The Pattern of this World – Autism, the Church, and the Radical Sanctity of Disabled Community
Proudly autistic, Dr Micah Neale reflects on how her Christian faith has supported her to manage the pattern of this world.
These are the opinions of the individual author and do not represent Church Urban Fund or the Church of England’s views.
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” – Romans 12:2
As an autistic teenager, struggling to understand the new context of secondary school and the unpredictable and – to me – baffling behaviour of my peers, this verse was a rock to which I could cling, limpet-like, as the storm of adolescence raged around me. “Do not be afraid,” the angels whispered to me through words recorded long ago, when my autistic awkwardness led to social gaffes as a young adult struggling to find her way at university, “the only approval you need is from God.” My faith has been a shield against the vagaries of neurodivergent life more often than I can count, a foothold I could defend against the spiralling uncertainty and existential despair that has followed me closely since childhood.
About autism
Autism is a lifelong neurological condition – not a disease or a curable aberration, but a characterisation of who we essentially are as people. It can present in radically different ways, as diverse as any population in terms of personality, interests, genders, abilities and communication styles. This is not intended to be a full description of autism, beyond my own experience (I recommend ASAN and AWN as particularly good organisations of autistic self-advocates, if you wish to read more). However, there are some difficulties almost all of us share.
It is hypothesised that autistic people feel emotions much more deeply, and for much longer than non-autistic (“allistic”) people, and often have greater sensory sensitivity, experiencing an “intense world” with which our brains must cope, even in early childhood. Almost all of us experience a less filtered sensory experience. Sometimes we cope with this intensity of feeling and sensory information by subconsciously shutting things out – keeping people at a distance, or learning not to pay attention to an alarming sensory input. At other times, we might appear hypersensitive. We often use our routines and pattern recognition to find certainty in this distressingly uncertain world.
Due to our unusual neurology, we tend to have different ways of communicating compared to allistic people. We tend to value precision and detail in our words, and interpret and perform body language differently. Many if not all of us have had to learn how to translate our natural communication styles into allistic dialect – I distinctly remember learning how to twist my mouth into a smile or frown as a nearly school-age child. Every social environment has its own unique performance styles in body language and speech. As with all linguistic abilities, this comes more naturally to some than to others, but it is never entirely fluent, especially since the allistic communities we live within are constantly changing.
Autism, moral principle and faith
A 2021 study considering moral consistency among autistic people, found in constructed scenarios autistic people were less willing to do something “bad” than allistic people, even when unobserved, and even when it would benefit them. To generalise, autistic people take moral principle extremely seriously, which many would acknowledge as an admirable characteristic, even if not recognised as such in the research or associated articles. Despite the pressure to conform, our experience of profound social difference often leads to a resilience against temptation and peer pressure. We are more likely to have an LGBTQ identity than allistic people (especially a transgender identity), perhaps for this reason. Principle provides us with certainty in our intense worlds, shows us the best course of action while our emotions and senses buffet us into decision paralysis.
For me, and other autistic Christians, our faith can be a key part of the principles which govern our lives. When struggling with a rough transition to secondary school, knowing that my sins and social gaffes (which, in my ignorance, I thought of as sins) were forgiven by our Saviour was a great comfort. Knowing that my anxiety was needless, that all I needed was to “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God”, gave me confidence when I had to rebuild all of my social relationships at university. Church felt like a place of refuge from allistic expectations, from our society’s collective obsession with appearances, a place where I could sing praises loudly and badly, where difference was not merely tolerated but – to a degree at least – celebrated.
There are many young autistic Christians in this country like I was, building their lives around the principles their Churches teach. With that comes a very real responsibility for church leaders to consider how their teachings will be understood by someone who will weave them deep into the fabric of their lives. We can attempt to apply our principles without resort to “common sense” or inhibition. Several autistic people I know have been constantly, compulsively preoccupied with moral principles they have been taught; for instance, struggling to feed themselves adequately due to what they perceive to be their duty to the environment. I have seen countless neurodivergent friends and family – and myself – tortured with unrealistic and repressive sexual ideologies, preached in corporate Christian media. Church leaders need to understand that highlighting a moral tenet (especially one virtually impossible to satisfy) can hurt autistic people, who will attempt to follow that tenet to the letter.
The Radical Potential of Neurodiversity
The “neurodiversity” movement takes as its fundamental premise that all humans have equal value, and should be treated accordingly. This is by no means novel – and its Biblical grounding is very solid – but it has too rarely been applied to disabled people, especially the neurologically disabled. Key to reinterpreting mental disability as “neurodivergence” – that is, having a different, but equally valid, neurology to the norm – has been a shift in how we understand what disables us. While past generations saw autistic people, people with personality disorders, or other neurological conditions as fundamentally defective, and therefore unable to do certain tasks or live a fulfilling life, the current “social model” of disability sees people as being disabled by social systems.
A good example is the doorknob. Someone with poor hand grip and dexterity (due to injury or disability) will struggle with a doorknob, making it difficult to live in a home where every door has one. While a medical understanding of disability places the blame on physiological deficiency, a social understanding of disability will ask whether more accessible doorhandles could be used instead. Rather than assuming that disabled people must inevitably face suffering, the social model asks: “What if we adapted our structures and systems to accommodate everyone?”
This sounds like a simple proposition but it is one with profound consequences, especially when it comes to neurological diversity (or “neurodiversity”). From a theological standpoint, it affirms that all of us are made in God’s image; gives us courage to say that the body of Christ is a disabled body, that all of our diverse perspectives are equally capable of revealing the divine.
Neurodiversity means a radical economy of care, where the focus is on meeting each individual’s needs, and supporting them to contribute however they can. This is a structure of society that churches can and often do model, with volunteers’ contributions valued and their needs supported as far as they can be. Of course, churches have limited resources to support complex needs, but every church environment I have been in has at least made a good faith attempt to support disabled people within their congregations. This is, of course, God’s will.
Neurodiversity and the Divine
God values us based not on what we do, or are able to do, but rather based on who we are as precious children of God, siblings in Christ. That means accepting our contributions to the health of the Body of Christ as a whole, naturally; but it also means a radical freedom from judgement. There is nothing we can do, as part of Christ’s brethren, to separate ourselves from the love and care of our God above and the Spirit who lives within. That is a love and care which the Spirit moves us to reflect back at others with the same unbounded breadth.
That means not only refusing the current structure of our society, judging our worth around our usefulness to capital, but also the ideology of meritocracy which grew up alongside it. We must reject the idea that our livelihoods should depend on having particular skills or capabilities. Every member of the greater community of Christ (and all of Creation besides) deserves, through Jesus’s justifying sacrifice, a taste of the infinite care, affection and love which God promises for our resurrected lives.
Neurodiversity, as it encourages us to perceive every human as someone who both gives and needs support, trains the pattern of our minds for the world to come, a world where our past labours are but vanity, and our worth in God’s eyes flows down to us through the blood of Another. Neurodivergent people do not simply need the church to accommodate us or adjust itself to our needs. We need the church to help remodel our entire society after the model of mutual care and assistance that Heaven shows us.
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
Micah Neale grew up in Milton Keynes and has long been concerned with social injustice, and the call to solidarity her Christian faith makes. She is proudly autistic and transgender, and has a doctorate in music history.