by Paul Edwards
At the very heart of the disability rights movement is the notion that it is society that creates disability by the barriers it places in the path of people with disabilities. A great deal has always been made of the intransigence of the country at large and of the widespread acceptance of what disability rights activists have dubbed the "medical" model. Under this rubric of disability, people so "afflicted" are perceived as inherently inferior. Their disabilities must be "fixed" or "cured" if they are to be made better. Emphasis is laid on lessening the disability and thereby making the disabled person more "normal."
It isn't my intention to spend a lot of time on this model but rather to suggest that it seriously distorts the reality in which disabled people must live. You see, I believe that it is not from doctors that the notion of people with disabilities as inherently inferior comes. I argue, perhaps controversially, that this notion comes instead from religion and that the medical model is far better understood if we take the doctors out of the middle and put religion at the center where it actually exists.
Neither doctors nor medicine have the power to explain or be held responsible for the pervasiveness of the value system that actually mediates disability attitudes. Instead, they have imbibed the same model from childhood that the rest of society has, and that model is religiously based. There is not a single instance that I know of where Jesus "empowered" a blind man or a lame woman or a deaf child. He cured them instead. I find it hard to imagine a more debilitating attitude toward disabilities than the one contained in the book of Job in the Old Testament! One "affliction" after another is piled on poor Job and he is expected to passively accept and endure but never to adjust. For Job, the isolation, pain and incompetence are all God's will and must be accepted joyfully. During a large part of the book of Job, he just sits there as a passive witness to his body's changes.
Our notion of what is "good" and what is "evil" comes directly from the values that we imbibe from earliest childhood in Sunday school. If we as disabled people are not "cured," we do not have enough faith; we haven't prayed hard enough. We are sometimes taught that disability doesn't happen in a vacuum. It is a punishment for someone's or the world's sins. Every religion demands that its adherents provide charity to those less fortunate than they and folks with disabilities certainly are that. There is an inherent recognition of the inferiority of those with disabilities and a concomitant duty on any good religious person to provide those "afflicted" people with "help."
The very word "handicapped" has nothing to do with medicine but rather comes from the practice in medieval churches of allowing the halt and the blind to stand outside churches with cap in hand. Judaism and Islam are as ability-centered as is Christianity, though Islam, far earlier than any of the other religions, identified "charity" as an absolutely central tenet of each man's responsibility. If anything, Eastern religions encourage even more passivity than do the others. The notion that, with patience and acceptance of one's karma one can gradually aspire to a higher plane, is surely as stultifying a position as one can imagine. It is possible for one's actions to influence future karma, though, and that is to the good. Unfortunately, disability is right at the bottom of the caste system along with untouchability.
Do I intentionally demean all the good that is done for people with disabilities by religious institutions or by the people who are a part of them? Of course I don't. Indeed, it is absolutely crucial to an understanding of disability history that we recognize that private philanthropy specifically encouraged by all religions was the source of the only assistance available to people with disabilities throughout most of history. The notion that the government or the society had any responsibility for assuaging the suffering of the downtrodden and disabled can be traced back, at the earliest, only to the 19th century. Without the ongoing efforts of churches, people with disabilities would be far worse off. Indeed, the contributions that ACB can glean from the larger society are probably most often given out of a value system that is explicitly and repeatedly sanctioned by cultural values that have their roots in the philosophy of whatever religious institution the giver is a part of. It is also true that people with disabilities are more accepted in churches than we are in most other areas of our society. Indeed, it is specifically because there is a place for us within the community of religion that I suggest we need to examine what that place is and what it could be.
The real point of this article is to suggest that the adoption of the "medical" model misrepresents what we are truly required to change. It is the very moral center of our society that we must impact. The disability movement may point as often as it likes to fundamentalist and right wing agitators as our public enemy; but all that does is obscure the real issue. The fact is that all organized religions, with the best intentions in this world and the next if they believe there is one, operate with an entrenched set of values that we must explicitly recognize and validate. Only then can we hope to understand just how much we have to do.
The attitudes of virtually everyone in our society toward disability, including us, are built from earliest childhood. The very bedrock of all that we are taught to believe is "good" creates a value system that reinforces the inferiority of people who are disabled and promotes charity and lower expectation as positive religious values. If we could devise a theology of disability, what would it look like? Just as important, how can we hope to change institutions that are so inherently grounded in the moral certainty that we need help and are worthy of charity?
My next article will at least explore some options that we can try. It will not be easy and, if we are honest with ourselves, it may not even be desirable. Civil rights are things that churches can understand. True equality is a horse of an entirely different color. Our quest for civil rights has already eroded the impulse to charity of many in our country. What will happen if we truly seek to disassemble the web of inferiority in which we are cocooned? Are we truly ready to stand exposed to the world without the anchor of a place in the moral hierarchy from which we reap considerable benefit? These are hard questions. Stay tuned. We have to face them or we will forfeit the chance to ever be all that we have the potential to be!