The Unselfconscious Ableism of Disability Theory and Theology
The trend in both Christian and secular disability theory has been to challenge the Thomistic assertion that disability will no longer exist after the resurrection. Jesus is called ableist for healing the disabled, even in Christian publications. The claim is common enough to have made its way into satire. More radical disability theorists claim that there is no such thing as disability, denying the lived reality of disabled people like myself.
What follows posits that one can—and must—assert the worthiness and godliness of everyone with a disability without rejecting the reality of disability. Furthermore, to assert that disability will be absent from resurrected bodies and brains is not to enforce artificial and oppressive notions of normality, but instead to recognize that all identities we wear in this world are transitory, with our true selves finding absolute expression after the eschaton.
This Body of Death
I live with OCD and migraines. I am a privileged, educated woman with access to healthcare and accepting family and friends—but still I say: my disabilities are real and I would not have chosen them for myself. Nor would anyone else.
OCD is not the neat-freak, twee quirkiness of sanitized media portrayals: untreated, it is a state of constant, pathological doubt about one’s reality and one’s own character. It is trying hard to be “reverent” at Mass and having the intrusive thought of shouting blasphemy during the consecration, which one must then negate by saying the Jesus Prayer repeatedly, starting over if one does not focus “correctly.” It is parking at one’s destination, only to be seized by fear that one cannot remember every single second of the drive and may have run over a pedestrian, resulting in one driving back over the route to look for a body, for blood, or for police tape. It is refusing to leave the house because one can never trust the door is locked.
Best of all, most OCD sufferers are aware of how irrational our fears and rituals are, but this only worsens our emotional distress as our bodies refuse to obey our rational minds—perhaps, we wonder, we really have crossed from the territory of the neurotic into the psychotic.
There are as many obsessions and compulsions as there are people with OCD, with the content of the obsessions changing over a lifetime, morphing to better attack whatever a sufferer holds most dear. It does feel, I can say from personal experience, like one imagines a demonic attack; I know hell is real because OCD has sent me there repeatedly.
Religious themes are common in OCD; it was originally called “scrupulosity” when first described in medieval monks. Martin Luther may have had OCD. Representing Catholics, St. Ignatius Loyola is thought to have had OCD and St. Oscar Romero received a diagnosis late in life. Even gentle St. Therese of Lisieux, known to most Catholics as the sweetly smiling girl carrying roses on the front of a holy card, was tormented as a child by fears that she had committed grave sins; her “little way” is a reclamation, a “baptizing,” perhaps, of an obsessive attention to the intention and impact of one’s thoughts, words, and deeds. Ironically, as a Discalced Carmelite, the initials “OCD” follow her name.
One of OCD’s greatest ironies is that regular psychotherapy worsens symptoms, because ruminating on one’s obsessions and seeking reassurance are both little-recognized compulsive behaviors. Obsessions fuel compulsions; performing compulsions strengthens obsessions. It is a vicious cycle of chasing security; I have heard OCD described as “the doubting disease” and those living with it as “reassurance junkies.”
My symptoms had been unpleasant but tolerable for most of my life, even if they at times led to panic and depressive episodes, only to suddenly and exponentially increase in early 2023. I am immensely blessed to have the resources and support to undergo exposure and response-prevention (ERP) therapy, the gold-standard treatment for OCD, and I no longer suffer constantly for months on end now that I can manage my symptoms and thereby actually reduce their frequency and severity.
Migraine is a neurological disorder that is, as we migraineurs say, “so much more than a headache.” In addition to excruciating, icepick-through-the-eye-and-out-the-back pain on one or both sides of the head, one’s senses go haywire—phantom smells, dancing aura lights before the eyes, feeling hot or cold—and too many more possible symptoms to list. In the absence of effective prescription drugs, sometimes vomiting from nausea is the only relief achievable, leading to memorable prayers such as “God, let me throw up or let me die already.” Smelling certain smells, eating certain foods, sleeping too much or too little, exercising, the start of a menstrual period—all these and more can trigger migraine, as well as seemingly nothing at all.
At the same time last year as my OCD worsened exponentially, my migraines increased from once monthly to twice weekly, seemingly confirming the theory that both disorders stem from overactive signals in certain regions of the brain. There is a substantial overlap of OCD diagnoses with migraine diagnoses. My disabilities then are, really, “all in my head,” both in where I experience the distress they cause and that they have their origin at the mysterious meeting of brain and mind, defying Platonic body-soul duality and confirming the body-and-soul psychosomatic union the Church understands to be a human person (following Aristotle).
Though I enjoy life and have many things to live for, I understand what Paul says when he describes living in “a body of death” in a way I doubt most people my age do (Rom 7:24). Even while having so much through this earthly tent, my heart sings at the verse, “For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (2 Cor 5:1-4).
Imagine my surprise then when I learned my desire to be resurrected without my overactive neural pathways, in line with two millennia of Catholic teaching on the glorified body, was a sign of my (alleged) internalized ableism.
Aquinas on the Resurrected Body
Aquinas’s teachings on the resurrected body in the Supplement to the Third Part of the Summa represent both the classic Catholic position and the imaginings of the wider Christian popular imagination. Aquinas states that all human beings will be resurrected, both the saved and the damned, in bodies preserving their original identity, integrity, and quality (ST suppl., qq. 79-81). Aquinas’s defines integrity as “[whatever] belonged to the truth of human nature . . . perfected by the rational soul”; it signifies the fact that all deficiency and “imperfection of a man will be removed at the resurrection” (ST suppl., q. 80, a. 4). By identity, Aquinas understands that “the selfsame soul [will be] united to the selfsame body”; this does not preclude changes, for the body “will rise again identically the same, but of a different condition, since it was mortal and will rise in immortality” (ST suppl., q. 79, aa. 1-2).
To this, Aquinas writes that the resurrected bodies of the saved will be glorified, possessing four qualities he says are described by Paul in 1 Corinthians: impassibility, or immunity to suffering; subtlety, or non-limitation to the laws of physics; the self-explanatory agility; and clarity, or the reflection of the soul’s glory in the body (1 Cor 15:42-44, ST suppl., qq. 82-85). In the Christian popular imagination, this translates into cheeky statements such as “this old general issue clunker is going to be upgraded to a luxury model.”
Disability Theory and the Resurrected Body
The seminal text of contemporary Christian disability theory is the late Nancy Eisland’s The Disabled God. Using accounts from Christian women living with disability, including her own, Eisland rejects traditional popular Christian views that “disability denotes an unusual relationship with God and that the person with disabilities is either divinely blessed or damned: the defiled evildoer or the spiritual superhero” stereotypes that do not represent “the ordinary lives and lived realities of most people with disabilities.”[1] This is an argument I embrace: that disability is morally neutral, with the suffering caused by impairment and discrimination being no more and no less meritorious than any other kind of suffering of the same degree. Yet many of Eisland’s arguments fall flat.
Central to Eisland’s argument is an implicit rejection of Aquinas’s account of bodily integrity after the resurrection, insisting that for herself and many disabled people, a body without disability is not a body they would recognize as their own. Eisland draws on accounts of the Risen Christ’s wounds to construct what she calls “a reconception of wholeness, . . . a human-God who not only knows injustice and experiences the contingency of human life, but also reconceives perfection as unself-pitying, painstaking survival.”[2] The image of the wounded Christ is a powerful one, and one I personally draw comfort from—but that Eisland compares disability to Christ’s visible marks while insisting that there is no supererogatory merit to living with a disability seems a contradiction. Indeed, Augustine says that all will be healed after the resurrection, save perhaps for the martyrs, who,
If it will be seemly in that new kingdom to have some marks of these wounds still visible in that immortal flesh, the places where they have been wounded or mutilated shall retain the scars without any of the members being lost. While, therefore, it is quite true that no blemishes which the body has sustained shall appear in the resurrection, yet we are not to reckon or name these marks of virtue blemishes (City of God, XXII.19).
This further illustrates the longstanding Christian understanding that if disability and impairment persist beyond resurrection—or rather, the scars of the impairments and not the impairments themselves—it is as a sign of merit; for Eisland to insist on post-resurrection wounds and a special identification of the disabled with Christ while disavowing the notion that the disabled are marked by God for special sanctity is to insist on having it both ways.
A great weakness of Eisland’s work is that it focuses only on persons with physical disabilities, predominantly with mobility impairments. This is especially lacking given that we whose disabilities affect our perception of the world and consciousness face not only the question of who and what we shall be after the resurrection, but if our disability will persist in the intermediate state between our deaths and the eschaton.
Additionally, in seeking to demonstrate that disabled people do live full, happy lives with (and not only in spite of) their disabilities, that we are “whole,” Eisland inadvertently falls into the same assumptions as ableism: that spiritual wholeness depends on physical wholeness, that disability needs to be proven as a variant of “normality,” or normality abolished, in order for disabled people to be considered people.
The Unselfconscious Ableism of Contemporary Disability Theory
In being forced over the last year to deal with much more significant impairment from my disabilities, I have slowly come to identify myself as disabled. In seeking to understand more the theoretical basis of disability advocacy today, I have come to a similar conclusion as many of my disabled family and friends who have a long engagement in the movement: the loudest, most radical disability theorists seem to be the most ableist and exclusionary of them all.
Amy Lutz, a medical historian and mother to a much-loved, severely autistic adult son, writes in her essay, “When Everything Is Eugenics, Nothing Is,” of the disconnect between the loudest voices that insist disability is socially constructed—that it never has inherent downsides and is just as preferable as living without disability—and the lived experience of those with severe disabilities and their loved ones:
Recently, Jonah brushed by the stove, accidentally turning on one of the gas burners. To say he didn’t notice is to obscure much more fundamental deficits. He doesn’t understand what fire is—how it starts, how it spreads. He wouldn’t yell for help, grab a fire extinguisher, or even know to leave the kitchen before being trapped.
I can’t help thinking that perhaps the greatest luxury belief of all is that disability is neutral. It sounds progressive and empowering—yet betrays complete ignorance of what severe intellectual and developmental disability looks like, or how it impacts affected individuals and their families. Perhaps ignorance is the wrong word. More accurately, some disability advocates aggressively shut down incongruent narratives with accusations of “eugenics” and “ableism,” to the point that even the NIH would rather abandon its founding mission [of preventing birth defects] than challenge this stunningly obvious fiction.
Because disability is not neutral in our house, Jonah will never have a meaningful career or a romantic relationship. He will never understand politics, geography, history, or philosophy. He can’t follow the plot of Star Wars or even Paw Patrol . . . No one would choose this extraordinarily constrained life—not for themselves, or for their children.
Does that make me a eugenicist? Impossible to answer. If promoting the health of fetuses with the goal of preventing disability counts as eugenics, then anyone who has ever taken a prenatal vitamin, or avoided alcohol or sushi during pregnancy is a eugenicist.
Adding to this trivialization of disability in the public consciousness is the rise of self-diagnoses by teens and young adults on TikTok, who assign themselves previously rare disorders—such as dissociative identity disorder, better known as “multiple personality disorder”—based on some vague discontent or an intrusive thought they once had. Most upsetting, perhaps, are those who latch onto a diagnosis of body integrity identity disorder (BIID), a real disorder with an occurrence of only .01% that causes the rejection of healthy limbs and subsequent self-amputation attempts, or otherwise claim that their true identity is that of a disabled person.
Disability is a social construct, yet it is supposed to be at the core of my identity, an identity worth appropriating; disability is no different than differences in hair color, but the disabled person is inherently enrolled in a worldwide liberation struggle.
Our preoccupation with the fate of disabilities in the world to come speaks more to our obsession with identities—individual and group—than it does about God and God’s generosity at the resurrection.
This Earthly Tent Is Always Being Borne Away
Our bodies are constantly in flux, as Eisland herself admits: “‘normal’ bodies, like impaired bodies, are subject to contingency,”[3] and “bodies evolve, become ill and disabled, and die.”[4] If we are to insist on disability persisting into eternity, we must question how disabled this resurrected body would be—at the greatest or least extent of one’s symptoms? Are persons who die soon after being maimed in accidents to be resurrected without limbs? Are those who die of dementia as likely to be resurrected with it as someone who lived with a longstanding bipolar disorder diagnosis? In short: will we be resurrected as we lived or as we died?
It would seem, as God is a God of the living and not the dead, that it would be as we lived (Luke 20:38). If we are to be resurrected as we lived, at what point of our lives then? In my three decades of life, I have had many bodies and many identities: infant, child, adolescent, adult; student, teacher, writer; daughter, sister, friend, bride, wife. My OCD and migraine symptoms have waxed and waned across time.
I can understand the insistence by some disability advocates and other disabled people that our disabilities will persist beyond the resurrection. If offered a miraculous cure for my migraines—no brain surgery, no side effects—I would take it in a heartbeat; but if offered a cure for my OCD, I would hesitate. Which of my traits are direct results of my disorder, or which of my traits come as a package deal with the overactive neurology that undergirds my OCD—I am not sure. To change so radically in this life, I think, would be to become unrecognizable to myself and loved ones—but in a world completely transformed, in the new heaven and new earth, I expect and hope that I too will radically transform.
As a friend with diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) said, “There are certain aspects of my autism that I would rather leave behind, but perhaps in the resurrection, and in the next life, we will have transcended beyond these distinctions. Even the neurotypical way of viewing the world and processing information won’t be applicable.”
This seems the wisest approach in speculating on embodied life in a world that is promised to be good but sounds alien to human imagination—one in which there are no tears, but also no sun and no moon and no sea. Not for nothing did Paul warn that speculations on the nature of the resurrected body are “foolish” or “stupid questions” (1 Cor 15:35-36). If even now our ethnic, class, gender, and political affiliations are being subsumed in Christ (Gal. 3:28), if the bonds of marriage will be superseded at the resurrection (Matt. 22:30), why then should we anticipate any aspect of our identity to remain unchanged in eternity?
I am content to live my life bearing this particular cross, trusting that that even though “what [I] will be has not yet made known,” (1 John 3:2) it must be better—though it will still be me:
[A]fter my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God;
I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me! (Job 19:26-27)