The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce Page A

polemical essay for the Associated Baptist Press arguing that the prosecution of Silsby’s team was good for the US evangelical church, which he saw as embracing a heretical and reckless attitude about adoption. If the missionaries were duped at all, Gutwein wrote, “They were duped by the peculiar strain of American evangelicalism that seems to think the United States is God’s chosen country and that seeks conversions by any and all means, including adoption. . . . This has been taken to the extreme by theologians and pastors who encourage infertile couples to have the family of their dreams and expand the Kingdom at the same time by adopting a child from another culture and heritage and replacing that heritage and faith with their own.” The Silsby saga turned even seedier when Jorge Puello, a US-born man living in the Dominican Republic who volunteered to represent Silsby’s group, posing as an attorney and using an alias, turned out to be wanted for questioning concerning human trafficking and child prostitution in both the United States and El Salvador. (In 2011 Puello—charged under the name Jorge Torres—was sentenced to three years in US federal prison after pleading guilty to separate, earlier charges of alien smuggling.)
    The mood in Haiti shifted more decisively against the missionaries. When a Minnesota adoptive mother came to the country to pick up hernew adoptive son and five other children who had lived at the Children of the Promise orphanage—an undamaged orphanage ninety miles outside the capital that nonetheless evacuated children under humanitarian parole—a group of men surrounded her at the airport, demanding to see her paperwork. “They started screaming at us that they are Haitian children,” a volunteer with the group told CNN, “and who do we think we are taking their kids from their country, and these missionaries can’t be stealing kids.” Central Valley Baptist Church posted an acknowledgement on their website that Silsby’s group had made mistakes and asked the Haitian prime minister to forgive them. Charisa Coulter was released from jail in March, and Silsby, who was eventually convicted of the separate, lesser charge of arranging illegal travel, was released for time served in May.
    Prime Minister Bellerive spoke to the circus aspect of the Silsby trial and how it had subsumed a majority of public attention around the larger crisis. “I believe it’s a distraction for the Haitian people,” he said, “because they are talking more now about 10 people than they are about one million people suffering in the streets.” A Haitian man living on the grounds of the courthouse where Silsby was tried agreed, telling ABC News that “These people are American. The whole world just wants to know what will happen to the Americans.”
    EVEN AFTER the very public Silsby affair, the lessons that Christian adoption advocates might have been expected to learn didn’t seem to take. Whereas Silsby became a villain or at least an embarrassment in the eyes of most observers—an opportunist who used the earthquake to reinvent herself, trampling on another country’s laws and families in a quest to appear heroic—things aren’t always as clear-cut. Silsby wasn’t the renegade bad apple that adoption advocates sought to portray her as but rather the person who took prevailing practices to their logical end: the sense, as one critic put it, that “I’m on a mission. I have every right to be on this mission. The rules are stupid because I know better.” Other orphan-rescue missions happening almost simultaneous to the scandal displayed a similar disregard for the law, but it was a disregard that could be harder to recognize coming from a more likable advocate—one like Tom Benz.
    In February 2010, just weeks after Silsby’s arrest, Benz, a kindly fifty-seven-year-old evangelical pastor, announced a new plan on the website of his ministry, Bridges of Faith. In coming weeks, he wrote, they