Forging and living in community is hard work. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either not aware of the suffering or hard work of other members in their community which is ongoing on their behalf or inexperienced. But this labour can also be part of the joy and beauty of it, a kind of craft taken up in the interest of establishing and maintaining spaces of loving mutual care for one another.

While people can sometimes tend to view church as a form of consumerised therapy, e.g. something that is undemanding (or only so demanding as to avoid revealing our interpersonal shortcomings) and meets a person’s (able-bodied) needs implicitly, there are other examples in recent years of reflection on ecclesia which focusses on areas where there is hard work to be done and towards the ways that we might sharpen the tools we bring to community-as-craft:

• confronting racism and the need for forms of repentance and reconciliation as white ethno-nationalism has crept into particular instances of Christian self-identity
• confronting institutional and interpersonal forms of misogyny and exclusion of women
• addressing the ways that elitism and class (un)consciousness, in the form of wealth, literacy, or social status can subvert worship
• unpacking the phenomenon of spiritual abuse and the ways that other more adjacent forms of trauma should be drawn into our reflection on life together
• …and finally, assessing the ways that we have created spaces where the disabled God is unwelcome

As a theologian who occupies a small slice of these intersectional categories, I am wary of the ways that in some of these fields, reflection about justice can come in speculative forms – where you might imagine how it is for another person who is oppressed whilst not experiencing oppression yourself – rather than arising from lived experience or wisdom. I’m working on a book, God is Weird where I’ll unpack some of my own analysis as an autistic theologian and Christian ethicist and I’ve also begun setting up an ethnographic project around autistic spirituality. These projects won’t be complete for some years now, I expect, so in the meantime I thought it might be helpful to put down a series of posts on what resources I’ve found (some of them are written, but not all!), areas where I see opportunities for practitioners to change their approaches, and ways that our core theological and doctrinal thinking might need to change in light of the forms of exclusion of privilege which have narrowed theological reflection in the 20th century.

It is worth emphasising that the task here is quite severe: Christians have been at the forefront of conversion therapy and eugenics movements which have sought to eradicate and hide autistic lives, usually achieved through breathtaking levels of interpersonal violence. So while there is joy abounding in a neurodivergent theology, this is very much not a cheery lighthearted conversation for autists who are sharply aware of these legacies and hold them as personal trauma. For this post, I’m going to frame out some of the parameters that I think might be salient for autistic church for the sake of later reflection where I’ll unpack them, so here goes:

(1) Queering church: the starting point for all of this has to be an accounting for weirdness and unconventionality in forms of Christian life and worship, doctrine and collectivity. I note that sometimes neurodivergent (“ND”) thinkers might try to avoid getting caught up in debates around sexual orientation and attempt more covert or disentangled ways to engage this subject, but after a long season of covert work as a theologian, I’ve really begun to question the wisdown of such an approach. Queerness has always been about wider concerns beyond sexual orientation, but also “unconventional” sexual orientation and gender identity have always been a co-occuring feature of ND lives and bodies. As a result, I tend to view adjacent queering projects as complementary. Following on from this, there are some hard questions we need to ask in opening up a conversation about queering church for ND neighbours:

• Why do we obsessively focus on categories of normality and flee from reflection on embodied difference?
• Why have Christians led movements to eradicate or convert forms of embodied difference (like down syndrome or autism)? It is really important to reckon with the intensity of violence that some Christian communities have sustained towards disabled members of their communities. Christians were among those at the forefront of the eugenics movement in the 20th century and still are via the proxy of genetic research into “causes” of autism and gene therapies in the 21st century. But in other contexts, it is equally the case that conservative Christians have been at the forefront of pushing for access to behavioural therapies (like ABA) which seek to convert (I’m not exaggerating when I suggest we shoud substitute language here of “torture”) autistic children and young adults so that they conceal conspicuous behaviours. I know of many ND children who were pressed into narratives of “normal” behaviour as part of sunday school teaching. I know of no disavowal of ABA by any Christian denomination. As Laura MacGregor and Allen G. Jorgenson observe in one recent journal article, especially for parents and carers of children with disabilities, for a variety of reasons, churches feel “unsafe” with the consequence that those families “[withdraw] entirely from church”.
• While the first-hand accounts of caregivers form an important body of knowledge which we should take very seriously in our reflection on the ways that churches exclude disabled persons, there is a hazard here in that these accounts of caregiver suffering and burnout can displace first-person accounts of chuch. I observe that much of the underwriting support for ABA and eugenics charities like Autism Speaks tends to be led by caregivers desperate for support which can ultimately cause further harm and marginalisation of those persons they are caring for. Why have we tended to focus on the (very real, to be fair) suffering of able-bodied caregivers and ignored the trauma and stolen agency of care-receivers?
• I have also observed that conversations about accommodations and support start off very easy and meet hard limits very quickly. Too often, after a brief burst of enthusiasm (again, perhaps not appreciating the full scale of work that may be involved), we often tend to drift eventually towards a framing of conversations about forms of accommodation, conversations about rights and entitlements as a zero-sum game, emphasising limits to what is “practical” and in sharper cases supporting rearguard action to centre and celebrate privileged people who are ceding those “rights” for the sake of another person (e.g.  men’s rights, or white experiences of “racism”).

(2) There is an urgent need to centre embodied diversity as we reflect on life together. We’ve done a bit of thinking (thanks in no small part to the legacy of Nancy Eiesland) around accessibilty for wheelchair users in the built environment, but there are many other forms of inaccessiblity that don’t get attention, including some straight-forward aspects of ND embodied experience like sensory sensitivities around sound, light, texture and food. How do we worship corporately in ways that start from the assumption that auditory, visual, and sensorimotor differences are going to abound? Formulaic approaches to worship music aren’t likely to work. And how can we create pathways for people to share their negative experiences without fear of marginalisation, shame or sanction? Two autistic people in the same church may have conflicting experiences: loud music can produce suffering for some people whilst intense bodily vibration can generate deep joy for another. This is a paradox we haven’t spent much time exploring in the church or in academic theology. In a similar way, we’ve done a bit of work to accommodate some forms of hearing impairment with AV equipment, but other forms of neurological difference like central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) or just plain autistic cognition can lead to challenges around pace and flow of auditory information: a 30 minute long eloquent sermon may be a brilliant canvas for some people but a blank page for many others. Should the sermon or song really be the centerpiece of a church service? There are interesting questions about the love feast and other forms of liturgical meals which seem to have fallen off the radar as we seek to emulate para-ecclesial genres of oratory and performance.

(3) There is an obsession, especially within Protestant forms of worship on speech and oratory. This can often crowd out silence. Or worse-still this preference can lead to a commodification of silence, where it becomes seen as especially holy (mindfulness workshop anyone?) rather than part of someone’s mundane everyday experience. ND church needs to be able to accommodate and celebrate persons who are non-verbal or non-speaking (even if this is occasional rather than persistent as is often the case with masking autistic people). This is more common than you expect, especially given the ways we can tend to use invalidated pseudo-social scientific instruments like the Myers-Briggs tests to badge non-communication as a personality trait (and thus not requiring a person’s energy as attention as a prolific communicator). We also need to reflect on ways of accommodating different forms of speech, which may involve gesture, sounds, or echolalia. I was particularly struck by the account by Eli Clare (Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure) of having shaking and erratic body motions as a form of embodiment which can be celebrated. Think about the number of places across a worship service where perfection is upheld (even if not achieved) as a pursuit: music production, scholarly and eloquent but accessible sermons, clever spontaneous announcements. Would it feel perfectly normal if a person with cerebal palsy delivered a sermon in your church? So often we assume that effective communication is the problem of the communicator. But what if listening was sanctified as a challenging liturgical practice?

There’s more I’m sure, including thinking about how we can confront and dismantle ablist hierarchies, but that’s a good start for now. More from me on this in weeks to come!