Perhaps the thing I hate the most about Christianity is the spy mentality where if things go well we’ll support you but if they don’t we’ll disavow any knowledge of your existence. This is definitely come more to the forefront as COVID has gone on and Christians still want to meet in person for things even though some vulnerable people just can’t. The gotcha with Christianity is if you become disabled and you don’t toe the line of concocting a redemptive narrative for your life to make those around you comfortable, you get disowned.

The Republicans blocking COVID funding in late 2022 can be seen as another manifestation of this. They only care about you while you are one of them. Once you are completely off their map, you become invisible to them. So since disability voices are utterly off their radar they have zero qualms about throwing us under the bus.

I like to say that through all this COVID pandemic has really been a time of personal growth for me. My belly grew out two inches! It is always easy to find silver linings in other people’s clouds and Christianity normalizes this by positing the redemptive suffering narrative. But in reality this narrative is about making the person who suffers less, (who almost always holds more power) comfortable. Senseless suffering and chaos (which is given in disability in heaping measures) is attacking Christianity precisely where it offers its weakest defense. Those with disabilities inside the faith have to choose between playing down their experience and putting a redemptive spin on it to satisfy the their peers or tell their story unabridged and risk ostracism from the group.

This is why you almost never see authentic disability voices in Evangelical Christian circles. Instead you see token individuals with disabilities toeing the line romanticizing suffering and painting over the ugly parts of disability. Then you have people in power talking over authentic disability voices. And then you are confused as to why you’re losing the younger generations who have out of control mental illness rates.

Hate is a strong word but it often isn’t strong enough to describe how much God hates those of us with disabilities.

Evangelical Christians support a political party that, through their actions, performs hatred for us. Let’s be honest, if you support a political party that wants to take our protections and healthcare away, though you may not harbor any ill will for us in your heart, your actions still indicate your ill will. Republicans even voted down the United Nations disabilities treaty which would have affirmed protections for us throughout the world.

Mental illness means that a lot of us are experiencing exactly the opposite of what Christianity promises. One in four millennials has a mental illness (including myself). Despite what Christians reflexively say when pressed, through their music and worship it is affirmed that Christianity largely transpires on the seat of the emotion. Mental illness, particularly depression and its treatments often kills your emotions. Anxiety is basically God not showing up LOUDLY. And in some bipolar or schizophrenia one’s experience of God is even turned against them.

God’s people are going to drop out of your life and not enter it because of your disability and its fallout. Get ready to be treated like garbage in church, particularly as an adult. This is because you are often poor and have not achieved the prosperity expected of you by most forms of Evangelical Christianity. Christianity is performance art, a big part of it is selling the idea to other Christians that, indeed, you are actually a Christian. When you have a disability so much of your energy is just used up surviving so you don’t have any left over to perform.

Salvation is subject to the vagaries of one’s mind. Christianity is so made or broken by belief that it’s like dragging a freight train with the thread of a spider web. This particularly becomes into focus in people with autism who may not be able to make themselves believe in anything they can’t taste touch or see. You lose belief and you lose everything, like a small wire delivering power to a huge hospital that can get cut off any minute by an errant squirrel. Plus once you stop believing the belief no longer sustains you (especially if you had no positive experience of God) and it becomes a vicious cycle. So you experience God’s hatred, being burned for eternity.

People with disabilities are restrained from being given the right to speak on behalf of themselves because they are often a test case that show societies prevailing beliefs a lie. That’s why the most preeminent autism organization Autism Speaks doesn’t have any real autistic representation. And that is why the Protestant Vatican doesn’t include actual people with disabilities making decisions in its program for us. Evangelical Christianity is about test cases that work for the abled majority but not everyone. Edge cases where people’s experience of God is non existent or turned against them, people’s inability to believe in the supernatural, or total failure are not considered. People on the spectrum and those with mental illnesses often fail to build an image of God in their head that makes them function but are still gaslit about it from their religious peers.

One of the most offensive things you can call a person with integrity is a liar. I’m calling you a liar but not so verbally, I’m letting my life speak to do so. You see, when you interact with me, an adult with a disability, you are suddenly beset with cognitive dissonance because now you have to reconcile your negative reaction to me with the values you hold on paper. In judging me for not fitting what a person (or especially a Christian) should be you are exposing yourself to the fact that the idea people have innate worth is just something people say to virtue signal.

Everyone wants to believe they have innate worth and they’ll be loved for “who they really are” but then they proceed to treat adults with disabilities like garbage and this shows they just want this for them self. In my own life as an adult with a disability I’ve just gotten treated worse and worse each decade (well junior high was the worst but besides that blip adulthood has been worse than childhood). Part of this is because I am not connected to worth making entities such as houses, cars, a good job, etc.. and people pick up on this and treat me accordingly. As you get older capitalist definition of worth comes more and more into the picture.

It’s just a sad fact that some people’s lives do not go according to “God’s plan” and those people are treated like garbage in church as well as the secular world. The difference is in the Christian world there is an imperative to treat people as if things people say to virtue signal were actually true.

There is this Judeo Christian idea that God is near to those on the margins. It’s a nice sentiment but it’s unfalsifiable because those on the margins have no voice and if what they said went against the prevailing narrative they would be shot down rather quickly. In contrast if something is true to those on top they merely need to go to Davos and announce the change and whatever it is will be adopted right away. Those of us on the autistic spectrum have a much higher rate of irreligiously than our neurotypical peers and those with mental illnesses are also less religious. So there’s two significant groups of people on the margins of society that God is decidedly not “near”. When you don’t “experience God” or God is telling you to do things like drink urine or kill yourself and the church treats you like garbage you can see why the faith is not attractive to people with mental illnesses and autism.

The truth is people don’t care about individuals with disabilities unless they are a parent of a kid who happens to have one. The Christian disability scene is more about shoring up the narrative and defanging the experience of disability so it fits in their neat little Christian box. Disability and mental illness are an existential slam-dunk argument against Evangelical Christianity (particularly against the idea that life will go according to “God’s plan”). This is why in Evangelical Christian circles people with disabilities are generally not allowed to speak for themselves or if so are tone policed and talked over when they do. For Evangelicals it’s a matter of keeping their faith alive because a raw, unfiltered experience of disability works like an armor piercing bullet through the armor of God.

How it does this can’t easily be put into words because it’s different for everybody. If you yourself are a person with a disability or you spend a lot of time with one where they are free to be their unfiltered self you will get a grasp of this. Otherwise this world is closed to you.

“Beer and shot” conservatives get riled up seeing images on FOX News of people buying lobster with food stamps. But more educated conservatives (like a good portion of Wheaton alumni) save their worst for those of us who played by all the rules, did everything the system told us to do, and still failed. This is because these people shine a light on the fact that the game is rigged and hard work won’t always cause you to experience vocational success (your life going according to “God’s plan”).

Take the conservative idea, the “success sequence”. Finish high school, take any job, get a college degree, wait until your twenties to marry and have children after you marry. As an individual with a disability this sequence simply doesn’t produce anything. I graduated high school, worked some while in college, graduated college, and worked two years at a tech job after college. Then my mental health fell off a cliff and I was laid off and had to move home. Then I did make an honest mistake not taking a 20 hour per week janitor job that year I got laid off because I was looking for tech jobs. I would come to regret this because wouldn’t get a legitimate job offer for that many hours decades since.

It’s uncomfortable to think or admit that physical appearance determines what job you can get as opposed to talent or work ethic (this is because employers absolutely hate admitting anything that would make people fatalistic). My thick glasses, a disability accommodation for my visual impairment physical disability, have caused me to be rejected at job interview after job interview. Some interviews it’s all the interviewer will bring up. Others didn’t believe I could see when I brought up that I was visually impaired. One interviewer even told me that my physical disability made her uncomfortable and somehow I had to put the room at ease for the incursion it caused. I have ended up fighting for scraps on the informal economy working a couple hours a day for people who I never interviewed for.

The success sequence for individuals with disabilities is different. In order for those of us with disabilities to get jobs we have to skip the line. “The line” is the regular resume/interview process (which in and of itself is generally just a ruse to give the job hunt process the appearance of meritocracy). We either skip the line through affirmative action and quotas or through possessing social capital, people who will fast track us places. Naturally this is a more liberal narrative but looking at the staggeringly high unemployment in the disability community you will see that the sequence conservatives advocate for isn’t working.

As an actual person with a disability I do agree a lot of good comes from suffering just like you!

It’s good for making you a net drain on society instead of a net gain for it. There is little Evangelical Christians love more than people going on government healthcare and dole. That’s why they support a political party so intent on increasing them. People whose lives didn’t go according to “God’s plan” (which is shorthand for success or at minimum a dignified existence) treat you really well when you go to church.

It’s good for making everyone but helping professionals stop having real conversations with you. Let’s face it as adult with a disability you are treated like garbage and as people age their conversations generally revolve around life gems (cars, houses, jobs) or emotional baggage. If all you possess is the latter people are going to get sick of you really quickly.

It’s good for stealing meaning from your life because the good things in your life like dignified work and relationships were the things that gave meaning, and are the very things disability often takes away. Highly principled people like to concoct some kind of “meaning” out of suffering but for the rest of us who just don’t want to be treated like garbage this does little good.

It’s good for alienating you because your life experience is so foreign to others. This causes you to lose the old friends you had and keeps new ones from entering your life.

It’s good for making you invisible when you want to be visible and visible when you want to be invisible. When you have something visibly wrong with you it’s incumbent upon you to make others in the room comfortable with the difference. When you don’t or can’t do this you will be judged.

The last four years have been a bonanza for the GOP (God’s own party) and their maverick stance on disability rights.

They opened with Trump mocking a reporter who had Cerebral Palsy. Apparently this didn’t matter because 80% of Evangelicals still went for him.

They tried to take away healthcare from people with disabilities which would literally kill some of them. They have done this through trying to repeal Affordable Care Act but also creating the Medicaid work requirement which independent organizations agree would cut people dependent on care off the roles (as many Medicaid beneficiaries are in the “no man’s land” between fully disabled and healthy).

They are making the Social Security Disability review period shorter to get people off the roles, including those with severe mental illnesses.

The appointed people to courts that were opponents of disability rights.

They recently proposed a rule that aims to dramatically weaken the Health Care Rights Law, a key component of the Affordable Care Act that prohibits discrimination based on sex, race, ethnicity, age, or disability.

God has a few reasons why he hates Twitter so much!

Unfiltered disabled voices are finally seeing the light of day in their raw, undiluted form. Whether it be people on the spectrum who use alternative communication devices, people in wheelchairs, or those with psychiatric illnesses. When people want to hear about navigating a wheelchair ramp in the cold they seek out Twitter instead of a religious institution that usually doesn’t care about them anyway.

God hates people who work outside the normal confines. Black people finally decided all the institutions including the church were too corrupt or impotent so they just organized on Twitter under the Black Lives Matter moniker. The people organizing African Americans kept getting shot and jailed so they finally decided to organize headlessly via Twitter. But headless authority scares God more than anything because the ruse with religion was that there was some kind of head. The fact that there isn’t isn’t something those in power wanted people to know.

The wrong things come out on Twitter. The things people trumpet (like Bible verses) are what bring people to the faith while the things they keep hidden (like clergy abuse and honest questions they don’t dare ask in real life) are what draw them away. Twitter turns everything on its head because now people are opening up about things that usually were left in the dark. This can be seen in #metoo as well as other movements. Religion works best with charismatic authority figures like Ravi Zacharias who are above repute. You need to trust people and institutions before you trust God no matter who is telling you otherwise.