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Article -The Social and Spiritual Inclusion of People with Learning Disabilities: a Liberating Challenge?

This paper outlines three theological stances, rooted in the perspective of social justice, that can form the basis of a pastoral praxis which responds to the circumstances of people with learning disabilities. Listening and responding to the marginalisation of people with learning disabilities challenges the church to greater wholeness in community and provides a basis for mutual care grounded in interdependence.
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Solidarity    

Liberation theology provides a paradigm for challenging the oppressions experienced by people with learning disabilities through a transformative process of struggle. It suggests a stance of ‘critical solidarity’ in which we first acknowledge the marginalisation experienced by people with learning disabilities as God’s particular concern, then stand alongside them in their fight for social justice, helping to transform the structural injustices which they face and supporting them to find their own liberating voices. These oppressions include their political and social exclusion and their experience of control by medical and social care systems.

There is a long history of labelling of people with learning disabilities that makes definitions a sensitive issue. The website of the Foundation for Learning Disabilities provides the following explanation: ‘People with learning disabilities find it harder to learn, but they can do so with help from other people. People usually have a learning disability from birth or sometimes from early childhood. People with learning disabilities are not all the same. They have different needs, come from all kinds of families and have varied lives. Some people have severe learning disabilities and will need a lot of day-to-day support. Others have mild or moderate learning disabilities and can live with much less help from other people. Some people prefer to say learning difficulties instead of learning disabilities.’

Often denied the status of adults, people with learning disabilities have been excluded from recognition as sexual beings, as potential parents, as householders or tenants and as people able to make an active contribution to society. They have experienced abuse and exclusion from basic services, such as health care. Even within newer models of community support it has not always been possible to promote the inclusion of people living in community houses in the wider community and to ensure that the most disabled persons achieve equivalent benefits from being in the community.

Moreover, the segregation of people with learning disabilities in special schools, long-stay hospitals, sheltered workshops, day centres and by specialised transport schemes, has meant that the general public is not used to mixing with people with learning disabilities, a situation which can create fear and misunderstanding. The lives of people with learning disabilities have often remained ‘hidden’, just as their voices have been ‘stilled’. Societally we have more experience in trying to protect people with learning disabilities than in ‘giving them wings’.

Over the last twenty years, major shifts have occurred in thinking and social policy about the role of people with learning disabilities. ‘Normalisation’ theory argued that stigma could only be overcome if people were able to live ‘an ordinary life’ in the community and to adopt socially valued roles and this was a major influence on policies to close segregated institutions. Language and goals have now moved beyond integration. Whereas integration does not seek to change societal norms, the ideas and practice of social inclusion –that people with learning disabilities have rights to be participants in the community and not merely residents in it – challenge the rest of society to change. This perspective sits within the social model of disability which locates the oppressions faced by disabled people in the barriers which exclude them and rejects the ‘medical model’ where the barrier is identified as the individual’s impairment. National policy now expresses a clear expectation that people with learning disabilities should become full citizens and, that the achievement of this requires both access to opportunities (lifelong learning, employment, housing etc) and also changes in public attitudes.

Engagement with people with learning disabilities as spiritual beings and their inclusion in faith communities will only have integrity therefore if both their claims to social justice and their rights to have their own experiences heard shape the form of that inclusion. Someone with a learning disability may be living on £15 a week because their benefit is being used to fund their housing and support costs. They may be trapped on benefits because their need for support makes it impossible for them to afford to take a job. So when people of faith encounter other people of faith who happen to have a learning disability they have a responsibility to be alert to the problems of poverty, exclusion and disempowerment which they may be facing in their lives.

The lives of people with learning disabilities are diminished by structural injustices. They are socially marginalised through segregation and limited access to employment opportunities and, therefore, income. As a result their quality of life is significantly poorer than many others in the community. Only four per cent of adults with learning disabilities in Scotland are in employment. They may lack choice over many important aspects of their lives such as where they live and whom they live with. If they have moved out of hospital or a larger group home into supported accommodation or their own tenancy they may be learning to cope with new freedoms after a lifetime of having their routines controlled by others. Faith communities can raise awareness of the changes to employment practice and welfare benefit regulations that are needed if people with learning disabilities are ever to gain access to the open employment market and attain access to an income sufficient to participate in society. They can raise these issues as urgent matters of social justice that are of concern not just to people with learning disabilities but to voters, employers and others with influence. They can help to change public attitudes in the workplace and in groups to which they belong.

It would be wrong to conclude that people with learning disabilities should be seen as passive victims. People with learning disabilities can speak for themselves and there is a growing self advocacy movement, exemplified by groups such as People First. Tenants of Key Housing have become involved in self advocacy work, including working to open up opportunities in the community through the Count Me In initiative. People in faith communities can get to know people with learning disabilities and, through knowing them support them to have their voices heard. Anti-poverty work provides a model of how personal encounter can lead to transformative change. Bob Holman, a policy analyst who lives alongside the poor in Glasgow, has enabled them to write their stories and have them published, as a powerful act to promote social justice. Donnison suggests that helping people to get their voices heard in policy debates is an important step:
‘When people tell their own stories they begin to gain some control over the use made of their pain and are less likely to be treated as case studies in someone else’s news story or research report’.

Communication does not have to be a barrier if people are prepared to give an individual the time that he/she needs and to let that person take the lead. Some individuals may want access to an independent advocate to support them over time in the choices they want to make. Training as a citizen advocate is one path of engagement that a member of faith community might want to consider if they feel they want to put themselves at the service of another on a long-term basis. This can offer the person with a learning disability the reliable and sustained commitment of another individual.
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Reconciliation

The second stance is that of reconciliation and this suggests the need for a political theology that confronts the barriers which the church itself presents to the liberation of people with learning disabilities. Moltmann argues that the greatest limitation in the development of liberation theology has been the failure of the church to transform itself in response. There is a painful religious legacy of equating disability with ‘sin’ and conversion with ‘cure’ which has to be acknowledged before reconciliation is possible. The problem goes beyond exclusionary practices to cultural beliefs about the nature of God. Michael Horsburgh has reflected on the problems which perfectionism, in the Judeo-Christian tradition has created for the acceptance of disabled people. Challenging ablist practice within the church and in religious thinking is a transformative stance. Nancy Eiseland, in The Disabled God has developed a ‘liberatory theology’ of disability. She proposes an emancipatory project of shared liberation by listening to the voices of people with disabilities, challenging oppressive structures and beliefs and developing new images and practices. Suffering and disability, in the image of the Christ, crucified and resurrected with the marks of his pain still visible, become a vehicle for integrating disability into the heart of religious experience, reinventing our image of God as ‘disabled’ and challenging the worship of perfection as an image of the divine.

There are many reasons why the spirituality of people with learning disabilities has been ignored. Communication barriers may limit the extent to which carers and others attempt to explore people’s emotional and faith lives. The assumption that spiritual understanding is denied to people with cognitive impairment should be challenged. People who have tried to understand the perceptual worlds of those who are non-verbal or have profound impairments argue that all people are active agents within their own meanings. However, it will be impossible for faith communities to reach out to people with disabilities (of any kind) unless they confront the fundamental legacy of exclusion that has marginalised and even condemned disabled people in much religious thinking and practice. As Christopher Newell writes:
‘I vividly remember several experiences of people, including priests, thrusting their way into my life offering a healing ministry which I had not sought and which was entirely inappropriate to my situation and churchmanship….Many of my friends with disabilities have also had experiences of their wholeness and legitimacy being questioned by people within the Church, in the name of “healing”.’

People with learning disabilities may have already experienced rejection by churches or religious people. Fear and ignorance may have made them objects of pity or they may have been treated as children or as without the ‘capacity for faith’. All such attitudes deny the humanity and the spiritual lives of people with learning disabilities. Churches can take steps to make themselves more accessible. Signing, the use of symbol to illustrate the Word and large print books will help many members of the congregation to participate more fully. But they will not lead to greater inclusion unless there is also a willingness to change the attitudes that cause pain and exclusion, such as associating disability with sin or believing that differences between people should be ‘cured’ out of existence. When, on the other hand, people are welcomed unconditionally within a celebration of the whole of creation and the uniqueness of each individual, then there is a space in which to develop an inclusive approach. This may mean that certain congregational and worship practices change. For example, people may come to accept sounds, where they were used to silence or choose no longer to sing hymns that associate visual or hearing impairments with darkness and ignorance. But, made as the response of a loving community to the needs of its members, such changes can be gifted enrichments of the church’s common life.

A desire for justice also informs the stance of reconciliation, for it seeks to overcome theological, political and cultural barriers to people’s rights to their full spiritual identity and so to restore right relationship between the church and those it has marginalised. The transformation in perspective is well illustrated by a reconceptualisation of the healing miracles. A declaration on ‘The Accessible Church’ from the Massachusetts Council of Churches redefines healing from cure of the individual to their restoration to a valued social role:
‘Healing is not so much about having something fixed or corrected as it is about becoming whole and being restored to one’s rightful place in the community’. And in this process, that community itself is healed also.

People with learning disabilities, in fact, lack opportunities for social connectedness and spiritual self expression. Despite care in the community, many still only count family members and staff paid to support them among their social networks. Churches are sites of interconnectedness or ‘social capital’. Members of faith communities may be able to introduce an individual with learning disabilities to the group that shares their particular interest, acting as a bridge between the individual and the social setting in which they might meet others with whom they have something in common. This is one way to help restore them to their rightful place in the wider community.
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Mutuality

The third strand to the potential for theological response is the theology of wholeness. It is based in the core religious value that we are all dependent and that strength and freedom come from awareness of our own vulnerability. The theology of wholeness offers a paradigm for our interdependence upon each other and upon God. It models both community and church as inclusive sites for exchange between all people and therefore provides a resource to counter the tendency to extrude the ‘other’ as beyond our concern, our responsibility or even our street. Moltmann notes the need to tackle the ‘shortfall of solidarity’ in contemporary first world culture in which older, sick and disabled persons are not perceived as our responsibility. The theology of wholeness challenges the church to greater community by a deep longing for the participation of those who have been excluded. It provokes the desire for us to know people different from ourselves and collectively to repair the absence of those we have up to now excluded through our own fear of weakness and of difference. Their absence and exclusion becomes our loss and our pain. A stance of interdependence means that we cannot be community or church unless the stranger has a valued place within it. It says that the body is incomplete without you and your unique gifts (I Cor.12:12-27) and therefore I long to have you here and cannot be at peace while you are still outside.
This third stance therefore provides the basis of a restatement of a Christian ethic in which people with disabilities can be received as gifted members who complete the wholeness of the community. It grounds our response as a community and helps us to become the kind of neighbours who challenge our communities to become communities that can celebrate diversity. Newlands has seen this challenge as fundamental to current discussions of community: ‘How to maintain respect for the stranger, for the otherness of the other, without imposing uniformity, while strengthening mutuality in community, is rightly in the forefronts of contemporary debate…’. Like the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 35-38) we are called to rediscover our common sense of humanity by responding to the other. It will be necessary to accept diversity as a basis both for citizenship and within community if we are to ensure the full inclusion of people with learning disabilities. A stance of mutuality also opens up common ground between the understandings of theology and contemporary social care theory.

The purpose and ethic of social care is being rethought, from care for, to mutual relationship with and from protection to enabling the development of full potential. Reindal argues that ‘interdependence’ provides a better way than ‘independence’ to theorise social relationships in order to take on board the reciprocity and mutuality of human relations. Kittay argues that we need to take dependence centrally into the ethic of care and accept interdependence as the basis of a just concept and practice of care. This stance is underpinned by theorising of welfare and citizenship as concepts that embrace emancipation and diversity. For Sevenhuijsen, such an ethic of care needs to be integrated into our view of democratic citizenship in order that ‘everybody would be guaranteed equal access to the giving and receiving of care.’

Current social care thinking therefore views support services as processes that should enable the individual to take up their rightful place in the community. ‘Charity’ in which others, such as for example a faith community, sought to ‘help’ people with learning disabilities as objects of pity or as dependent people in need solely of care and protection would be seen as regressive and unhelpful. Rather our stance becomes not that of servicing the needs of people with learning disabilities from a position of strength, but acknowledging that people who need support have a right to autonomy and that, conversely, people without apparent support needs can gain from others.

One consequence of their exclusion from valued social roles within community networks is that people with learning disabilities are cut off from opportunities themselves to give to others, a situation having both social and spiritual implications. In a recent study in Scotland, which used a holistic tool developed at the University of Toronto to assess the quality of life of people with learning disabilities, people with learning disabilities reported that they had few opportunities to help other people. This was taken as one indicator of their opportunity to exercise a spiritual life. We deny people with learning disabilities not only their rights, but also their responsibilities as friends, neighbours and citizens.

Accepting people with learning disabilities as valued members of faith communities is not about ‘helping’ them but about accepting that all people have contributions to make to the common faith life and that we have responsibilities to support each other in our growth as spiritual beings. Congregations need to ask themselves how people with learning disabilities can bring their gifts into the church community, for example by showing others how to make the church more accessible. The social and spiritual resources of the church can be used to offer people with learning disabilities the opportunity to care as well as be cared for.
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Conclusion

These three stances of solidarity, of reconciliation and of mutuality provide a liberating path for the church’s engagement with people with learning disabilities. A just theology that is inclusive of people with disabilities will therefore challenge, in solidarity with them, the structural injustices that exclude people with disabilities from social and political life. It will also encourage us to welcome the dynamic implications of inclusion for our understanding of our own community and of our relationship with God.

Thanks to Linda L. Treloar for comments on the paper.
An earlier version of part of this paper was given at the Association for Moral Education Conference, 2000, On the Making of Moral Citizens? University of Glasgow, 7-10 July 2000

About the Author
Lisa Curtice is a professional Associate at the Craighead Institute in Glasgow.
email: thecraigheadinstitute@compuserve.com

Endnotes

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