Kinism is Stupid and un-Christian

How Adoption Undermines Ethno-Stupidity

In some of the more stupid corners of the internet, ethno-nationlism has been ramping up. By “ethno-nationalism”, I mean a sense that one has a higher moral obligation to the good of their own ethnic group than they have to the good of any other group. You see this in folks like Stephen Wolfe in The Case for Christian Nationalism, in Joel Webbon, and in a host of other ethno-nationalists who have now openly touted the notion that a person should be more committed to their own “people’s” good than the good of another.

The basic argument goes like this. Just like I am more highly obligated to the good of my children than the good of another’s children, owing to my unique relationship to my children, so the intensity of my obligations to people corresponds to genetic/familial closeness. And hence, since generally speaking those who hail from the same general region as me will share genetic similarities that result in similar phenotypes—indicating familial closeness—I should prioritize their good.

Here’s the problem: the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Logic of Adoption

The entire project fails when you realize that the principle of unity in a family is not genetic similarity. It is a covenant. A man and a woman create a family together through the Spirit sanctifying their marital covenant, in which they are made mysteriously one flesh. And hence, a husband-wife pair have no greater obligation to their biological children than they do to their adopted children, because their obligations are grounded in the reality of the marital covenant.

Adoption—inclusion into the family—means coming under the same Spirit-empowered, sacramental covenant which is the principle of the unity of that family. And of course, familial adoption is itself an echo of God the Father’s gracious love in Christ Jesus the eternal Son, in whom a family is adopted through engraftment into the Son by the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ, in other words, is the New Covenant incarnate, and through union with Christ one shares the very inheritance of the Son. That means, then, that the True Family of God—of which all families are echoes and images—is fundamentally structured around the concept of the covenant, reflected in the fact that a husband-wife-children unit is structured around the covenant.

So right off the bat, the ethno-nationalist argument from Wolfe and others fails because it misses the fact that covenant, and not biology, is the true foundation of the unity of a group. And this reality reflects itself sociologically. What coheres a corporation is not ethnic similarity, but a set of shared commitments. What coheres a city is, again, a set of shared commitments. This is true for any kind of group. Now, one might form a group via a commitment to shared ethnicity—but then its the commitment itself that is the foundational principle of unity for a group. That commitment of multiple partners to each other is summatively and preeminently expressed in the concept of a covenant. And therefore, a nation does not need to cohere around a shared ethnic origin, but rather around a shared covenant. The covenant of Father, Son, and Spirit to express the excellencies of God in creation grounds the possibility of covenants in the structure of human relationships—and the potential for such covenants is the condition for the possibility of group-cohesion.

The goodness of adoption exposes this whole project as a Satanic lie from hell, distorting the goodness of a God who makes rebel exiles into sons and daughters.