Why Disability Studies Needs to Take Religion Seriously

Abstract

Religion and theology are central ways that many people make sense of the world and their own place in that world. But the insights of critical studies of religion, or what is sometimes positioned as religious studies as opposed to theology, are scarce in disability literature. This article suggests some of the costs of this oversight and some of the benefits of including religion. First, this article discusses how some past scholarly engagements of disability and religion have misrepresented and denigrated Judaism. Second, it argues that Judaism paints different disabilities in quite different ways, and that we cannot coherently talk about "disability in Judaism" as if it is a single thing. Third, it discusses the medical model and the social model, and shows how one Jewish woman's writing on pain complicates how we might think about these models. In this way, the article shows how religious studies can both help remedy past mistakes and bring new insights to disability studies.Keywords: disability studies; pain; religious studies; Judaism Disability studies needs more religion. 1 This is not an altar call, but rather a call for scholars of disability to pay attention to the intricacies of religious beliefs, practices, texts, and communities. Like other populations, disabled people are often religious: current figures say 80-85% of people with disabilities say faith is very important in their lives, a number roughly equal to non-disabled people (Ault Jones 2010; Disabilities and Faith 2016). In countless memoirs, people with disabilities discuss their comforts, struggles, and ongoing relationships with religion (for a diverse array of examples, see Sanford 2008; Cohen 2010; Coggins 2017), and even memoirists who reject religion feel the need to respond to theological interpretations of disability (Adams 2014;Linton 2007). Religion and theology are central ways that many people make sense of the world and their own place in that world. Religion also shapes cultural images of disability, even to the extent that we sometimes use theological language to talk about disability: in one explicit example, "pillow angel" became a term for children with developmental disabilities who are subjected to medical treatments to stop growth. 2 And yet very little critical disability studies or crip theory literature engages religion at all.Christian theology and ethics, most visibly, have made headway into thinking about disability and religion. Theologians and ethicists write about how their communities should include people with physical or mental differences using religious texts and traditions as resources. But the insights of critical studies of religion, or what is sometimes positioned as religious studies as opposed to theology, 1 In a forthcoming publication, I theorize why the growing field of disability studies largely neglects religion or treats it reductively. This is in part, I suggest, because of the ways "crip theory" has modeled itself on queer theory, a field that has also largely (though not completel...

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