(Episode 507): So Glad You Asked! About Religion and Disability

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On today’s episode of So Glad You Asked, Professors Morgenstein Fuerst and Goodwin discuss religion and disability. They do this by examining the history of disability activists, Crip Lit, and theirs and other scholars understandings of the intersection of bodies, ability, and religion. Ilyse and Megan are here to remind you that if people have bodies, and they use those bodies to do religion, then we need to think about how different bodies, all with different needs, will have different relationships with religiosity.

"Ableism is when you turn your head the other way and say that your able-bodied privilege is not privilege and refuse to see that your privilege is the face of my oppression.

-Maria R. Palacios

The 101: Where We Did the Professor Work…

How do we define “disability”?

The Lesson Plan…Here’s What We Talked About:

We addressed disability and its earliest appearances in religion…
“We see disability, particularly around mental illness, being lauded in ways that I'm uncomfortable with right like healers or speaking with Gods are speaking in tongues are being touched. So folks that we might today say they're having struggles with mental illness and might could use some support or medication or community. It's like, no, they're a profit. They're a seeker. They're communing with God…but we see religions, understanding disability from the textual level. So like, this is not new. This is like, you know, ancient texts.” (IRMF 19:24).
We talked about how people, without claiming disability activism, have been making accommodations for generations…
In everyday spaces, as well as religious spaces, we see accommodations everywhere. This is in the form of things like microphones, rooms for breastfeeding, ramps, elevators…things like that, infrastructure that limits access for everyone. There are all kinds of ways that communities care for each other and have for as long as there have been bodies with differences. This mostly looks like care and help within community.
We did some disclosing…
In which Professors Morgenstein Fuerst and Goodwin are vulnerable about their relationships to this topic. As religious people who are chronically ill or fit into frameworks of disability, their stories are important as we look at, prioritize, and understand the ways that varying abilities and bodily experiences influence the everyday lives of people, especially as they interact with religion.

There’s differing definitions, IRMF, because disability is both a concept and a legal category in the US, among many other nation-states. Broadly? Disability refers to mental and physical realities that may limit, impede, or structure one’s movements, senses, or abilities. In terms of how activists and theorists and people living with disability talk about it, it is often framed as any so-called deviation from normative assumptions about movement, thinking, emotional processing, and the way our brains work.

How can we think of ableism in religion?

Sometimes this looks shitty, like how disabilities are punishments from God (a fairly common perspective in Abrahamic traditions) or this looks shitty in the “disabled people are uncommonly pious and good, because look at what they have to manage, I could never”
Sometimes this looks like access and help without shame and judgement within a religious community.
Sometimes it looks like white cis-het protestant history in the US of trying to “breed out” and eliminate disability through eugenics.

How should we think about crip theory and religion?

All religions already address disability, not always well or positively, mind you, and certainly not evenly, but disability is a hallmark of human life and our religions are already thinking about it – we skip over it, we miss shit
People with bodies of all abilities participate in (including leave) religious traditions, and are themselves making sense of ableism within these spaces – again, if we ignore these folks, we miss the story