children, helping them heal and find new life in Christ” (though 80% of Haitians already have life in Catholicism).

The urge to “rescue” Haitian children by removing them from Haiti doesn’t twinge in Christians alone, as self-deprecatingly revealed by True/Slant’s own Laurie Essig in a post titled My Post-Colonial Fantasies of Adopting Haitian Orphans. This urge rises, perhaps, at the intersection of two powerful beams of feeling: pity for the suffering of innocents, frustration at our own feebleness watching that suffering on television as we trot on a treadmill.

But as Essig’s post indicates, in most of us that urge is tamped down by our understanding of the implicit colonial condescension in it, the desire to “civilize” the children, to upgrade them to our superior culture. And maybe in others of us the urge is flattened altogether by our knowledge of the fallout from 1975’s Operation Babylift, in which over 3,000 children were removed from South Vietnam at the end of the war, ravaging families and leaving a legacy of severe cultural dislocation for many children (if you haven’t seen the incredible documentary Daughter from Danang–which illustrates that fallout through one Tennessee woman’s frustrated effort to reconnect with her Vietnamese family–DO).

But the urge is managed differently in many Evangelicals, which is why I knew this group of Idaho do-gooders were Christians before NPR had the chance to tell me. Part of the reason is that for Evangelicals the knee-jerk colonial feeling of superiority dwells also in the realm of faith: evangelical Christians by definition feel they have the truth, and that they’re commissioned to share it with the “lost regions” of the world. So they don’t shut off the impulse to preach. When you listen to evangelicals talk about international missionary work, the phrase “spiritual darkness,” with all its Conradian echoes, recurs quite frequently in reference to Third World countries.

A less troubling reason evangelical Christians manage the adoption urge differently is that adoption is relatively common in evangelical culture. This owes to the biblical imperative to look after the physical and spiritual orphans of the world, and also to the reasoning a pastor’s wife–who had raised an adopted daughter herself–once fanned out for me: “If you’re going to be against abortion, you’ve got to be willing to adopt.”

Muting the babble of reasons for the sake of brevity, let’s skip to the result: it seems like mostly a good thing that so many Christian families are willing to adopt. I’d venture a guess that most of them are happy to endure the proper legal avenues to do it, making the New Life Children’s Refuge about as representative of adopting Christians as Rip Torn is of aging actors.