I remember having an alienating experience in a church a few years ago thanks to a sermon where the priest equated “constant activity” with faithfulness. I have a condition that causes chronic fatigue and limited mobility, among other things, and I cannot do many activities—and certainly none constantly—so it hurt to hear that held up as an essential part of being a good Christian.
Unfortunately, I’m pretty used to disabled people like myself being excluded in and from churches. For some disabled people, such as those with mobility disabilities, physical accessibility is a barrier to inclusion—this tends to be a problem for churches, as they’re often old buildings and may be exempt from standard accessibility requirements. Of course, physical limitations aren’t the only type of disability, nor is physical access the only relevant thing to folks who have them. Social inclusion is also important, and it’s built not through ramps and Braille (though good luck making people feel included while ignoring their physical access needs), but through words and attitudes.
For those looking to make their church or community more accessible to disabled people, I’d like to offer some common themes and habits to interrogate.
Ability as faith
The sermon I uncomfortably sat through is far from the only time I’ve heard ability associated with Christian virtue. Hymns are particularly rife with it.
It’s key to recognize hymns as powerful texts that do and shape theology in the same way that other texts do, and whether it’s mobility (“I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light,” “Just a Closer Walk With Thee”), vision (“Open My Eyes That I May See,” “My Faith Looks Up to Thee”), or standing (“Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” “Rise Up, O Men of God”), there are plenty of Christian hymns that associate physical ability with faithfulness.
Some folks argue that these are just metaphors, but to say that these hymns use ability as “just” a metaphor is an inadequate response to the messages of exclusion they send to people who cannot take mobility and/or sensory abilities for granted. Whether literal or metaphorical, texts that align ability with virtue can have a negative effect on how audiences perceive disabilities and disabled people.
Some people may balk at the idea of letting go of hymns they may cherish. That’s understandable, but it also shouldn’t get in the way of inclusivity efforts. The hymns referenced above largely date back to the 1800s—long enough ago to have carved out an important place in many traditions, but not so foundational that they can’t be taken out of rotation. The reality is that there are a lot of Christian hymns out there, and removing ones that advance harmful theology will still leave us plenty of stuff to sing.
Disability as death
Another hymn, “Mary did you know,” references a few disabilities and puts them in parallel with death:
The blind will see, the deaf will hear
The dead will live again
The lame will leap, the dumb will speak
The praises of the lamb
In many ways, I’m not surprised by the prevalence and apparent resonance of this comparison. I’ve heard my fair share of people who insist they’d kill themselves if they were to become seriously disabled, and plenty more who seem confused by how someone could live with a serious illness indefinitely but not be dying of it—so connected for them are the ideas of illness and disability to death. Ableism in Christianity isn’t solely the fault of hymns, sermons, and other Christian content equating illness and disability with death, but the continued use of that theme does nothing to make churches more inclusive.
Healing
As “Mary did you know” alludes to, there’s a tendency in Christianity to view disability primarily as something to be removed through healing. Some of this is biblically based—many of the miracles Jesus performed are related to healing sick and disabled people.
To be sure, there are people with disabilities and chronic illnesses who would like to be healed. There are many more who wouldn’t, or who simply don’t think in those terms because their disability is as much a part of them as any other feature or identity. When disability is presented only as something to be healed, it erases the diverse and often complicated relationships disabled people have with their bodies and disabilities and frames disabilities as exclusively negative.
Faith healing and prayers for healing often serve as a way to reinforce the power of the nondisabled people doing the praying/healing, and further dehumanizes disabled people by turning them into props. Rev. Zoe Heming, a Church of England minister and wheelchair user, recounts the not-uncommon experience of nondisabled people forcing prayers on disabled people:
“I’ve been in situations where I’ve been talking to another wheelchair user in church and somebody was so determined to pray for us and we just kept ignoring them because we were in the middle of a conversation. In the end he just put his arms on both our shoulders and just prayed. It was really annoying and very disempowering. I was furious.”
This desire to cure disabled people without their consent is part of a larger desire to control disabled bodies (where they go, how they’re perceived, and whether they can even exist at all). Recognizing this as a way of performing control and power, rather than slotting it into a more benign framework like “helping,” is key to understanding how uncomfortable and offensive healing prayers can be.
Accessibility in churches begins with respecting disabled people and seeing us for who we are. We are not metaphors, tragedies, or a platform to show off holy powers. We attend church for reasons as diverse as nondisabled people do (assuming we can get into the building at all), and our bodies hold no more or less inherent virtue than a nondisabled person’s.
Ableist and exclusive language runs deep in the Christian tradition, and I don’t expect it to go away anytime soon. What I do expect is a recognition of the social exclusion that crops up so often in churches and other Christian spaces—and a commitment to change it.
