Veronica is the little four-year-old girl who is at the center of an epic custody battle between her South Carolina adoptive parents and her biological father. A member of the Cherokee Tribe, the father agreed to give custody to the birth mother four months after Veronica’s birth but claims he had not known the birth mother had placed her up for adoption. The adoptive parents raised Veronica from her birth in 2009 to December 2011 when the biological father won custody from a South Carolina Court under the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978 which gives a tribe the right to intervene in custody cases of children with any degree of Indian blood. However, in June 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that that the Indian Child Welfare Act didn’t automatically guarantee the father custody. The South Carolina Supreme Court took custody away from the father and gave it to the adoptive parents. The South Carolina Court issued an order for the father to surrender custody immediately after he failed to bring Veronica to a court-ordered visitation with the adoptive parents. The child was never surrendered to the adoptive parents and remains in Oklahoma in the custody of the father while he awaits extradition to South Carolina to face felony charges for custodial interference. [Tulsa World, 8-25-13, 9-5-13.]
Indian tribes have become aggressive in not only defending but expanding tribal sovereignty into many areas of American life heretofore undreamed of. As a result many of the rights of Indians and tribal sovereignty are now superior to many of the rights of all Americans and the laws that govern them. The ICWA of 1978 is but one example. Under the guise of preserving tribal culture, the tribes have used law to prevent adoption of Indian children by non-Indians. The rationale for tribal interventions is summarized by the remarks of Terry Cross, executive director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association.
Tribal culture remains much alive and part of daily life. That culture is absorbed by living with your family and being with the extended family of your tribe and clan. If children grow up never knowing that way of life, they might not realize what they’ve missed. But that doesn’t make the loss any less real. This is about the rights of children to have their heritage and their culture. It’s about the rights of an Indian child to be raised Indian. [Tulsa World, 8-25-13.]
Mr. Cross’s statements raise a multitude of questions and problems for a society and culture already reeling from the disintegrating effects of the ascending humanistic worldview.
• To what degree of blood constitutes an Indian? In other words, how much Indian blood does it take to be an Indian—1/16th or 1/32nd or 1/64th or 128th? Does even one drop of Indian blood make one an Indian?
• In preserving one’s heritage, why is it more important to preserve the heritage of the 1/16th Cherokee and ignore the heritage represented by the other 15/16ths?
• If the law says that tribes may allow only Indians to adopt Indian children, then why shouldn’t all children placed for adoption in the United States be placed only with parents of the same ethnicity as that of their biological parents?
• If so, how do we decide in which ethnic groups the children are to be placed when the parents are not “pure bloods”? What if the parents do not know their ethnic backgrounds
with any degree of certainty?
• And perhaps the most important question, to which does the Indian owe his primary allegiance: the Indian Tribe first or the United States of America?
Once a government begins awarding special status to particular groups in society, the ultimate combinations and permutations of rights and privileges become surreal and exceptionally divisive (e.g., affirmative action, Sharia law). Because of popular but aberrant definitions of multiculturalism and diversity, American society is drowning in a myriad of Alice in Wonderland laws, regulations, and bureaucratic intrusions that are fracturing the unity necessary for a culture to survive. That unity is defined by the nation’s central cultural vision. We see these clashes tearing at the fabric of our central cultural vision as the culture wars play out between combatants holding the opposing biblical and humanistic worldviews.
The biblical worldview’s focus is not on the differences of various groups but upon diversity’s contribution to the whole of society, and from this emphasis comes unity. Unity is made possible when each member or group is recognized as an indispensable contributor to the body and not something that stands apart. The biblical oneness of all men is shown by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles when he wrote that God made “…of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on the face of the earth…” [Acts 17:26 KJV] The Apostle Paul reiterates the necessity of unity in his writings to the Corinthians, “But now are they many members but one body.” [1 Corinthians 12:20 KJV]
Humanism’s definition of diversity and multiculturalism focuses on differences within society and not society as a whole. With emphasis on the differences, mass culture becomes nothing more than an escalating number of subcultures within an increasingly distressed political framework that attempts to satisfy the myriad of demands of the individual subcultures. There is a loss of unity through fragmentation and ultimately a loss of a society’s central cultural vision which leads to disintegration. Humanism’s impulse for diversity is a derivative of relativism and a perverted concept of equality. [Johnson, p. 398.]
Survival of a culture implies that it must have segregation and denial. By segregation is not meant segregation within a culture but between cultures. It must deny that which is alien and destructive to its central cultural vision. However, such a culture becomes stronger when it welcomes integration of diverse groups that share that common central vision. It is in the humanistic definition of pluralism that cultures are prone to failure. [Johnson, pp. 193, 398.]
By its very essence, culture must discriminate against those outside its boundaries that do not share its central vision. A culture must believe in its uniqueness, worth, and the superiority of its worldview. To attempt to meld together or co-mingle multiple cultures into one culture with multiple centers of vision is to create a powerless culture with little influence and place it on the road to disintegration. By definition, culture must have an inward-looking vision and resist the alien. Without such there is a loss of wholeness, and a culture’s cohesiveness dissolves into chaos as its various parts drift into orbits of parochial interests and egocentrism. [Johnson, p. 193.]
Today, America faces a cultural crisis in which the nation’s cultural unity is being undermined by a humanistic worldview that has seeped into all aspects of American life. The American central cultural vision as known by the colonists, Founders, and citizens to the present day is in peril because the “…inward-looking vision and the impulse to resist the alien are lost.” With such loss comes disruption and eventual disintegration.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
Michael Overall, “Fight turning adoption into battle over ICWA,” Tulsa World, August 25, 2013, A-17; September 5, 2013, A-1.
Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for America’s Central Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), pp. 193, 398.
