Rooted in Historical Distortions
A Review of
How Ableism Fuels Racism: Dismantling the Hierarchy of Bodies in the Church
Lamar Hardwick
Paperback: Brazos Press, 2024
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Reviewed by Maryanne Hannan
What if we’re getting it wrong? What if we took seriously the gospel account of the risen Jesus as disabled, still bearing the marks of his torture and crucifixion? In How Ableism Fuels Racism, Pastor Lamar Hardwick wants us to reread Luke’s account of the post-resurrected Jesus, who chose to come back with the holes in his hands and side and compare that to the images and ideals historically espoused in American Christianity. How did churches come to privilege white, male, abled bodies, despite Jesus’s clear preference for the marginalized and oppressed? This “hierarchy of bodies,” based on the belief that normal bodies are better, does great harm to the Christian message.
For Hardwick, faith is incarnational, a belief that the God of creation works through all bodies, excluding none. God reveals himself in the embodied Jesus and we experience God through our own given bodies. For economic and social reasons, in order to justify and sanitize slavery, black bodies were deemed disabled from our nation’s beginning. Being black was the same thing as being disabled and therefore dehumanized, in more ways than I had ever imagined. A new word, drapetomania, entered the national vocabulary in 1851, naming a pathological condition among slaves who kept trying to escape. Hardwick explains, that “because Blacks were considered abnormal, their belief that they should be free was not seen as a moral issue but rather a medical one.”
When African slaves began converting to Christianity, it made no difference in their living conditions. Their new faith, they were told, would only affect their spiritual expectations. For example, the colonial Virginia Assembly enacted a law that baptism did not confer freedom. Churches infamously supported slave ownership, tweaking doctrine to support economic preferences, with distorted biblical readings. In contrast, over time, the Black churches developed what Hardwick calls “their own robust and rebellious readings of the Bible that cultivated a sense of resistance to shame.”
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Hardwick argues that these dual –isms, ableism and racism, are rooted in the same historical distortions, still dangerously entangled. Ableism assumes power to impose a ranking system for bodies, to determine what is normal and desirable, what is the default body to which everyone should aspire. Any deviation from the ideal is a suspicious failure. San Francisco actually passed the Ugly Laws in the mid-19th Century, which made unlawful the public appearance of anyone “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed.” This egregious example is mirrored often in unspoken standards, which continue today. Christian churches distanced themselves from the disabled community, insisting that a landmark case testing the 1990 American with Disabilities Act (ADA) be tried on the basis of religious liberty, rather than disability rights. This marks, for Hardwick, a clear divergence of Christianity from issues of social justice.
As a black, autistic, pastor who is undergoing treatment for cancer even as he is writing this book, Hardwick has seen the problems from every angle. I am white, normally-abled and economically privileged. For me, then, this book is a gift, opening up the insidious encroachment of these double biases, in ways I had not considered, both subtle and overt. I enjoyed how Hardwick wove his own story and experiences in and through the historical and kerygmatic material. I appreciated the way he built on the work of other scholars, especially Nancy L. Eiesland, whom he credits with insight into the disabled God image.
That being said, he makes broad sweeping claims, as his goal is to step out boldly. I felt some of these analyses could bear more scrutiny. For instance, he prefers the term “initial sin” to Adam and Eve’s original sin, as he tries to delink original sin from a way of understanding disability. This problem is definitely a tricky one, about which more than one book has been written! He wades into topics far and wide, including black maternal death rates, the errors of the medical system in assessing kidney function for transplant patients, and the recent senseless murders of innocent black men. I was thrilled to read his insights into the contributions made by the Black church, notably his hope it will continue effective efforts to dismantle ableism. He promises to write more on that topic in the future.
I am grateful for the opportunity to have read this book, but I would like to reassure the author that there are churches, white, black, brown and mixed, of all degrees of abledness, where a God who loves those on the margins is worshipped and celebrated. May we all take inspiration from Hardwick’s work and do a better job of implementing the wisdom and insights he has shared.
Maryanne Hannan
Maryanne Hannan is a poet and frequent book reviewer, and also a member of the National Book Critics Circle. She lives in upstate New York and is the author of Rocking like It’s All Intermezzo: 21st Century Psalm Responsorials (Wipf and Stock, 2019). More information at www.mhannan.com.
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