I am delighted to be here today to be a part of something that may seem groundbreaking from a policy standpoint but in reality is as American as baseball and apple pie.
That is, bringing together leaders in the religious community and leaders in government to help solve a problem--in this case, the foster-care crisis--is not really all that new.
Surely, President Bush has made faith-based initiatives one of the hallmarks of his Administration, but the President is simply tapping a dynamic that has been part of the American story from the beginning.
Whether we are talking about why the first Americans came to these shores, or how religion was invoked to justify the American Revolution, or how it worked to bring about an end to slavery, religious leaders have been indispensable to our nation and our society.
And this is why the faith communities represented at this conference are so important, because the acute problem of foster care—like many of the social problems that plague our land—cannot and will not be resolved without the help of the communities that you represent.
For example, who would have thought that the racial discrimination a generation ago would have been resolved without the courageous leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., the gifted preacher whose deeply held religious convictions inspired his work, vision, and accomplishments?
A more recent example is Millard Fuller, whose sincere religious faith prompted him--as a self-made millionaire businessman--to give it all up at the age of 29 to begin a new life building safe, decent, and affordable homes through a new organization that he called Habitat for Humanity.
Fuller’s idea was simple: He wanted to build modest homes on a no-profit, no-interest basis, thus making homes affordable to families on low-incomes. Requiring future home owners to invest their own “sweat equity” in the building of their homes--as well as homes of other families--lowered the cost of the house while increasing the pride of ownership.
Where would our nation be today without Habit for Humanity? Today, Habit has built more than 150,000 houses for more than 625,000 people. This is not something that the Department of Housing and Urban Development could have done—it required a special ingredient that a secular government cannot create—the religious faith and devotion of man like Millard Fuller.
As Fuller says: “I see life as both a gift and a responsibility. My responsibility is to use what God has given me to help his people in need.”
Solving the Homebuilding Problem
Just as Fuller responded to the need to build affordable homes, we are here to encourage the application of what the President calls that “wonder-working power” to another type of homebuilding problem: loving parents for the 129,000 foster-care children seeking adoption.
In some ways, this is a more serious problem. It is easier to build a new house than to build a home--a place that signifies emotional commitment, security, and belonging. It is easier to put up four walls and a roof than to create a haven sanctified by the abiding ties of wedlock, parenthood, and family obligation.
Yet this is exactly what children in foster care--like all children--need.
Foster care children lack the loving care and acceptance associated with hearth and home. These children are truly what Jesus called “the least of these.” Their lives have been an emotional roller coaster of different family placements, new schools, and sometimes separation from siblings. And being older than 8 years of age, these children are way beyond the age that draws the most interest from prospective, adoptive parents.
Unfortunately, if we fail to anchor these children in families, they will face greater risk of academic failure, mental illness, adult homelessness, welfare dependency, and imprisonment.
- The problem is further complicated because the government can’t really fix this problem alone. We can identify the problem, we can draw attention to it, but we can’t really solve it.
As much as Americans look to the government to solve problems, there are limits as to what we can do, especially when it comes to foster children.
Now this doesn’t mean that government isn’t important—for public policies certainly do make differences in the lives of children and families. As someone who oversees $46 Billion annually in government spending, I would not have taken this job if I didn’t think that government was important.
And when it comes to adoption, the Bush Administration is doing all it can to streamline, encourage, and accelerate the adoption process so that more foster-care children can be delivered into a permanent, loving home. For example:
Through the tax relief bill of 2001, we have eased the financial burden of adoption by nearly doubling the maximum adoption credit from $5,000 to 10,000 per child. And for adoptions involving “special needs” children, the tax credit jumped from $6,000 to $10,000, regardless of expenses.
We have expanded the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program by improving post-adoptive services. We have increased funding available to the states, including education and training vouchers to youth who have been adopted from foster care after the age of 16.
The Adoption Promotion Act of 2003 continues all the current incentives for adoption in the states, including the Adoption Incentive Program—which awards financial bonuses to states that increase the number of children adopted from foster care--for another five years.
And this has worked. The annual number of adoptions has increased by 79 percent since 1996, with 51,000 children adopted out of foster care in 2002.
To reinforce these gains, we launched the first federal adoption website, <www.adoptkidsus.org> just two years ago. More than 7,000 children are featured on the website, and more than 2,700 have been placed with adoptive families.
As you already heard this morning, our national public service advertising campaign will increase public awareness and encourage adoption of older children from the foster care system.
Many of the state adoption officials in this room have spent countless hours helping children, and contributing to these good figures. And I commend you for your selfless sacrifice to find homes for children. I would venture to guess that none of you went into the adoption business to get rich. And yet, through your efforts, tens of thousands of adopted children have experienced great riches because of your efforts. Thank you.
Our efforts thus far have produced good results. However, there are factors and dynamics that remain beyond our control. As much as we love these kids, all the social services in the world can’t compensate for everything that loving parents can do for a child.
In other words, government can’t be the loving parents and we can’t create the loving homes that these children need.
Nor can the government force American citizens--especially those who are already parents and have more demands than they can handle—to go the extra mile and decide to adopt a foster child into their family. There is no law that requires families to adopt children.
Adoption is a HUGE undertaking. It requires extraordinary commitment and dedication. Most Americans find rearing their own biological children a huge commitment that taxes them to the hilt. Some parents can’t even handle that level of commitment and tragically desert their children and families.
So parenting and rearing children who are not your own blood requires an unusual level of commitment and sacrifice—far more than is the case with a conventional family.
You might say that we need to find parents who have a special calling to do this kind of thing. We need to find parents to Answer the Call to adopt children.
And that kind of commitment can only come from within the heart.
So where do we find these kinds of extraordinary parents? And how do we persuade them to become adoptive parents?
This is precisely why we need the religious institutions and faith-based communities represented here today. You have both the moral resources as well as the family resources to help the nation deal with the foster-care crisis.
II. Possessing the moral resources necessary for a virtuous republic, religious institutions have authority to persuade American families to go the extra mile and adopt foster-care children.
That faith-based organizations possess resources that secular government does not should be obvious.
While I am not a theologian or a clergyman, I do know that the three most representative faiths in America—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—all uphold in their sacred texts a teaching or principle that cuts to heart of the foster case crisis. They all claim that God commands his children to care for the less fortunate.
In the Jewish tradition, the Tanach [TAH-NAK] is replete with admonitions to care for the orphans and fatherless among us.
In the Muslim tradition, the Koran teaches that those who follow Allah to care for the “orphans, the needy and the wayfarer.”
The Christian tradition echoes these same sentiments. Jesus went as far as to say that his followers would be judged to the degree in which they care for “the least of these.”
Furthermore, St. Paul, the writer of much of the New Testament, frequently uses the analogy of adoption to describe how God relates to human beings. God, says Paul, is a loving Father who graciously adopts children into his family.
These moral resources of these respective traditions provide the necessary motivations for Americans to consider adoption.
And only religious institutions can challenge and inspire Americans with these kinds of appeals. It is not the business of government to preach or to admonish or even suggest what a citizen’s obligation is to his God.
Yet that doesn’t mean that we don’t recognize that religious institutions can shape society and its values in a way that government cannot.
Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington argues so convincing in his new book, Who Are We?, religion has always played a role in American society unlike that of any other industrialized nation.
In fact, Huntington claims that the founding fathers believed that religion provided the necessary virtue for the Republic. He even quotes Alexis de Tocqueville claiming that religion in America “must be regarded as the first of their political institutions.”
So we are on solid historical and political ground in encouraging to faith-based organizations to play a role in solving the foster care crisis.
But there are also practical reasons why religious institutions should get involved in foster care adoption.
III. Religious institutions offer the family resources to help solve the foster-care crisis.
What I mean by this is simple: The pool of potential adoptive families is limited—adopting special needs children is not something that your average American family will do. However, churches, synagogues, and mosques have a captive audience of likely families that represent great promise for foster children.
This was exactly what Reverend W. C. Martin, pastor of Bennett Chapel in Shelbyville, Texas, found after he decided, along with his wife Donna, to adopt four children.
So pleased with this experience, he encouraged his congregation to get involved in adoption. Within time, the families of his congregation welcomed more than 100 children into adoptive and foster homes.
In helping his congregation capture the vision, Reverend Martin invited the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services to teach classes for prospective adoptive and foster parents in his church building. Now Bennett Chapel is working with DPRS to build a community-wide Family Outreach Center to provide much needed resources, support, and gathering place.
Not every single congregation in America needs to go to this extent. In fact, given the more than 400,000 religious congregations in America, if just one family out of every three congregations nationwide chooses to adopt, we would solve the backlog of 129,000 children in foster care waiting for a home.
Another encouraging aspect of the families in religious congregations comes from the social science literature. The literature strongly suggests that churchgoing families--relative to non-churchgoing families—are more likely to posses the traits that make for effective parenting.
For example, the extensive work of Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia has found that church attendance actually makes men better fathers. Churchgoing fathers, he found, were more likely to be engaged one-on-one with their children, to participate in family dinners, and to volunteer in activities with their children.
Wilcox has also documented that churchgoing urban mothers are 20 percent more likely to rate their relationships with the husbands as excellent.
A 1998 study in Child Abuse and Neglect found that children whose parents rarely attend church were more than twice as likely to suffer from physical abuse as children whose parents attended church regularly.
A 1997 study in Social Forces found that married couples who regularly attend church were 2.5 times less likely to divorce than those who did not attend.
In other words, churchgoing families—the families that participate in your congregations--represent a good pool of potential adoptive families. And with your help, we can connect foster children with these families.
Conclusion
This is why I am delighted to be here today and to see the faith-community participating in this adoption summit.
Through the efforts of this Administration, and the state adoption professionals in this room, we have come a long way to helping children find adoptive homes. However, more children need adoptive homes
The moral resources of your respective religious traditions, coupled with the family resources that your congregations represent, can go a long in placing more and more foster children in loving homes. And with the professional expertise of our state adoption agencies, this partnership of faith-based organizations and government could make a real difference in the lives of children.
President Bush would be proud, as this meeting symbolizes his commitment to adoption, and his commitment to solving the foster care problem. Last year, the President said this as he signed the Adoption Promotion Act of 2003:
“The future of many thousands of children depends on the willingness of caring parents to make that personal commitment. It would take less than 1 percent of the American population to provide a home to every child awaiting adoption. . . . Yet so many parents who have made the decision, count it among life’s greatest and happiest turning points. And so I hope more Americans, after careful thought and prayer, will make the decision to adopt a boy or girl of their own.”
I trust that all of us here this afternoon will be able to take this bold vision back to our communities and back to our religious organizations.
Thank you.
-Address at Adoption and Foster Care Summit July 2004 for Wade F. Horn, Ph.D., Assistant Secretary, Administration for Children and Families
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