Soojin Chung. 2021. Adopting for God: The Mission to Change America through Transnational Adoption

Soojin Chung's Adopting for God recovers the religious convictions that drove the transnational adoption movement in post-war America.Focusing on 1949-60, the book centres on what Chung terms 'adoption evangelists'a dual designation: they accomplished evangelism through adoption whilst 'converting' Americans to the cause of adopting Asian children.Through comparative analysis of evangelical adoption evangelists (Robert Pierce and Everett Swanson, and the Holt family) and ecumenical ones (Pearl Buck and Helen Doss), Chung demonstrates how these distinct theological traditions employed divergent purposes, audiences and methodologies, yet contributed in concert to reshaping American understandings of race and family.By situating transnational adoption within the complex landscape of post-war Americashaped by the Korean War and Cold War geopolitics, the baby boom and ideals of the nuclear family, neoevangelicalism and Christian internationalism -Chung illuminates how adoption evangelists navigated and shaped these forces.In doing so, she offers a more nuanced understanding of religious actors within Cold War structures that challenges prevailing tendencies in Cold War historiography to underestimate their agency.Rather than portraying adoption evangelists as mere instruments of American imperial expansion, Chung presents them as complex agents whose actions were influenced by Cold War contexts yet irreducible to them.Pearl Buck exemplifies this complexity: whilst engaging with Cold War anticommunist rhetoric, her commitment to transracial adoption was shaped not merely by Cold War imperatives, but by a 'Christian worldview and philosophy of human solidarity' (97) cultivated through her childhood and missionary years in China and informed by Christian internationalism since the 1920s.Chung demonstrates that these religious resources, whilst operating within Cold War America, provided motivations and frameworks that predatedand extended beyond -Cold War ideology alone.Chung's multifaceted analysis enriches our understanding of the transnational adoption movement.In addition to the comparative analysis of evangelical and ecumenical adoption evangelists, the author's attention to gender dynamics provides another valuable dimension.