There’s little question that the ten American Baptist missionaries from Idaho, Kansas, and Texas who illegally loaded 33 Haitian children, ranging in age from 2 months to 12 years, into a bus and tried to drive them across the border from Haiti into the Dominican Republic on January 31st had “good intentions.”

It’s even likely, as missionary Carla Thomson insisted, that they truly believed “God was the one who told [them] to come” to Haiti, where they reportedly planned to install the orphans in a 45 room hotel in the town of Carabete that they were converting into an orphanage.

The notion of “good intentions” is a prized American virtue, and one many Americans expect will carry a great deal of weight when being judged on any situation, especially when it involves children. This is where the wide-eyed, bovine, uniquely evangelical, sense of prerogative, showcased so starkly in the Academy Award-nominated 2006 documentary Jesus Camp, comes into full play. There’s a sense that, to a significant number of American evangelical Christians, the world outside the borders of the United States is little more than their personal Biblical coloring book, with God in one page and the Devil on the opposite page.

In the scenario at hand, the Lord God Jehovah is just waiting for a plane load of Baptists from Idaho and Kansas to round up a group of orphaned children (in a country Pat Robertson told his followers just last week had “made a deal with the Devil”) and drive them across the border, away from their families and their decimated country, for a “new life in Christ,” possibly to be adopted by “loving Christian families.” Aside from the odious religious pretension, there’s much humanity to be appreciated in that sentiment, at least on the surface. It has a certain CBN/Hallmark Movie Channel co-production fatalism to it.

The problem is, not only were the children not orphans, the Baptists had no right to take them anywhere, much less away from their surviving parents. One of the children, 9-year old Benatine Poulimé was weeping hysterically and insisting she wasn’t an orphan, that she wanted her mother.

“I said I wanted to get off the bus,” Poulimé said, describing how the missionaries told her that she had to remain. The little girl told CNN that the Baptists loaded her onto the bus just yards from her home. “I was crying. I said I wanted to go to my mother.” The 33 children are now at the SOS Children’s Village in Haiti while aid workers try to find their parents and family members.

These missionaries–members of the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian Ohio and the East Side Baptist Church in Twin Falls, Idaho– had formed an ad hoc Haitian child rescue mission and called it the New Life Children’s Refuge. Like western missionaries for hundreds of years, expect the fact that they sincerely felt they were doing “God’s will” ought to count for something. Their pastors–who not only should have known better than to let them go, but who share at least equal responsibility for the situation at hand–are appealing, on behalf of their congregants. They feel that all should be forgiven, and they should be sent home to the U.S. the next plane.

“We’re waiting…and hoping and praying that the outcome will be the one that we’re looking for,”

the Rev. Clint Henry, senior pastor with the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho told CNN,

“so the team that has been falsely charged will be vindicated, and that the whole world is going to know that we weren’t here doing the things we’re accused of doing.”

Pastor Drew Ham, also of the Central Valley Baptist Church echoed those sentiments to CNN’s Dan Simon on Monday night.

“Really, at this point, we’re making a passionate plea to just simply bring our Americans home, where they belong.”

This language and tone is traditionally employed in cases where Americans (often journalists, like Roxana Saberi, or Lisa Ling and Euna Lee) are held by hostile regimes on trumped-up charges.

The trouble for the ten Baptists is this: the charges were not trumped up. They loaded 33 Haitian children into a bus, even as some of them were crying out for their mothers, insisting they were not orphans, and begging to be allowed to return home.

Furthermore, if, as it’s been reported, the desperately-poor parents of some of the children “gave” the children to the Americans, ipso facto the children were not orphans. Nor did the parents have any right to “give” them away in the first place, however tragic their own circumstances, and however understandable the parent’s impulse was to give their children a chance at a better life.

I have no trouble believing the group’s leader, Laura Sisby, when she told the Associated Press that they were

“just trying to do the right thing”

in the wake of the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that devastated the tiny island nation in January. There’s nothing I don’t believe about the genuine bafflement in the faces of the missionaries as they talk to journalists about why they were there and the shock they feel that anyone would think anything else.

“I can tell you our heart and our intent was to help only those children who needed us most,” Sisby told CNN’s Karl Penhaul.

It’s likewise not a stretch to believe that Ms. Sisby was confused and didn’t realize she and her group were doing something seriously illegal.

What seems stunning–really, stunning–is the hubris of starting an “orphan relief” organization in Idaho, jumping on a plane to Haiti, and the sheer effrontery of chartering a bus to take children out of the country without knowing everything there is to know about the legalities and practical logistics of such an enterprise, let alone, apparently, realizing that the children needed passports in order to travel.

“We felt it was a very God-appointed meeting,”

beamed Sisby as she described a meeting with a Haitian pastor who helped set up the homemade “rescue mission.”

While the desire to “save” the children is admirable, and easy for anyone with a shred of human empathy to relate to, the execution of that impulse, in this particular case and fashion, plays into the most grotesque, usually specious, stereotypes of perceived American entitlement abroad–the notion that Americans go where they want, do what they like, and take what they please, be it land, culture, or even, as in this case, children.

This perception has enjoyed an unfortunate renaissance in the years since the Bush presidency, when the notion of autonomous, sovereign nations with their own laws–let alone their own borders–has inexplicably become a blind spot in the minds of many ordinary Americans. Crossing a border has consequences, even for Americans, and when borders are crossed foreign laws apply.

In a country like Haiti, whose historical and cultural memory precludes a time when they were not enslaved, exploited, or toyed with by powerful foreigners, the “good intentions” in this case exacerbate a deep cultural wound.

Worst of all, it’s a wound that may have practical consequences, not only for the missionaries, but also for the orphans of Haiti.

What the Baptists have unwittingly demonstrated is just how easily foreigners with malignant objectives (unlike the missionaries) could land in Port-au-Prince, charter a bus, and scoop up children off the streets with or without the cooperation of their parents.

While the Baptists are clearly who and what they say they are (however misguided or ignorant) they could just as easily have been child traffickers posing as missionaries. They aren’t, but they could have been.

Turn it around. Imagine a busload of foreign nationals–or even a busload of American missionaries from Idaho–landing in New Orleans after Katrina and rounding up 33 “orphans,” loading them onto a yellow school bus, and trying to take them across state lines. Picture the popular, let alone judicial, response. Perception is everything, and this is how the Haitian judiciary will see it the situation, as a kidnapping.

“I don’t know what [their motive was]“

Georg Willeit, the spokesman for SOS Children’s Village, an aid agency working in Haiti, told Wolf Blitzer on Monday night about the Baptists.

“And I don’t know what [was] their intention. Clearly these kids did not have any papers. It’s also clear that [one week ago] the Haitian government [forbade taking] children abroad. And this happened two days ago. And it’s clearly against the opinion of the major child care organizations like SOS Children’s Village, and it’s against the opinion of the U.N. [...] I don’t know why [this] happened, but [one has to be] aware of the danger of child trafficking. And this pressure for foreign adoption [also opens] doors to people who are not as good as they pretend to be.”

“It is clear now that they were trying to cross the border without papers,”

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told the AP on Monday.

“It is clear now that some of the children had live parents, And it is clear now that they knew what they were doing was wrong.”

Ironically, it seems likely that the very earthquake that the Baptists came to save the children from will be their own salvation. With the Haitian legal system in disarray because of the earthquake, and the prisons in shambles, Bellerive is open to sending the Americans home to face justice. The Baptists will likely be extradited home to the United States.

What the results of a trial held on U.S. will be is anyone’s guess, though it seems likely that their well-intentioned stupidity may be seen in a calmer light on their home turf.

In the end, the Baptists may soon be back home in Idaho, Kansas, and Texas, giving interviews to the Pat Robertson on The 700 Club about their ordeal; the legitimate child welfare workers in Port-au-Prince will be trying to deal with the monstrous, genocide-level loss of human life; and the children will either live or die under the murderous Caribbean sun in the holocaust that used to be their country.

If there is a further, harsher clampdown on legitimate foreign adoptions because of this case, the New Life Children’s Refuge, and the pastors of the respective churches, can take some of the blame for the needy, legally adoptable children who may never find loving homes outside their broken, devastated country.

The Baptists’ wacky misadventures in glory will have turned out to be little more than a distraction from the real work at hand—a distraction no one had time for, or could afford, least of all the children of Haiti, for whom time is literally running out.

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