Anti-Ableist Leadership, Black Worship, and the Disabled God
I have a disability, I am Black, and I am an ordained Baptist minister. I grew up in the Black Baptist church tradition, a tradition with sermons and songs that have interpreted the healing texts in the Gospels through an ableist lens. That means that in my church and many others, we have normalized a set of mental and physical capabilities; we have built systems and structures and ideologies that are primarily accessible to people with particular mental and physical abilities; and we have communicated to our brothers and sisters in Christ that their bodies and minds are not ideal rather than lifting up their gifts, gifts that could be shared in worship, preaching, and serving alongside their temporarily able-bodied siblings in Christ.[1] That is not the way of justice, and it is not the path that God shows us in the resurrection.
Models of Disability
Theorists have identified several ways of conceiving of disability, but the most dominant and pervasive is likely the medical model of disability. The disability and liturgical theologian Sarah Jean Barton describes how this model “envisions disability as an intrinsic, individualized, and inherently negative problem. This medical construal of disability for adherents to the medical model ought to evoke a response that seeks to remediate, minimize, or eliminate disability through therapeutic fixes (e.g., surgery, rehabilitation, or medication).”[2] For Christians, the implication of this model is that God’s good design and ideal is an able body and that people with disabilities should pray for a medical cure or some kind of divine intervention; proponents of this view can look to the stories of Jesus healing people of various disabilities in Scripture. There is also an expectation that because disability does not fit into God’s ideal, people with disabilities will be cured from them in the eschaton.
However, this common way of conceiving of disability does not allow people with disabilities to be comfortable in their own bodies and minds. The message we receive is that we are defective and damaged, and in a practical sense this is echoed all around us. Institutions design systems and spaces with only certain bodies and capabilities in mind, and then, in the aftermath, they attempt to fix the problems posed by those with disabilities, to make accommodations, as if we were an afterthought.
Thomas E. Reynolds associates this view of disability with what he calls the cult of normalcy, which “deals with bodily variations by rendering them pathological and deficient vis-a-vis reference points of power and privilege.”[3] In capitalism, bodies are valued based on the perceived contribution those bodies can make to the market economy, and within this narrative, the cult of normalcy trains people with disabilities to see themselves as deficient and abnormal and to hate their bodily existence so that they always seek a cure.[4] This is a denial of the image of God in people with disabilities, and it is at the root of contemporary ableist interpretations of Scripture that expect people with disabilities to desire a cure.
In direct contrast to the medical model is what Barton refers to as the social model of disability. “Societal barriers to access and participation disable people, not particular minds and bodies,” she writes. “In this social model for disability, the impetus for change falls not upon individuals with particular impairments but upon societies to enact systemic justice and access.”[5] Here, we shift the focus to how the structures and systems in society are built for certain people and not others. For example, in the social model, not being able to walk is a disability only because society privileges walking—stairs are expected in most building entrances, and ramps, if they are available, are to the side or in the back. If all buildings had centrally located ramps or functional elevators as a default, the disabling barriers would be eliminated. If closed captions were seen in movies and films as a default, there would no longer be an expectation that being human means being able to hear—disability thus results from social, architectural, and other types of barriers that privilege certain minds and bodies.[6]
The disability and queer theorist Alison Kafer notes that although this is an improvement over the medical model, it is problematic in its reliance on socially constructed categories that shift over time and cultures. That is, the social model relies on a distinction between impairment and disability, such that impairment refers to physical and mental limitations and disability refers to exclusion and barriers because of those impairments, but those definitions and how we might apply them are not static.[7] Moreover, the social model leaves out the experiences of people with chronic pain. People with chronic pain, illness, and fatigue critique the social model because its emphasis on proactive changes to social structures will not actually alleviate their pain. It is an overcorrection of the medical model, which expects a cure, in that the social model does not allow people to hope for a cure if that is a future they want to imagine and determine for themselves.[8]
Instead, we need a model that neither weaponizes my disability, asking me to desire a body that is not mine, nor rebuffs those who choose to hope or work for a change to their disability. We need a model that allows for coalition building among people with varying types of disabilities. To that end, Kafer has developed a political/relational model, in which “the problem of disability no longer resides in the minds or bodies of individuals but in environments and social patterns that exclude and stigmatize particular kinds of bodies, minds, and ways of being.” Returning to the example of people who are unable to walk and use wheelchairs: it might be said that such people suffer from impairments that restrict their mobility, that they are, say, wheelchair bound, and that this so-called problem is best remedied by medical and divine intervention to cure them of their disability. But in a political-relational model of disability, “the problem of disability is located in inaccessible buildings, discriminatory attitudes, or ideological systems that attribute normalcy and deviance to particular minds and bodies.” Disabilities or impairments are only known because institutions have constructed systems and barriers that determine what an able body or mind is. Moreover, Kafer states that “what we consider as impairing conditions—socially, physically, mentally, or otherwise—shifts across time and place, and presenting impairment as purely physical obscures such shifts.”[9]
Following Kafer’s trajectory of thought, I am suggesting a move beyond accessibility; I am advocating for a world and church that do not uphold certain bodies and minds as normal. I am asking us to see the image of God in all people, including people with disabilities, and to let that way of seeing transform how we do church.
Disabling Theologies in Worship and Preaching
The disability theologian Nancy L. Eiesland offers us a useful two-part method for evaluating theologies of disability. First, she encourages enabling people with disabilities to participate in the full life of the church by removing physical and theological barriers to access.[10] When we lack ramps, level-ground entrances, and alternative means for communicating, we reinforce constructs of what a normal body is and can do. Likewise, Reynolds provides good examples of the kinds of theological barriers that people with disabilities can face:
Religious language used to sanction common human experience and thus ignore, misrepresent, or demean the bodily presence of persons with disability (e.g., through metaphors like “walk by faith and not by sight” or “hearing God’s word” and through theological views that denigrate or trivialize the experience of disability as something plaguing the sinful, or “lacking in faith,” or “God’s special ones”).[11]
In Black churches, this can be witnessed in exhortations that praise God when we have certain abilities that others may lack—“If you got the activity of your limbs, you ought to stand up on your feet and give God some praise!” or “No one rolled in here this morning,” are two examples. Although it is appropriate to give thanks for the bodies we inhabit, it is harmful if we lift our bodies before God as the archetype of an acceptable body. Worship leaders and exhorters should seek to find ways in which all of us can be thankful for the bodies we possess, whether we see, hear, walk, stand, or process differently. Likewise, when worship leaders invite people to stand at certain points of the service, they privilege standing as the most sacred act and the normative posture for reverence, even if they add the caveat “if you’re able.” Disability theologians and liturgical scholars invite us to think about invitational language: “I invite you to rise in body or in spirit,” we might say. Rising in body or in spirit could mean standing, but it could also mean doing something else with our body that feels reverent; it could mean fixing our attention, whatever that looks like, to a particular liturgical element.
In her two-part method for evaluating theologies, Eiesland also encourages the church to seek access to the lives of people with disabilities and allow those experiences to disrupt existing notions of normal.[12] This is a call for nondisabled people to evaluate their conceptions of what is normal and to realize their complicity in ableist systems.[13] As I showed earlier when discussing Kafer’s political-relational model of disability, the social construction of disability is known only through what is constructed as the abled body. Therefore, anti-ableist theology calls on people without disabilities to evaluate their relationship to their bodies and asks them to question how they benefit from the cult of normalcy.
In this context, Eiesland names three carnal sins the church commits when engaging in disability theologically. The first is the sin-disability link in which we might say that disability results from sin and that people are not cured because they lack faith. The second is virtuous suffering, which suggests that God gives people disabilities to test their faith in exchange for a heavenly reward or to provide an example of faith for people without disabilities. This is observed in what Stella Young calls “inspiration porn”—images of people with disabilities working out with the caption “No excuses” or stories that admire a temporarily able-bodied teenager who asks someone with a disability to prom or that admire a person’s accomplishment because of their disability (and not despite ableist systems). It’s the unhealthy undercurrent when someone walks up to a person with disabilities without context and says something like “I’m inspired by how you don’t let your disability stop you!” These reactions sanction the structural, social, and physical barriers people face and disregard the advocacy of people with disabilities for accessibility. The last carnal sin is segregationist charity. This is when we emphasize performing social services for people with disabilities instead of removing ableist barriers and honoring the gifts people with disabilities bring to the church and world.[14]
In the Black church, segregationist charity seems to be cherrypicked from the New Testament and distributed throughout our sermons and worship hymns. Take, for example, the lyrics to the popular hymn by Eugene M. Bartlett, “Victory in Jesus”: “I heard about His healing, of His cleansing pow’r revealing, / How He made the lame to walk again and cause the blind to see.”[15] I have heard countless sermons on the healing narratives in the Gospels—we learn about Jesus giving sight to the blind, making people who do not walk walk, removing palsy, and other miracles. In most of these sermons, it is preached that if God can free the person in the biblical text from *fill disability in the blank*, then God can free us, too. If we have enough faith, the disability can be removed, and the person can be restored to a body deemed normal.
Disability then becomes a metaphor for sin and everything bad, while the curing of disability and the normative body becomes a metaphor for salvation. This is seen in sermons and reinforced in the church’s hymnody, as demonstrated by the lyrics of the second stanza of “Victory in Jesus.” In fact, many hymns use negative disability imagery that reinforces the cult of normalcy, including these two famous examples: “Amazing grace! how sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me! / I once was lost but now I’m found, / Was blind but now I see” and “Hear Him, ye deaf; His praise, ye dumb, / Your loosened tongues employ; / Ye blind, behold your Savior come, / And leap, ye lame, for joy.”[16] When these lyrics are sung, it suggests that a disabled body is less than God’s ideal and needs to be cured.
These songs are undergirded primarily by ableist hermeneutics of the narratives of Jesus healing people as a part of his ministry in the Gospels. These are takes that conflate healing with cure. Disability theologian Kathy Black explains that a cure is the removal of disability and attaining a body deemed normal, whereas healing is about a “sense of well-being in a person’s life, a sense of comfort, support, and peace.”[17] Healing, then, can happen with disability being present; it can be restoration and participation in the community as one becomes at peace with one’s body by appreciating the unique ways disability brings new perspectives and possibilities. Healing thus highlights the agency, faith, innovation, and interdependence of the person and people being healed as opposed to the restoration to a normative body.
The third stanza of “Holy, Holy, Holy” in some hymnals says, “Holy, Holy, Holy! though the darkness hide Thee, / Though the eye made blind by sin Thy glory may not see,” but more recent versions of the stanza say “though the eye of sinfulness,” which is a gender-inclusive reading that is theologically closer to the older lyric “Tho’ the eye of sinful man.”[18] These changes illustrate how we can adapt to become less ableist. The former line speaks negatively of a lack of vision, reinscribing the cult of normalcy and rendering bodies that do not see as less than ideal, whereas the latter line better captures the impact of sin on humanity’s perception; the eye of sinfulness distorts humanity’s perception regardless of whether one has the ability to physically see. Humanity’s ability to perceive is distorted by sinful systems that deny the presence of the imago Dei, the image of God, in every person.
What does it mean to be made in the image of God? Reynolds notes, “This theme [of imago Dei] is a perilous topic for people with disabilities because Christians have often interpreted disability as a distortion of God’s purposes, marring the image of God.”[19] The concept of the imago Dei has often been associated with attributes like productivity, autonomy, rationality, and independence, some of which may not be obtainable by people with disabilities, and thus, the church has often denied their personhood. In contrast to this harmful view, disability theologian Hans S. Reinders states that the image of God is found outside of individuals in the interrelationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is a holy fellowship built on relationality, mutuality, and interdependence. This vision of the imago Dei is one that we should embrace, as all humans can relate to one another and for interdependence—to love and to be loved.[20]
Rich Wound Yet Visible: Worshipping a Disabled God
Christians are people of the resurrection, and Sunday is the day of resurrection—that is why the earliest Christians gathered on Sunday and why most Christians still gather on Sunday.[21] It is the central proclamation of disability theology that God raised Jesus Christ in a nonnormative body. Jesus’s resurrected body could do things his preresurrected body could not, like walking through walls, appearing and disappearing, and performing miracles, yet the presence of his supernatural ability does not erase the presence of his disability.
The juxtaposition of Christ’s abilities and disability became clear to me last Easter when I heard the choir sing the hymn “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” Here is the third stanza:
Crown Him the Lord of love,
Behold His hands and side,
Rich wounds yet visible above,
In beauty glorified.
No angel in the sky
Can fully bear that sight,
But downward bends His burning eye
At mysteries so bright.[22]
This is one of the few hymns that captures the essence of disability theology. As the hymn reminds us, God raised Christ with the visible signs of disability in his hands and feet. Eiesland provides additional insight on this vital part of the Christian faith:
The coming of Emmanuel was understood by the early Church in terms of death and resurrection. At the resurrection, the disciples understood the person of Jesus for who he really was. Only through the lens of resurrection could they understand the meaning and significance of Jesus’s life on earth. In the resurrected Jesus Christ, they saw not the suffering servant for whom the last and most important word was tragedy and sin, but the disabled God who embodied both impaired hands and feet and pierced side and the Imago Dei. Paradoxically, in the very act commonly understood as the transcendence of physical life, God is revealed as tangible, bearing the representation of the body reshaped by injustice and sin into the fullness of the Godhead.[23]
The resurrected body of Jesus Christ thus helps us dismantle the normative body. When Jesus became too weak to carry the cross and fell under its weight, he had to develop an interdependent relationship with Simon the Cyrene. Then, Jesus was injured and impaired by crucifixion, and Eiesland points out that after God raised Jesus from the dead, the impairments and wounds in his hands and side are still visible—this is clearly seen in Jesus’s appearance to Thomas in the Gospel of John.[24] In other words, Jesus Christ is raised with his disability uncured. All this means that those of us with disabilities are made in the image of the disabled God, sharing in Christ’s death and resurrection in baptism. God has called people with disabilities to the full vocation of discipleship. Eiesland says:
In presenting his impaired hands and feet to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God. Jesus, the resurrected Savior, calls for his frightened companions to recognize in the mark of impairment their connection with God, their salvation. In doing so, this disabled God reveals a new humanity. The disabled God is not only the One from heaven but the revelation of true personhood, underscoring the reality that full personhood is fully compatible with the experience of disability.[25]
As the theologian Harold Trulear argues, Black Christians have historically found solidarity in a suffering Jesus but hope in the victory over death and oppression that comes with the resurrection. By pointing to the risen Christ’s wounds, I am not diminishing that hope or victory. Indeed, the resurrection-centered disability theology of Eiesland does not dichotomize vulnerability and power. He emphasizes both that Jesus “gets up with all power in his hands” and that those hands are still disabled and wounded. The Christ, both crucified and risen, stands in victorious solidarity with the disabled and marginalized.[26]
In other words, we might say that the church worships a disabled God because Christ rises with wounds yet visible. Paul says the following:
Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Romans 6:3–5 NRSVue)
In baptism, all the faithful are joined to the disabled God, dismantling the cult of normalcy because the one to which the faithful are joined does not have a normal body.[27] The church is joined in baptism with a risen disabled Christ, dismantling all notions of normalcy.
Finally, this has eschatological implications for people with disabilities. We are often told to hope for a body that is cured of our disability in the general resurrection of the dead, when the dead are raised “incorruptible,” as if a disability is a corruption. But if the faithful are “raised in a resurrection like his,” as Paul suggests, and Jesus was raised with his disability, there’s room for all types of bodies to be raised. There’s room in the resurrected world for all types of body-minds, but they will be free from the old heaven and earth’s disabling barriers.
As worshippers, the church is called to anticipate God’s resurrected world, and worship is a rehearsal for the world that is to come. The resurrected world, perhaps, is not a world absent of impairment or disability but a world of justice and accessibility.
[1] Temporarily able-bodied is a term that some disability activists and scholars use to refer to people without disabilities; it is a way to highlight that a person can have an experience of disability at any point in their life and that ableism affects those currently without disabilities.
[2] Barton, Becoming the Baptized Body: Disability and the Practice of Christian Community, Studies in Religion, Theology, and Disability (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2022), 5.
[3] Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2008), 60.
[4] See Reynolds, Vulnerable, 62.
[5] Barton, Becoming, 5.
[6] See Barton, Becoming, 7.
[7] See Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), 6–7.
[8] See Kafer, Feminist, 6–7.
[9] Kafer, Feminist, 6 and 7.
[10] See Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1994), 21–23.
[11] Reynolds, Vulnerable, 15.
[12] Eiesland, Disabled God, 21–23.
[13] Reynolds, Vulnerable, 177.
[14] Eiesland, Disabled God, 70–75.
[15] Bartlett, “Victory in Jesus,” in African American Heritage Hymnal, 1st ed. (Chicago, IL: Gia, 2001), 261.
[16] Bartlett, “Victory in Jesus”; John Newton, “Amazing Grace,” in African American Heritage Hymnal, 271; and Charles Wesley, “O for a Thousand Tongues To Sing,” in African American Heritage Hymnal, 184.
[17] Kathy Black, A Healing Homiletic: Preaching and Disability (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996), 51.
[18] Reginald Heber, “Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty,” in African American Heritage Hymnal, 329; Heber, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” in Glory to God, ed. David Eicher, 1st ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2013); and Heber, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” in The New National Baptist Hymnal (Nashville, TN: Triad, 1986), 1.
[19] Reynolds, Vulnerable, 177.
[20] See Reynolds, Vulnerable, 186; Reinders, Receiving the Gift of Friendship: Profound Disability, Theological Anthropology, and Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), loc. 2779–816 of 5542, Kindle; and Barton, Becoming, 29–33.
[21] James F. White, Introduction to Christian Worship, 3rd ed. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2000), 50–53.
[22] Mathew Bridges, “Crown Him with Many Crowns,” in African American Heritage Hymnal, 288.
[23] Eiesland, Disabled God, 99–100.
[24] Eiesland, Disabled God, 101.
[25] Eiesland, Disabled God, 100.
[26] Harold Dean Trulear, “To Make a Wounded Wholeness: Disability and Liturgy in an African-American Context,” in Human Disability and the Service of God: Reassessing Religious Practice, ed. Nancy L. Eiesland and Don E. Saliers (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1998), 239.
[27] Barton, Becoming, 111–12.