There I was, feeling anxious and out of place, about to present my first disability theology paper at an international conference exploring disability from a variety of faith perspectives. In the room with me, I thought, could be my future doctoral adviser from the University of Aberdeen. But he would not arrive until later. Instead, I was met with a different voice that invited me to consider a surprising intersection between disability theology and another theological discipline.
Some backstory here: Our son was born with a congenital disability, eosinophilic esophagitis. His body misidentifies food proteins, mistaking them for viral invaders. So instead of welcoming specific food proteins as nutrients – building blocks for life – his body erects barricades, sending out responders to neutralize supposedly dangerous intruders. In the words of one writer who has explored food-related disabilities, our son’s body experiences “friendly fire” in its autoimmune response. Like other disabilities, food-related disabilities can cause a cascade of other bodily challenges that can themselves become specific forms of disability.
We believed the church and public spaces welcomed all types of lived experiences. We discovered that was not the case for our son — and for a host of others needing disability accommodations.
Like many parents of children with disabilities, we became aware of the unexamined privileges of our own able-bodied lives. Our perceptions that the church and many other public places are hospitable were undone. Before our son’s disability, we experienced life in the church and public spaces as touched by systemic privileges but otherwise broadly accessible for meeting basic daily needs. We believed the church and public spaces welcomed all types of lived experiences. We discovered that was not the case for our son — and for a host of others needing disability accommodations.
What seemed like understandable food accommodation requests for including our son in the church where I served as a pastor were treated as outrageous constraints on others’ freedom. To use the language of food-related disabilities, the body of Christ itself misidentified the “healthy nutrients of inclusion” as dangerous constrictions on liberty — unwelcome requests from bothersome guests. Expecting that our son’s disability would elicit empathy on the part of church leadership, we found instead that the existing intractable able-bodied barriers were hardened. We were surprised that disability accommodations were far easier to secure in our local public school than in our family’s place of worship, which was, in my case, my place of employment as well.
We were surprised that disability accommodations were far easier to secure in our local public school than in our family’s place of worship.
“Surely,” I said to myself, “the broader Christian disability community would be accepting of my son. No, even more than just accepting — joyfully inclusive and friendly toward food-related disabilities. At least the Christian academics will be kinder than some of those within the church … right?” Unfortunately, within the disability community, a strange exclusion or power-dynamic game can play out as “Are you disabled enough to be disabled?” This form of ableism is a microaggression that involves boundary-keeping.
Expanding the boundaries of “disability”
At the international gathering on faith and disability, I was the first to explore food-related disabilities, which meant I was about to expand the boundary. One parent of a child with a better-known, visually observable disability, who was himself a disability theology contributor, asked me why my son had to have a “disability.” He wondered aloud whether my son’s disability harmed the place of food-related disabilities at the table. So instead of being intimidated about speaking at the conference, I now wondered whether I even wanted to stay, or whether I should consider earning a second doctorate in disability theology. My first doctorate was in liturgical studies and missiology. Those areas were both known parts of my life as a pastor, but I felt like a complete novice in the pastoral care of individuals with disabilities. Now, after this conversation, I found myself wondering whether individuals with food-related disabilities would be treated as unwelcome guests in the Christian academic discourse of disability theology. If so, should I even be there? I was present in the room, but did I belong?
As parents and friends of individuals with disabilities, and as disabled persons ourselves, we are all people who live in a beautiful yet delicate creation that we tend together before the face of God.
Thankfully, in speaking with other presenters and participants at the conference, I found that the interaction reflected a very personal journey for that individual disability theologian, not an absence of welcome from the broader community in its views toward food-related disabilities. People were excited to see a new disability subject emerge and to see disability models used and explored in new ways. That struggle to attain inner security and belonging touches every one of us. As parents and friends of individuals with disabilities, and as disabled persons ourselves, we are all people who live in a beautiful yet delicate creation that we tend together before the face of God.
The intersection of disability with queer theology
As shared above, I encountered another surprising intersection at this conference: a queer theologian who was the only presenter to explore the intersection of queer and disability theology. They were a fascinating presenter, and I found a kindred spirit in them. They dared to transgress boundaries and to make the body strange and wondrous. They reminded presenters that the problem of the idealized “normate body” – the socially constructed ideal of the body, as Amos Yong called it in the 2011 book The Bible, Disability, and the Church: A New Vision of the People of God – is not unique to questions of disability but extends to gender and sexuality.
As an affirming pastor, now also with a Ph.D. in disability theology, I rarely see the surprising intersection of those two experiences named and explored in either academic or ecclesial spaces. Queer theology and disability theology are what I call “neighboring theological discourse.” As neighbors, they share a lot of the same lived experiences of embrace and exclusion. For example, both at times are misidentified as “contextual theologies.” They are also treated as subcategories of inquiry within the larger field of practical theology.
Queer and disability theologies can reimagine traditional divisions within theological studies, providing fresh insights into widely used motifs within systematic theology, biblical studies, moral theology and church history.
But those approaches to grasping queer and disability theology are a myopic way to understand just how unique and expansive their discourses truly are. Queer and disability theologies can reimagine traditional divisions within theological studies, providing fresh insights into widely used motifs within systematic theology, biblical studies, moral theology and church history.
Queer and disability theologies are neighboring theological discourses because they share several busy streets as they make sense of the world and the Divine. Standard queer and disability theology introduction texts – examining what are called the “front matters” or “theological prolegomena” (first things) – explore nontheological critical theories about queerness and disability that come out of queer studies and disability studies. Queer theory and disability models become dance partners whose bodies define the distinct movements made by the theologians reflecting on them. One commonly finds queer and disability theologians critiquing the limitations in nontheological accounts of things like queer theory or, in the case of disability, the medical and social model of disability.
This pairing plays out in the 2007 volume edited by Gerard Loughlin, Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body, and in Deborah Beth Creamer’s comments on models of disability in her 2009 book Disability and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities. Queer and disability theologies not only dance with critical models from their respective fields of study, but they also reimagine theology itself before moving on to reimagine theological anthropology. Marcella Althaus-Reid’s 2003 book, The Queer God, and Nancy L. Eiesland’s 1994 book, The Disabled God, offer examples of how reimaginations in theology lead to new imaginations of what it means to be human and, conversely, how particular human embodiments provide lenses onto the Divine.
Heteronormativity and ableism, as unexamined passengers in the liturgical traditions of churches, leave behind their own challenges for both discourses to unmask and confront.
Both queer and disability theologies also have well-known “clobber texts,” groupings of Scripture passages with a history of being used as texts of terror to invite the formation of unhealthy and exclusionary biases — texts that require queer and disability hermeneutical rereadings of Scripture. Both communities, sadly, have experienced a widely documented history of traumatic ecclesial encounters, and both face systemic issues preventing their full inclusion. Heteronormativity and ableism, as unexamined passengers in the liturgical traditions of churches, leave behind their own challenges for both discourses to unmask and confront. Liturgies that harm, that reflect the work not of the people but of “dis-membered bodies” who disfigure the image of Christ, are part of both theologies’ sacred imaginative work to re-member Christ’s body.
How queer and disability theologies can expand the experience of church
Queer and disability communities are populated by such beautiful and complex voices, sounding out the strangeness and wonder of what it means to live embodied. How can exploring these many intersections between queerness and disability help the church reimagine the tables we share together: the fellowship of story and song we weave together, the prayers and silence we hold together, the bandages and shoelaces we apply to our shared wounds and walks? We spend so much time in Presbyterian spaces dreading the passing of the church that was, the wood and stone of the institutional body.
If we are not mindful, we may miss the chance to wonder about the flesh-and-bone church the future holds — if only we slow down and pay attention to the surprising intersections unfolding in our midst.
If we are not mindful, we may miss the chance to wonder about the flesh-and-bone church the future holds — if only we slow down and pay attention to the surprising intersections unfolding in our midst. The term “transgressions” has had a pejorative resonance in some previous theological discussions in the church’s confessional life. Perhaps the future church will “transgress” upon the smallness of our former boundaries with the largeness of God’s kin-dom, in the words of Ada María Isasi-Díaz in her 1996 Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century. Perhaps we will make our body curious and make the liminal ends of the table boundless.
