When it comes to providing homes for at-risk kids, people of faith, especially Christians, are far more likely to adopt and foster than non-religious people. But because of new regulations from the Biden administration, the very religious beliefs that prompt people of faith to adopt and foster could now render them ineligible. Critics say these new rules violate freedom of Religion Protections. A new film, Sound of Hope, which DailyWire Plus has partnered with Angel Studio to get into theaters on July fourth, tells the true story of Christians who transform their community through adoption. The people behind the film are hoping to draw attention to this critical issue. In this episode, Daily Wire Culture reporter, Megan Basham, explores the issue of Christian adoption as exemplified in the film, and the government policies that could end up hurting children in need. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's June 23rd, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.

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Daily WIRE Culture reporter Megan Bascham joins us now to discuss the new Peacetree Productions' film, Sound of Hope, and how new federal regulations might impact the role communities of faith play in caring for foster children. Hey, Megan. Let's start out by giving some context here. How big of a need is there for adoptive and foster families?

I think it's fair to say that it's a heartbreakingly big need. The most recent year for which we have data is 2022. That year, just over 53,000 kids were adopted out of foster care, but well over twice that number had a case plan for adoption. What that means is that they just continued in the system because they didn't have any family that caseworkers believed were safe for them to return to, and no one else adopted them. Joe Nittig is the CEO of the Global Orphan Project and founder of Care Portal. That's a platform that connects churches to kids in need. He was also an executive producer on Sound of Hope, and he broke down some of the statistics for me.

Every year in the United States, even though we pour about 30 billion taxpayer dollars into child welfare. There are more than seven million children, that's more than four million families that are referred to child protective services. So these are families at the front door of the system. And there are nearly 400,000 children that are in foster care right now. And there are more than 100,000 children in the system who are available and waiting for adoption. So that's a big picture look. A myth about child welfare is that every child that's in that system is there because of abuse. That's not true. The number one driver for why those seven million children, which kids go into the system, the number one driver is not abuse, it is neglect. It's usually poverty-related neglect. In some, we have a very reactive system with many children waiting. We keep flooding more children into the system, children that shouldn't be going in there in the first place. That is the state of the Union of Child Welfare and Child Wellbeing in the United States of America.

Then to give a little more context here, Here, the average child in foster care is around eight years old, and as they get older, it becomes much harder to place them.

Yeah, definitely heartbreaking. Just how big of a role do people of faith and Christian communities tend to play in providing homes for these kids?

Oh, man, just a massive role. So according to Barner research, practicing Christians are more than two times more likely to adopt than the general population. When you look at evangelicals, which is who this film focuses on, they're five times more likely than other Americans to adopt. They're also more likely to adopt older kids and kids who have special needs or other behavioral issues. I spoke to Tony Mitchell, who is a board member for the Christian Alliance for Orphans, also known as CAFO. That's a nonprofit that represents around 200 organizations and close to a thousand churches. Now, he was adopted out of foster care himself by a Christian family. He told me that that upbringing and his own personal faith that grew out of it were the reasons that he decided to get involved in this work.

I was given up at birth to foster care, and I remained in the foster care system for two and a half years. Up until late in my life, I did not know what happened during those two and a half years, how many homes, or anything at all. Then I was adopted at two and a half years by a wonderful family. That family, we were not very wealthy. We existed below the poverty level, and then was the first and only one to go to college. Then after a 30-year, very successful business career, retired, and now I give time to several ministries and have a ministry-focused retirement.

He also told me that Christians are instrumental in caring for at-risk kids, not just in the fostering and adopting that they often do themselves, but also in how they support those who foster and adopt.

My adoptive parents were people of faith, and it had a significant impact on me. My dad would always I always quote things from the Bible without chapter and verse. I did not know as a child where his sayings, as I called them, came from. When I opened the Bible for the first time myself, my first reaction was, Hey, they got this from my dad. It was definitely a part of my life. God also touched my life in my foster experience. People of faith are very key. Many times a church will create a community around foster children, families, adopted children families, and even families that are at risk and to help prevent children from being put into the system. That's where the church can really step up, helping a family avoid foster and then helping families that do take the brave step into fostering and adopting to help them also.

Now, Mitchell pointed out that you will often see churches organizing to make sure the foster and adoptive families in their congregations are are provided with clothes, beds, other material needs. They offer babysitting, weekend care, homework assistance. Really just anything you can think of so that these families don't feel like they're bearing this responsibility on their own.

Yeah, I've seen that play out personally at communities I've been involved with. Why is it often Christians who tend to be especially engaged in this work?

Well, mainly because, as Barna research found, Christians believe they have a biblical command to be involved in this work. Seventy 27% of them say they have a personal responsibility to care for orphans. Just one example of why they feel that way, James 1:27, that verse says, Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this, to look after orphans and widows in their affliction. I'd say that that belief is very authentically reflected in Sound of Hope, which tells the true story of Bennett Chapel, a church located in a small East Texas town called Possum Trot. It's a true story, all 22 families in the church adopted 77 children out of foster care. Here's a clip.

This time that we put our eyes on the children. It ain't got nobody.

I hear it all the time.

But pastor, kid like this, they're going to cause me some problem. Ain't you caused some problem, too? I ain't going to take care of somebody else's problem, do I? And what I say to that is, Pharaoh's daughter took the redeemer of slaves and pulled them up right out of the murky banks of the Nile River and set Moses right there in a home as if he was her own son. So why are we doing the same? We fill up church houses like this all over the place every Sunday, and we praise Jesus in them. But if we can't wrap our arms around the most vulnerable amongst us, then what do we have? What do we have? Noize. Noize. That's what we have. Noize.

You can hear how well that illustrates Barna's findings. Yeah.

Now, when you hear about kids in need in the foster care system and religious families stepping up to fill the need, I think many people find it surprising, even shocking, that this issue has become so controversial in a matter of political debate. What's going on there?

Well, essentially, it's that the very thing that makes these families decide to adopt and foster those Bible-based beliefs, is what's prompting some political leaders to decide that they're unfit. On April 29th, the Department of Health and Human Services enacted a new rule called the Safe and Appropriate Foster Care Policement Requirements. That's a mouthful, but it requires foster families to use a child, and I'm quoting, identified pronouns and chosen name, and to allow the child to dress, in a manner that the child believes reflects their self-identified gender identity and expression. In other words, if a girl says she's a boy, the foster parents would be required to treat her as a boy and vice versa. Then this rule also says that any foster families must commit to establishing an environment that supports the child's LGBTQI plus status or identity. Now, that language could potentially even mean that foster families must commit to something like providing puberty blockers to the child. These rules conflict with the doctrinal convictions of the vast majority of church-growing Christians in the United States. This was Republican Senator James Langeford of Oklahoma discussing these concerns during a Finance Committee hearing last month.

I am getting some concerns of some folks that are coming back to my office on Just a concern, the ACF's recent rule on foster care considers situations where a child has been removed from their home. The statement was, due in part or in whole to a familial conflict about their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or sex characteristics. I know it's a touchy issue on this, but we got to figure out how to get as many people as we can, possibly, to be able to help in the foster system. What I don't want to have is a message being sent to faith-based organizations or families that believe in a traditional marriage situation that you're no longer welcome to participate.

When HHS proposed this new rule at the end of last year, a group of 18 Republican attorneys general sent a letter to the administration saying they believe it violates the Constitution because it discriminates against religious families. They also said that the proposal, quoting from their letter, will harm children by limiting the number of available foster homes. But the administration went forward with it anyway.

Okay, so this rule has just recently been enacted. Do we know yet how it's going to be applied?

Not yet, because it's not scheduled to go into effect until 2026. But we can look at how some Democrat-led states are applying very similar policies. Oregon's Department of Human Services also requires foster and adoptive parents to, quote, unquote, support a child's sexual orientation and gender identity. There we're seeing Christians stepping forward to say the state has not allowed them to foster or adopt because of their personal Christian beliefs. To give you just one example, Alliance Defending Freedom is representing Jessica Bates. She's a widowed mother of five who says her application to adopt a pair of siblings out of foster care was denied because of her Christian convictions. This was what she told Newsmax last year.

I had successfully made it through some of the training and had been several months into the process and then reported to my certifier because they've really emphasized this sexual orientation, gender identity training that you have to support it.

I emailed her and told her I couldn't do that because of my faith.

Then we had a phone call, and because I wouldn't take a child for cross-sex hormone injections, I was basically told that I'm ineligible to adopt in the state of Oregon.

Then also last year, Catholic couple Mike and Katie Burke said that Massachusetts rejected their application to be foster parents. They said the only reason listed on their application was that the state did not believe they would be, affirming to a child who identified as LGBTQIA. This is what they told Fox News.

They said to us that we didn't follow the LGBTQ policies of the state. If you look into it further, then you could see that they match it up with our Catholic faith.

The letter that they sent us said that they didn't think we would be affirming of an LGBTQ plus child. They've also filed a lawsuit arguing that this is a violation of their constitutional right to religious liberty.

You almost wonder whether a story like the one told in Sound of Hope would be possible in some states right now.

Yes. That is very much something that the filmmakers behind this movie are concerned about. I spoke to Josh and Rebecca Weigel, who made this movie together. They were co-writers and Josh directed, and they're also adoptive parents themselves. This was very much a serious labor of love for them and an expression, they say, of their own faith. They told me that policies like this new HHS rule does stand to hurt suffering kids the most.

We're Christians, and this is a story about a Christian community. Obviously, that legislation would prevent this story from happening again if it plays out the way that it sounds like it could play out. People may not understand that over two-thirds of the people helping are people that may not agree with that legislation. You have a monumental ocean of traumatized children mounting every year if you were to cut off that care. Yeah. I mean, anything that would stand in the way of churches being able to be the answer to this crisis and being able to care for children is going to hurt the kids. We want to see more churches step in. We want to see them be the solution to this. So any legislation prohibiting that is definitely problematic.

Hopefully, though, the attention that this film is getting will encourage audiences, whether they're a part of a religious community or not, to consider how they can care for foster kids or support foster and adoptive families.

The most important people we have to remember when considering these policies are children in need. Megan, thank you so much for reporting. Anytime. That was Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham talking about the new film, Sound of Hope, out in theaters on Independence Day. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.