“The hardest part of being disabled isn’t the pain,” writes Amy Kenny, a disabled scholar and activist, “it’s the people” (116). My Body Is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice and the Church, Kenny’s memoir-cum-manifesto, paints a searing picture of how her nondisabled fellow Christians in particular make life harder for her. These “prayerful perpetrators” (3), as Kenny humorously dubs them, accost her with their toxic theologies, insisting that she could stand up from her wheelchair and walk if she “just had enough faith” (99), that she “would be free” if only she “stopped resisting” (2). The prophetic message of Kenny’s book is that freedom does not mean independence from a mobility aid. It means liberation from ableism, that is, the systemic devaluing of certain bodies and minds on the basis of socially constructed notions of normalcy and productivity.
Kenny addresses this message to her American co-religionists—prayerful perpetrators and disabled Christians alike. In ten short chapters that splice personal anecdotes and disability theory with listicles and spiritual exercises, Kenny simultaneously empowers disabled Christians to see themselves in the Spirit’s nonverbal groans and Jesus’s cruciform impairments, and equips the prayerful perpetrators to recognize disability as a product of disabling physical and social environments of their own creation. To both audiences, Kenny’s argument is clear: God calls the church to dismantle ableism.
Yet “inside the church” is exactly where Kenny encounters “the most harmful ableism” (26). For instance, near the end of the book, Kenny ranks the following query eighth in a list of the top ten disability theologies that Christians regularly foist on her: “What sin in your life is preventing you from getting up and walking?” (172). In addition, if Christianity’s sermons and songs picture a eugenicist heaven without wheelchairs, its houses of worship are realized eschatology, preventing disabled people from attending—as, for example, the church that tells Kenny installing a ramp would be an irresponsible use of its tithe money. Such exclusion is legal, she notes, because American churches and religious schools successfully lobbied for exemption from the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act—a history that Kenny recounts to devastating effect in chapter 2.
In other words, the ableism that Kenny encounters in her co-religionists is not an occasional accident but a systemic design flaw shaping their beliefs as much as their buildings. In trying to persuade them of the divine call to dismantle ableism, then, Kenny has set herself the difficult task of convincing the very people who see her disability as personal faithlessness or fallenness that the real problem is their demeaning and individualistic conception of disability. Throughout the book, she uses a risky method for this task, explaining key concepts from disability theory and identifying scriptural warrants for them. This approach risks alienating the same prayerful perpetrators who most need to hear her message, for as Kenny tells it, they worry that her biblical interpretation prioritizes the “disability community” over “the sacredness of Scripture” (92).
Kenny defends herself against this type of critique by grounding her biblical hermeneutic in the Spirit’s work of attuning diverse communities to the “living and active” logic of the Bible (92). However, the most compelling case for her hermeneutic lies in her exegesis itself. Kenny shows through unfussy close readings that disability theory does indeed get closer to the message of Jesus and the prophets than did the Christian lobbyists to whom American faith communities owe their exemption from the ADA.
For example, in chapter 8, Kenny contrasts inaccessible church architecture with crip space, which refers to the physical and social dimensions of disability activism. Crip space “cultivates the environment and its norms” with and for disabled people “from the outset,” not “as an afterthought” (134). In other words, rather than ignoring or erasing disability, crip space relies on the embodied wisdom of disabled people to construct new modes of gathering, participating, and belonging from which everyone benefits. Thus, crip space conceptualizes healing as a sociocultural process centering on “relational interdependence,” not an individual process aspiring to “superfit bodies” (138). As Kenny so cogently points out, the prophet Jeremiah envisions the new Jerusalem as crip space: God leads “the blind and the lame” along “a level path where they will not stumble” (31:8-9). Similarly, Kenny notes, the author of Hebrews instructs Christians to “‘make level paths for your feet,’ so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed” (12:13). Like crip space, the biblical conception of healing involves ramps, not cures.
My Body Is Not a Prayer Request invites churches to start this communal healing process right now. How might a church foster crip space and thereby free its people from the misbelief that their worth depends on their capacities? Kenny’s suggestions are convicting. For one thing, “instead of trying to pray away my body,” Christian communities could share “the crip tax,” the extra $30,000 that disabled Americans pay annually after health insurance to cover assistive technologies and medical care (63-64). In addition, churches could join the fight for pay parity, voting access, marriage equality, and parental rights—all things that disabled Americans currently lack. Finally, pastors could remind their congregations that, for Christians, “the definitive revelation of God to humanity” is neither a military leader, nor a superhero, but a “disabled Jesus,” who “inverts all our shame and preconceived notions about what power looks like into a cross” (168).
Readers conversant in disability theology and theory may find themselves disappointed that Kenny’s book treads the familiar paths of writers like Eli Clare, Nancy Eiesland, and Alice Wong without breaking any new ground. But for churches that remain oblivious to the ongoing harm of their inaccessible sanctuaries and unexamined theologies, My Body Is Not a Prayer Request is a powerful wake-up call. The playful and exuberant voice in which Kenny issues it should make it not merely a duty but a delight to heed. In the meantime—the nonlinear crip time of relapsing and remitting symptoms, cancelled plans, and uncertain futures—Kenny offers disabled Christians a liberating spirituality that links spoon theory to sabbath rest, neuroplasticity to new creation, and disability to biodiversity. “May the disabled God remind you,” Kenny prays in the book’s closing “benecription,” “that you are cherished just as you are, crutches, chemical sensitivities, and all” (188).
Olivia Bustion is a postdoctoral fellow in the Divinity School and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago.
Olivia Bustion
Date Of Review:
June 24, 2024
