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5. Religion and Reunion
- University of Michigan Press
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75 5 Religion and Reunion It has seemed to me that the religious aspect of adoption is in the fact of forgiveness and the grace of God, as these make possible relief from the otherwise impossible burdens of illegitimacy and prohibition of contact between natural parents and adopted children. —Jean Paton, 1959 The years 1957–1960 were the most intellectually fertile ones of Jean Paton’s life as her intensive reading melded with her experience as an adopted person,social worker, and Christian. Paton produced a new adoption reform program, which she named“Reunion,” and new concepts crucial to her understanding of adoption reform. Her voracious reading habits did not prevent Paton from attending to the practical matters of marketing her written work and conducting adoption interviews. In January 1957, she placed another ad in the Personals section of the Saturday Review of Literature, alerting potential readers to the preparation of her latest publication,“Three Trips Home.”1 A month later, she devised and sent out a detailed questionnaire on what she had termed the adoption fantasy.2 In April, Paton mailed a press release to Canadian newspapers, calling on adult adoptees born before 1935 to volunteer for a study of adoption. She continued to promote The Adopted Break Silence, sending review copies to publishers and journal editors who requested them and mailing flyers, which publicized favorable reviews of the study.3 One review, in the syndicated newspaper column Child Behavior by psychologist Louise Bates Ames and Dr.Frances Ilg,cofounders of the Gesell Institute of Child Development, which called the study “extremely worthwhile reading,” brought in 700 inquiries.4 In October, Paton also found time to undertake a field trip to Southern California to interview fifteen people.5 The interviews with adult adoptees pro- 76 jean paton and the struggle to reform american adoption duced little new material. However, one unintended consequence of her California visit was that she learned at a public function that social workers disliked her book. Paton noted that they believed that The Adopted Break Silence“was an attack upon the profession of social work.” She dismissed their criticism. It was “a small and most grudging view,” she wrote, adding that“the book is an attack upon myself, and I have profited from it.”6 Still, their disapproval rankled Paton and would have far-reaching consequences, giving her an explanation for why her work was ignored and laying the groundwork for her future animus against the profession. By May 1958, Paton had moved about eighty miles east of Ojai, to Acton, California, a small residential community located in the rugged Sierra Pelona Mountains.7 There Paton began reading extensively. As in her earlier reading, she showed a remarkable appetite for interdisciplinary study, including history, religion, politics, psychology, science, genealogy, anthropology, and sociology.8 During this intense period of study, one concept—Christian adoption—came to dominate Paton’s intellectual landscape, without which it is impossible to understand her life’s work.9 This idea drew upon Paton’s intense religiosity, which was initially sparked in childhood. Ypsilanti was home to more than ten vibrant Christian denominations, and while growing up, Jean was a member of a fundamentalist Presbyterian church; she once even entertained the idea of becoming a missionary.10 The church provided her with “a sense of God,” who was“a presence throughout the world, and He was Love.”11 Paton believed that “this was a wonderful gift.”12 But her public schooling tempered her religiosity through critical thinking. She related how just before going away to college at age fifteen or sixteen, her minister gave her an antievolution tract. Once he was out of sight, Paton violently tore it up,“right through the binding.” It took her “many years to repair the inner injury.”13 Sometime in her forties, however, as a result of what appears to be a conversion experience, Paton was “born again.” She wrote to Richard Byfield, a minister of the Protestant Episcopal Church in San Francisco,“His presence shot through my many-tiered walls.I have been on my knees in gratitude more than one time since I began the Life History Study Center.”14 Paton incorporated the Christian beliefs of forgiveness and reconciliation into her ideas about adoption reform; these religious concepts came to define her understanding of intermediaries, search, and reunion. It may be a surprise for many to learn that Jean Paton was a religious person or that religious tenets permeate her understanding of adoption reform...