Autism and Christianity: A Difficult Marriage

 

PIN THIS, PLEASE - Autism and Christianity

 

Can autistic people be Christians? It’s a fair question, given that a disproportionate number of autistics are homosexual, trans, and/or either irreligious or into witchcraft or New Age spirituality. I’m not going to get into my theories as to why that may be. Beyond stating that the brain of an autistic is wired differently – some more differently than others – compared to that of a neurotypical, even the experts don’t know.

As far as whether an autistic person can be a Christian, well, here I am.

“But, isn’t autism demonic??”

*SIGH.* I suppose if you’re convinced that the common cold, Down’s syndrome, and being born with two differently colored eyes is demonic, then I won’t be able to convince you otherwise regarding autism.

For the rest of you who can think rationally, no, autism is not demonic. Nor is it a mental illness, though it easily leads to various mental illnesses, especially depression, anxiety, and OCD.

Why would anyone think autism comes from the satan?

Because they don’t understand the condition. They don’t understand that their baby or toddler is banging their head against the wall because they’re overwhelmed with stimulation – the bright lights, the non-stop talking and music, the disgusting tastes and textures being forced down their throats – and so they have to do something to release the stress build-up. Or to whack their neurological system back into balance.

People don’t understand that the staring all day at a ceiling fan or spinning plate or flushing toilet isn’t a sign of mental deficiency or demonic possession or the lack of desire to connect with other people, but a sign of fascination with the motion, or the need for more brain stimulation, or the need to escape from the other environmental stimulations.

People don’t understand that the child’s inability to speak in fluent sentences by age two like little Johnny next door can, is likely because their brain is developing more slowly than average. And most autistics who never are able to speak are able to figure out how to communicate in some way, at some point in their childhood – even if the way is difficult for their parents to understand.

Christians, especially those of the charismatic/Pentecostal/Full Gospel ilk, are notorious for demonizing phenomenon which they don’t understand. Praying for “deliverance” for someone whose brain developed differently in utero than the brains of most other people is both tragic and dumb.

It also does nothing to bring the autistic person closer to Christ. It will have the opposite effect, in fact.

“But so and so prayed for their kid and the autism went away!”

Autism isn’t a disease. It’s not something that requires healing. If a parent prays for a child who’s been diagnosed with autism and suddenly the child’s behavior becomes that of a neurotypical child, they probably had something else going on that was causing them to engage in disconcerting self-stimulation activities.

Or, while the parents were praying, they set up a structured day chock-full of activities for the child. Having interesting and stimulating things to do all day, and having a structure that made them feel safer because they no longer had to struggle against an executive function that was broken, they no longer felt as strong a need to try to regulate their nervous systems by head-banging, hand-flapping, or incessant rocking.

That stimming that sends parents running to their pediatricians in a panic in the first place? Yeah, it’s essential for us. If we are experiencing the slightest bit of stress or the least bit of boredom, our neurological systems get out of balance. The rocking, swaying on feet, humming, skin-picking, hair-sucking or twirling, hand-flapping, head-banging, foot or finger tapping, all of those stims somehow, for some reason, help our brains feel more together.

Let’s cut to the chase even further: the stimming helps us feel not crazy. Or, in many cases, helps us to find words or dig for creative ideas a lot more easily than if we just sit or stand still.

Those actions are not symptoms of demon possession or mental illness.

So if you’re wondering what the Bible says about autism, it says as much about it as it does about ADHD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Tourette’s syndrome.

Nothing.

EXCEPT.

Yeshua’s command to love one’s neighbor included everyone, regardless of brain function.

Now, before I dive into my personal experience as an autistic Christian, I think it’s pertinent to address a concept that has popped up in this age of ableism.

That is, disability theology.

Disability theology in a nutshell.

There are a lot of definitions around this phrase. Basically, it has to do with the question, “How does God see disabled people?” Closely associated with that is the idea that if a person is deaf, blind, in a wheelchair, has Down’s syndrome, or – yes – is autistic, they have a problem and need to be prayed for. And if they get prayed for and still have the problem, they must be in sin. Or not have enough faith.

It’s the same as often happens when a church member develops a terminal disease or chronic ailment. Only in the case of disability, the person is in this state for their entire life, or most of their life, or at least decades of their life.

And in some segments of Christianity, inclusion in the church is a foreign concept, and would-be disabled worshippers are sidelined and marginalized.

Because they are not “healed” or “whole.”

It’s sad that disability theology is even a thing, because the people of God are supposed to accept others for who they are, and understand that our Father has them on a particular journey for a particular reason. We aren’t supposed to be getting up on our thrones of judgment and pride and wondering why on earth everyone else can’t be as perfect as we obviously are.

Okay, tongue back out of cheek. Let me talk about a few issues I have faced as an autistic Christian.

Sensory sensitivities in church.

One day, I felt God calling me to join the church choir. Not too many weeks after, I was having to put earplugs in my ear before every singing time. It was a church that played modern music with modern instruments… and that had speakers behind the choir risers.

It was already too loud (for me) to be in the front row of the sanctuary when the band was playing.

The lights didn’t bother me so much, but I know that’s another issue many autistic people have to deal with when out in public. But the women’s perfume? The men’s cologne? Some days, I couldn’t leave the building fast enough so I could take a deep breath of the nitrogen oxide-infused outside air. Seriously. You can complain about air pollution from cars all you want, but give me Dallas air during a summer rush hour over artificial body scents any day.

Then, there were the communication challenges in church.

While I attended the particular Christian fellowship where I joined the choir, I also participated in that place’s singles group. One of the most steadfast members of not only that group, but the church fellowship as a whole, was a guy around the age of sixty named Freddie. Until I began writing this article, I had considered him to be a simpleton. Mildly mentally deficient, you might say. He worked a blue collar job – car mechanic, if memory serves – and had weathered skin, a shy smile, wrinkles around eyes that never quite met yours, and a relatively short stature. He was quiet, and when standing in a small circle where others were conversing, his single contribution would be, “I’m just glad I’m saved.” (Hear that with a deep Texas drawl.)

But after years of not thinking about the man, Freddie came into my mind just as I was writing the heading about communication. And I realized: he wasn’t a simpleton.

He was autistic.

And like most autistic people who are verbal, he had a standard thing he’d memorized so he could properly fit in socially.

That’s less of a problem for me, because I also have ADHD, which makes me a kind of motor mouth at times. But when in large groups, I become a wallflower, and if I haven’t thought ahead of time of questions to ask other people or topics to bring up, my brain gets stuck.

And even when it’s not stuck, it sometimes takes a few tries to get out exactly what I want to say. And when I say, “exact,” I mean, “sort of, almost, close enough.”

I may have forgotten about Freddie, but I will never, ever forget the singles Sunday school class we were having one day when the guy who’d been leading it for several years turned to me and said, “Emily, when I first met you I thought you were a dingbat.”

He’d been going around the room, talking about how he’d gotten to know and love each of us. While I appreciated his past tense of the comment, it felt like a slap in the face.

I wouldn’t know I was autistic for another twenty-some-odd years, and I had no idea that I came off like an idiot when I was attempting to converse with other people.

I didn’t realize I would get on a topic I enjoyed and harp on it in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way, continuing to talk long after everyone around me had lost interest in what I was saying.

So if you attend a Christian fellowship and have someone in the congregation who struggles with proper verbal expression, do me and them a favor and give them a break. And a lot of patience. Because it is often the diversity of communication that creates a problem around autism and finding belonging in church.

But the most intense of my neurodivergence and struggles with my faith have occurred outside the walls of a sanctioned worship building.

 

Autism and religious anxiety.

If you take nothing else away from this post, I want you to learn this about autistic people: most of us have a serious problem with rigid thinking. We read something that connects with us at a deep level, and even if it’s completely wrong, or doesn’t fit us later in our lives, we latch onto it like a piranha to its prey and refuse to let it go.

Therefore, autistics who are raised in a religion generally have one of two responses to what they learn.

They believe everything they’re taught until it hurts.

Or.

None of it makes any sense and they walk away from it as soon as they can.

I was the former.

And I was raised Catholic.

If that doesn’t mean anything to you, back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the Catholic church’s greatest talent was making you feel guilty. Not that evangelical Protestant churches never do that, but the Catholic church has had centuries of practice. It’s very good – or used to be before it took a political left turn – at making its members feel guilty.

For not going to confession.

For not praying the rosary.

For not believing Mary is the Mother of God.

For not going to church every Sunday.

For eating before taking the Eucharist.

I could go on and on, but you get my drift.

The Holy Spirit protected me from believing some of the very wrong doctrines the denomination teaches, but I still lived under the fear that if I didn’t toe the line, God’s judgment would befall me.

Leaving Catholicism and joining a charismatic evangelical church in my mid-twenties only slightly alleviated the problem. Because in that new place of worship, you weren’t a real Christian unless you went to all three services during the week. You were “less than” if you didn’t do some sort of volunteer work for the church – even if you were highly sensitive and therefore suffered from constant anxiety and could barely handle your day job. You were supposed to pray for fifteen, thirty, sixty minutes every day – depending on who you asked – and have a morning Bible devotional before you left for work. If you were married, you were expected to have a passel of kids.

You couldn’t say negative things – however true they might be – without someone scolding you for making a “bad confession,” and you were an infidel if you didn’t tithe.

Those who gave more than ten percent to the building/leaders/organization were favorites.

One huge thing that came from both denominations I experienced was that if you had a talent or gift, God had given it to you to glorify Him, so you’d better use it that way, or else!

That’s where much of my religious anxiety landed in the years after the Lord led my husband and I to walk away from the institutional church. If I wasn’t part of a “local body,” how could I serve?

Wait! I know – start a YouTube channel! Except that’s not nearly as easy as it looks. Plus much of the lifestyle my family has chosen (namely, living in a very small house) makes creating videos difficult.

Okay then, I can write novels and teach through stories! That worked for a while, but the longer I did it, the more it felt like the wrong thing to do.

Maybe I should just focus on the simple homesteading life, I thought. But when I tried to grow a garden, I discovered that disease runs rampant in this part of the country, making it an exercise in frustration.

During the past decade, I’ve gone weeks being angry at God. The anger came from the guilt, guilt that I wasn’t doing enough. Could never do enough due to the choices I’d made.

My thinking around the issue was more rigid than granite, and it took many trials and many meltdowns and many years before I found out that God.

Did not.

Create me.

To do.

He created me to be.

To experience. To love. To enjoy His blessings.

Yes, a part of those blessings come from the things I do, and I certainly am the last person on Earth who would advise any Christian to sit around eating snacks and watching Netflix while praying for God to supernaturally pay the light bill.

But instead of following Him on a daily basis, I was running after what I thought – or what other people were telling me – I should be doing to bless the world with my time, skills, and talents.

But there’s an even greater facet to autism and spirituality that has promoted religious anxiety.

Autistic people are inherently self-centered.

Let me explain.

Autism presents differently in every single one of us with the condition. But the one thing we all have in common is that we live mostly inside of our own heads.

Fifty percent of diagnosed autistic people are unable to empathize with others on an emotional level. On an intellectual level, maybe. But not emotional.

Those of us who can feel empathy nevertheless struggle to understand why our way of thinking might be wrong and someone else’s might be right. We struggle to see other people’s perspectives, struggle to understand why other people don’t understand us.

Because of the rigid thinking, we believe that our logic is the right logic.

And so we tend to be critical and judgmental and not realize that our critiques and judgments are hurting other people. We tend to make decisions to serve our own needs.

We’re self-centered.

Christians aren’t supposed to be self-centered. If I really have the Spirit of God living inside of me, I should automatically be the opposite.

Yet, I have to make a conscious effort to put others’ needs and desires before mine. I have to work to see a situation from someone else’s perspective. And I mean, work hard.

Especially if that perspective is the opposite of mine.

Throughout my thirteen-year teaching career, I felt guilty that I could never feel nurturing toward my students. I sometimes feel guilty that I couldn’t be the epitome of the nurturing mother for my son when he was younger.

Because, through no fault of my own, I live in my head.

I have to make the choice to show affection, care, love. Such things simply don’t come naturally to me. Or, probably, to most autistics.

This is why I say that autism and Christianity makes for a difficult marriage. But I believe with all of my heart that autism and faith is a match worth fighting for.

I’m not sure where I’d be today without God’s grace.

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