I was sitting in bed in the middle of a spiritual crisis when I got a call from my friend Emily (name changed for anonymity). I was grateful for her call and shared with her the distress and uncertainty I was feeling. She asked if she would pray for me, and I said yes, because I thought prayer might help me calm down, ground me, remind me of my values and community, and reconnect with myself.
But Emily was praying with a different purpose. Instead of praying for peace, calm, or support, she prayed for my “insanity” to be cured “in Jesus’ name.” She prayed for me to be healed “without changing my medication or treatment, which clearly wasn’t working.”
I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t the prayer I was expecting, and it was far from the prayer I needed. When I hung up a few minutes later, I felt more alone than I’d ever been.
If Emily had asked me, I would have answered that I neither needed nor expected a “cure.” Moreover, the suffering I continued to experience in the weeks and months that followed proved that such a cure was unavailable even if I wanted it. Emily’s prayers and my subsequent lack of healing placed me, Emily, and God in a tricky interpersonal triangle. Either Emily’s prayers hadn’t worked, or my insanity was too sinful for even God to cure, or God was powerless to make things right. In other words, my persistent, powerless insanity must be evidence of either an impotent God, insufficient faith, or an irreparable soul.
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As I grew older and interacted with other people with disabilities, I learned that my experience was not unique. Disability activist Imani Balvarin said she frequently gets prayed for in public by strangers. She writes on X (formerly Twitter) She once received unconsented prayers for healing from 12 strangers in one day.On her website, Crutches and Spice, Barbarin writes about another incident when, shortly after she spoke at a conference about her painful experiences with repeated unsolicited prayers for healing, multiple conference attendees came forward to pray for her healing, doing the very thing she warned them against.
People with disabilities experience this all the time. In Bethany McKinney Fox’s book Disability and the Way of Jesus (IVP Academic), Rev. Matthew Argin, a Christian pastor with cerebral palsy, describes being approached by a stranger at a shopping mall and bombarded with aggressive questions, implying that if she believed in Jesus enough, she could stay in a wheelchair. In an article for the Religion, Disability & Health journal, Darla Schumm, a blind woman, writes about an airline employee who told her that just as Jesus heals all sins, if she prayed hard enough, he could cure her blindness.
In telling these anecdotes, it’s important to remember that disability doesn’t exist in a vacuum. People with disabilities embody different identities and cultures that influence how they are treated and their experience of the world. As a white, cisgender, queer woman with an invisible disability, I have a very different experience of disability than Balverine, a Black woman whose mobility is limited by a visible disability. As such, I strive to continually remain a student of the disability justice movement who cares deeply about these intersections.
The disability justice movement formally began around 2005, when disability activists—particularly LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, and people of color activists—began to imagine a “second wave” of the disability rights movement that they saw as limited by white supremacy and heterocentrism. Instead, these activists argued, the disability justice movement has always been, and should continue to be, led by disabled people of color and queer and gender non-conforming disabled people.
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In response, the Disability Justice Movement asserts: “Skin, Teeth, and Bones: The Foundation of Our Movement is Our People (Sin is void).”
Every body is unique and essential, every body has strengths and needs to be met, we are powerful not in spite of our bodies but because of their complexity, and every body is limited by ability, race, gender, sexual orientation, class, nation, religion, etc., and they cannot be separated.
But while the disability justice movement celebrates the blessings of disability and diversity, Christian obsession with healing uncritically associates disability with sin, evil, and going against God’s will. Many Christians who advocate praying for healing claim the Bible as a justification for their actions. After all, many of Jesus’ miracles were “heals.” According to Fox, the New Testament mentions healing more than any other document from the Second Temple period, and even secular accounts of Jesus portray him as a miraculous healer. Many Christians have interpreted Jesus’ miraculous healings as an invitation to themselves to attempt miraculous healings, such as praying for disabled people like me, Barbarin, and Arguin. Especially since many of Jesus’ miracles of healing were (allegedly) confirmed or made possible by the faith of the individual being healed (consider, for example, the stories in Mark 5:34, Mark 9:23, Luke 17:19, and Matthew 9:20–22).
For many people with disabilities, this interpretation feels one-sided, especially since many people with disabilities are not interested in treatment. Instead, they understand their disability as a unique part of who they are. Although people with disabilities may seek treatment for their disability by taking medication, participating in rehabilitation therapy, or wearing prosthetic limbs, many do not want to eliminate their disability entirely.
I, and many of my disabled relatives, subscribe to the social model of disability, which locates the primary “problem” of disability in ableist social attitudes and the built environment. (Ableism refers to the systemic and interpersonal discrimination against people with disabilities in today’s world.) According to the social model of disability, the “problem” of blindness is not a lack of vision, but a lack of Braille resources. Similarly, the “problem” of wheelchair use is not a lack of mobility, but a lack of elevators, ramps, and other physical accommodations.
Many disabled people feel proud of their disabled identities, experiences, cultures, and communities. In her book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Arsenal Pulp Press), disability movement leader Leah Lakshmi Piepsna Samarasinghe writes extensively about “crip skills,” “crip science,” and “crip emotional intelligence.” These are insights and capabilities that are unique to disabled people and that arise from the ways disabled people choose to, or are forced to, navigate in society. (Crip is a term used by the disabled community to refer to themselves, and was previously short for cripple, a derogatory term.) Susan Wendell points out in an article for Hypatia that even disabled people who want treatment, especially those with chronic pain or illness, often see medical and personal treatment as “a complement to, rather than a replacement for, ableism.”
The obsession with healing can also be a form of erasure. Piepzna Samarasinghe writes that in an ableist society, “the only good able person is the healed able person, the able person who ceases to exist. Healing is healing and removal.” This concept is also common to Christian eschatology. Biblical scholar Candida R. Moss argues that the early church believed in a heavenly being who was able, “healed,” “perfect,” pale, white, and perfect. The result was a “systematic removal of disability.” [and Blackness] It comes from the kingdom of God.’” Similarly, Barbarin said she has internalized the “healing” narrative as a result of people telling her her whole life that she would be healed in heaven.
The Christian exclusion of disabled and racially traumatized bodies from heaven is inseparable from the aforementioned link between disability and sin. An able-bodied body inhabiting the afterlife is the logical outcome of the Christian obsession with healing. Disabled people with physical disabilities disappear not only from earth but also from heaven.
The “treatment agenda” is rooted in prioritizing individual change (treatment) over social change (justice). It imposes undesirable changes on the bodies and minds of disabled people without acknowledging the increased diversity, creativity, and potential that disabled people bring to the world. Thus, a Christian theology that demands only the treatment of the bodies and minds of disabled individuals is inadequate at best, ignoring the broader transformation that is necessary in an ableist and ableist society.
As Christians, we know we can and must do better for people with disabilities and their communities. We believe that with a holistic and liberating theology, we can learn and grow to be an inclusive spiritual home, drawing on the traditions and following the leadership of our disabled ancestors and relatives. In the words of Patty Byrne, “There has always been resistance to all forms of oppression. We know in our bones that people with disabilities have envisioned a world in which we thrive, a world in which all our beauty is valued and celebrated.” May this happen in our churches, in our networks of connection, and in ourselves.
This article also appears in the August 2024 issue of US Catholic (Volume 89, Number 8, pages 16-18). To subscribe to the magazine, click here.
Image: Unsplash/Joyce Kelly
