Delivered at Temple of Faith Church, Louisville, KY
23rd Church Anniversary with Pastor Joel A. Bowman, Sr.
“Ableism has been a fixture in our society for far too long, determining which bodies are deserving and which ones are not. It has also influenced architectural designs that dictate who can occupy public spaces—upholding views that trample on the dignity of the disabled community. Hardwick draws a connection between race and disability and what we must do to dismantle a hierarchy of bodies to achieve a more just society in our churches, communities, and the world. As he says, ‘disability is not a dirty word,’ and I join him in asserting that the time to resist believing this is now.” —Terence Lester, founder of Love Beyond Walls; author of All God’s Children, I See You, and When We Stand (Hardwick, 2024, p. i)
There’s a saying that if you’ve met one person with autism, then you’ve met one person with autism. Autism is truly a spectrum, not because we should view it as some linear scale that ranges from zero to ten or from not very autistic to extremely autistic. Autism is far too complex to simplify it in those terms. Instead, we should see autism as more like a color wheel in which, depending on factors such as environment, age, gender, and sociological circumstances, the common traits associated with autism are sometimes more pronounced in certain areas than in others. All the traits are there, but they may not be experienced equally by those who are observing. (Hardwick, 2024, p.17)
Even prior to the transatlantic slave trade, we see early developments of an ableist system that ranked the value of the bodies brought to the new land. In one of the oldest historical references to Africans in North America, a settler named John Rolfe (ca. 1585–1622) referenced some twenty Africans as merchandise. It had not yet been determined if these Africans were indentured servants or if they were doomed to a lifetime of slavery; however, it is apparent that these Africans held a lower status than their White Virginian counterparts. This serves as evidence that even before racial slavery became the primary reason why Africans were brought to the West, their bodies were ranked as inherently inferior to White bodies. It appears that ableism was at work early in the development of American culture. This perception of inferiority based on race is at the heart of my argument that Black bodies were categorized as disabled bodies. (Hardwick, 2024, p.36)
Disability ministry in the Black church context is often invisible because it stems from the days of slavery and the need to shelter those with disabilities from harm or violence. Slave owners saw Black bodies that were physically (or mentally) disabled as a monetary liability. They did not see them as people but as bodies born and bred to produce labor. If a person they saw as property became unable to meet the rigorous and debilitating physical demands placed on their bodies, they faced the possibility of death. This was true even though a large percentage of physical disabilities among enslaved Africans were due to harsh conditions and torture. When a child was born with a physical disability, communities would often conspire to lie to slave owners by telling them that the child did not survive birth in order to shield them from terrible forms of treatment, including being drowned so that slave owners would not have to feed and clothe someone who would not give them a sufficient return in the form of labor. What emerged because of this need to protect the disabled is what I call the “shadowing” of the disability community. We often see shadowing in the Black church and the Black community in the various ways that they shield the disabled from the harsh treatment of an ableist society. (Hardwick, 2024, p. 98)
Why am I sharing all of this? Because for years I have struggled with body image. Even when I was at the height of my physical fitness as a college football player, I was rarely satisfied with the way my body looked. Over the years, I’ve struggled with my appearance. I suppose a large part of my self-consciousness is due to social anxiety. I don’t like being the center of attention. I loathe being stared at and struggle with thoughts of how I am being perceived. Autism has obviously had a role in these feelings, (Hardwick, 2024, p. 138-139)
For most Christians, the story of crucifixion is important because it is the story of one man who is crucified. That man was Jesus, and because of the Gospel narratives and their claims about the true identity of Jesus, Christians tend to place all of their attention on him. No doubt the story of Roman crucifixion is a fascinating one, but Christians are singularly focused on Jesus and his experience. McCaulley contends that based on a long-standing tradition of African American biblical interpretation, Black people in America have also made a profound connection to the story of Jesus being crucified because of the presence of an African man named Simon. According to the Gospel of Mark, Simon was from Cyrene, a city in North Africa in what is now modern-day Libya. It is without question that Simon was a dark-skinned African man who, Mark writes, was “forced…to carry Jesus’ cross” (Mark 15:21). Carrying crosses isn’t a new experience for Black and disabled bodies. Crosses have been forced upon them for centuries. Our culture and our churches continue to burden them with crosses of shame and stigma. (Hardwick, 2024, pp. 145-146).
Disability has long been seen as a celebration of different bodies—a vehicle for providing disabled people with dignity and honor within the Christian tradition and the broader society. Except disabled people are already worthy of dignity and honor. Disability theology is not just a celebration of difference; it is also an exploration of God’s embodied human experience while simultaneously interrogating and informing humanity’s experience with God. (Hardwick, 2024, p. 148).
