Moral Injury and Religious Ableism: A Constructive Vision for a Future of Disability Justice

Existing in a world not built for disabled bodies and within millennia of hierarchical church history which still today too often insists that some bodies are better than others, this paper examines the moral injury experienced by disabled people when dealing with the ableist theology of their faith communities. Taking into consideration the author’s positionality as a congenitally disabled scholar-activist and incorporating the insights of pastoral theologians Larry Kent Graham (2017) and Carrie Doehring (2015) alongside feminist scholar Rita Nakashima Brock (2012), I articulate how the violence of ableism within the church continues to harm disabled children of God. Following Doehring in understanding moral injury as the harm that occurs when an individual’s sense of what is morally right is violated by forces beyond their control and expanding Graham’s argument that this type of injury is intensified when individuals feel powerless to prevent such violations, I argue that stress responses to religious, societal, and internalized ableism must be intentionally disrupted through embodied, collective interventions of repentance and reimagination. 

When disabled people are bombarded with narratives of cure, are consistently preached about as metaphor, or are told that they “need to have more faith” because “God doesn’t want them to be disabled,” religious communities enact repetitive violence by failing to see the Imago Dei in divinely-made disabled bodies. For disabled people who often do not seek bodily cures because they do not believe there is anything wrong with their holy and whole disabled body-mind-spirits, these morally injurious theologies inflict wounds which too often go unnoticed within social and theological systems that unquestioningly defend the correctness of their ableist beliefs. Disabled people within Christian churches, like many veterans grappling with the psychological wounds of war, are largely unable to resist such wounds because the perpetrators themselves typically do not view their beliefs or the resulting praxes as violent or immoral. Rather than question the way things have always been done or reassess how such ableist theologies have inhibited flourishing for divergent bodies within their communities, clergy and lay members alike too often blame those with disabilities for their failure to conform. Still today in far too many communities disabled people are led to believe that their nonconventional bodies are caused by personal sin or are the result of humanity’s supposed “fall” from grace. At best, church leaders do not notice when they are inflicting such violence on disabled beloveds because they have not received the education necessary to deconstruct their embedded ableism. At worst, the attitudes, practices, behaviors, and beliefs of the church are so integrally tied to the eurochristian hierarchy of bodies that they readily inflict moral harm on all bodies who cannot or who refuse to coalesce with the desired “ideal.”

While in recent years some scholars working at the intersection of psychology and disability have thought about moral injury itself as a type of medicalized disability, I am instead interested in the way that ableist theologies taught by and reinforced in community cause moral injury for disabled Christians whose perception of the Divine enfleshed does not match the embedded, communal theologies they have been taught. This paper interrogates Lisa Nichols Hickman’s Disability Theology of Limits for responding to moral injury (2018), recognizing the ways by which faith communities and sacred texts create and maintain moral standards for believers while also challenging the assumption that human limits are the ultimate culprit in theologically injurious experiences rather than systemic ableism, sexism, cis-heteronormativity, and the many other oppressive -isms. Labeling moral injury as a disability simultaneously fails to see the violence of these moral violations and perpetuates the narrative that disability is something negative which must be fixed and, if possible, preemptively avoided. I seek to engage in conversation with other disabled thinkers and with scholars constructing alternative possibilities to the systematic ableism of the institutional church, desiring to build out a lifegiving framework for disability justice within the church where all people can truly belong. In this paper, through dialogue with disabled and not-yet-disabled scholars, I seek to co-imagine a tangible and practical future beyond ableism in order to disrupt the continuing violence of such toxic theologies and to cocreate healing for disabled beloveds who have been morally injured by the church.

The freedom to live fully in all of one’s complexities, even and especially when embodying sacred flesh that refuses to conform to the expected norms of our world, is constrained when faith communities fail to see the Divine in disabled bodies. Churches choose to inflict violence when they refuse to lament and repent of their ableism, rejecting the expansive notions of divinity and of socially-just behavior that many disabled people know to be true of the God who chose to take on flesh and tabernacle among us. Repenting from this morally injurious theology requires Christian faith communities to revise their ways of being in the world, reimagining in community an alternative way forward by trusting the lived wisdom of disabled people when they express the violence of their experiences rather than by trying to speak for disabled folx, denying reality, or furthering harm by acting out of pity. By tracing historical harms, challenging frameworks of moral injury as disability, and naming the continuing but too-often-unquestioned violence, this paper offers a first constructive step towards healing from religious ableism and moral injury.