Christian Nationalism and Disability: A History of Harm

Author: Ian C. Langtree - Writer/Editor for Disabled World (DW)
Published: 11 Sep 2026
Publication Type: Scholarly Paper

Table of Contents:
Synopsis - Definition - Overview - FAQs - Insights, Updates - Related Content

Synopsis

This article examines Christian nationalism in the United States through the lens of disability, tracing how the fusion of religious identity with national power has shaped the lives of disabled Americans for well over a century. Drawing on peer-reviewed sociology, Supreme Court decisions, public health research, and national survey data, it follows a consistent pattern that runs from eugenic sermon contests and forced sterilization to religious exemptions from the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Senate defeat of a global disability rights treaty, and new evidence directly linking Christian nationalist beliefs to ableist attitudes. The analysis draws a clear line between personal faith and nationalist ideology, acknowledges the resistance that has come from within religious communities, and explains key terms along the way for readers who want an evidence-based understanding of a heavily debated subject.

At a Glance

• 1 - In a 2013 survey, 48 percent of evangelical, fundamentalist, or born-again Christians agreed that prayer and Bible study alone could overcome serious mental illness. Among all Americans, the figure was 35 percent.
• 2 - People with intellectual disabilities were 5.9 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than the general population. Christian nationalism was also one of the two strongest predictors of anti-vaccine attitudes.
• 3 - Children with autism had 1.84 times higher odds of never attending religious services than children without the condition. Children with mainly physical conditions such as asthma or diabetes showed no significant difference.
• 4 - A review of 172 child deaths tied to religiously motivated medical neglect found that 140 of the children had conditions with survival rates of at least 90 percent. Federal rules once required states to adopt religious exemptions in child neglect laws as a condition of receiving certain funds.

Topic Definition

Christian Nationalism

Christian nationalism is a political and cultural ideology that fuses Christian identity with national belonging, holding that a country such as the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should remain one in its laws, symbols, and public institutions. It is distinct from personal Christian faith, because it centers less on belief or worship than on questions of who counts as a true citizen and whose values should govern public life. Supporters typically favor official recognition of Christianity, laws based on their understanding of Christian values, and a privileged role for Christians in government, education, and culture, while researchers have linked the ideology to authoritarian attitudes, hostility toward religious and racial minorities, and resistance to civil rights protections for groups that include people with disabilities.

Overview

A Medal at the State Fair

In the 1920s, American families could enter a state fair contest modeled in part on livestock judging. Beginning in Kansas, "Fitter Family" competitions asked parents and children to submit medical histories and family pedigrees and then undergo physical and mental examinations. Winning families received a medal inscribed with a line from the Psalms: "Yea, I have a goodly heritage" (Boudreau, 2005). The scripture was not decoration. It announced that bodily fitness, family bloodlines, national strength, and divine favor all belonged to the same story.

That story never fully disappeared. It changed its vocabulary and moved from fairgrounds into courtrooms, legislatures, church boards, and survey data. This paper follows it. The focus is Christian nationalism in the United States and, more broadly, the ways organized religion has used its cultural authority against disabled people - sometimes through open hostility, more often through exemptions, silence, and theologies that locate the problem inside the disabled body. The goal is not to indict religious belief itself. The goal is to show how a particular fusion of religion and national identity produces predictable damage, and why disabled Americans so often stand where that damage lands.

What Christian Nationalism Is - and Is Not

The phrase gets used loosely, so precision matters. Sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, whose research anchors much of the current scholarship, describe Christian nationalism as a cultural framework rather than a church or a creed:

Christian nationalism is "a cultural framework - a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems - that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life" (Whitehead and Perry, 2020a).

Two features of that definition deserve attention. First, it concerns identity, not doctrine. A person can rarely attend church and know little scripture yet still hold Christian nationalist views, while a devout believer can reject them entirely. Perry and colleagues describe the ideology as a set of "beliefs about historical identity, cultural preeminence, and political influence" rather than a measure of religious orthodoxy (Perry et al., 2020). Second, the Christianity in question is a particular kind - typically white, conservative, and Protestant in its cultural reference points - which is why many scholars use the fuller term white Christian nationalism.

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) measures the ideology by asking Americans how strongly they agree with five statements:

• The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.
• U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.
• If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
• Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
• God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

In PRRI's 2025 American Values Atlas, based on more than 22,000 interviews across all 50 states, 11 percent of Americans qualified as Christian nationalism "Adherents" and 21 percent as "Sympathizers," while 37 percent were "Skeptics" and 27 percent "Rejecters." Support reached 67 percent among white evangelical Protestants and 56 percent among Republicans, and roughly half the adults in Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia fell into the supportive categories. PRRI reports that the national figures have remained largely stable since it first asked these questions in late 2022 (PRRI, 2026).

Dominion theology - The belief that Christians hold a divine mandate to govern society's central institutions. A popular modern version, often called the Seven Mountains Mandate, names family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government as spheres that Christians should control.

The Deep Architecture: Freedom, Order, and Violence

Survey numbers show how many people hold an idea. They do not explain why the idea behaves the way it does. For that, it helps to shift scales - from individual attitudes to the underlying narrative that organizes them.

Sociologists Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry (2022) argue that white Christian nationalism rests on a "deep story" built around three themes. Freedom is understood as freedom from restraint, especially government restraint. Order is hierarchical, with a presumed natural ranking of who belongs at the top. Violence is imagined as a righteous means of defending that freedom and restoring that order. Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020) traces a related current in white evangelical culture: the celebration of a militant, rugged masculinity in which toughness and strength take on an almost sacred status.

That deep story is not merely theoretical. In PRRI's 2025 data, 30 percent of Christian nationalism Adherents agreed that "true American patriots may have to resort to violence" to save the country, compared with 11 percent of Rejecters, and 79 percent of Adherents scored high or very high on a scale measuring right-wing authoritarianism (PRRI, 2026).

Now place disability inside this architecture. The following connections are analytical rather than quotations from any single scholar, but they help make sense of the evidence in later sections:

• Freedom as freedom from obligation sits uneasily with disability rights, which depend on public mandates such as ramps, interpreters, accommodations, and funded services.
• Order as natural hierarchy invites the ranking of bodies and minds, a habit with a long eugenic pedigree.
• Strength as virtue can quietly recast dependence, illness, and impairment as weakness, failure, or spiritual deficiency.

Body politic - An old metaphor that pictures a nation as a single living body. When a movement imagines the nation as a body that must be kept pure, strong, and whole, the actual bodies of disabled citizens can begin to look like symptoms of national decline rather than members of the nation.

That metaphor is the thread running through the rest of this paper. It reappears at every scale and in every era, from Progressive Era pulpits to present-day policy disputes.

Timescale One: The Eugenic Century (1880s to 1940s)

Eugenics - A social and pseudoscientific movement, influential in the early twentieth century, that sought to "improve" the human population by encouraging reproduction among people judged fit and preventing it among people judged unfit, a category that routinely included disabled people, poor people, and immigrants.

Before eugenics had a foothold in American law, disability was already being used to decide who could join the nation. The Immigration Act of 1882 barred "any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge." Historian Douglas Baynton (2016) shows that over the next four decades, immigration restriction leaned heavily on the language of defect. Whole ethnic groups were stereotyped as physically inferior or mentally unstable, and inspectors applied vague standards such as "likely to become a public charge" with enormous discretion. Religious vocation offered no protection: in 1905, a British missionary couple was detained at Ellis Island because he had deformed feet and she was blind. The restriction campaign culminated in the national origins quotas of the 1920s, which favored immigrants from northern and western Europe.

Organized religion did not invent this thinking, but it lent the thinking moral authority. In 1923, the American Eugenics Society formed a Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen (Baker, 2014), and in 1926, 1928, and 1930 the society ran sermon contests encouraging ministers to preach eugenics from the pulpit (Rosen, 2004). One winning entry, a Mother's Day sermon by an Episcopal minister in Minneapolis, warned that "the less fit members of society seem to breed fastest and the right types are less prolific." The same minister endorsed forced sterilization laws as "necessary and wise and Christian."

The Supreme Court handed the movement its most infamous victory in Buck v. Bell (1927). By a vote of 8 to 1, the Court upheld Virginia's forced sterilization of a young woman named Carrie Buck, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. writing that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." Roughly 70,000 Americans were eventually sterilized under state eugenics laws, and the decision has never been formally overturned.

An Uncomfortable Detail About Who Preached What

A careful reading of this history resists easy villains. Rosen (2004) found that the clergy most enthusiastic about eugenics were largely liberal, modernist Protestants who viewed it as a Progressive reform. The Catholic Church turned decisively against eugenics with Pope Pius XI's 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii, and the lone dissent in Buck v. Bell came from Justice Pierce Butler, a Catholic. Many conservative evangelicals also rejected eugenics, largely because they rejected evolutionary science.

That detail matters for systems thinking. The harm did not flow from one denomination's theology. It flowed from a structure: religious leaders who equated the health of the nation with the purity of its population and who were willing to lend the pulpit's authority to that project. The Progressive Era version wore liberal clothing. The underlying pattern proved ideologically portable, and it is the pattern, not the costume, that echoes through later movements.

A Transatlantic Mirror

Germany shows where that logic can end when nationalism, state power, and a compliant religious culture converge. According to its own internal tally, the Nazi regime's so-called euthanasia program murdered 70,273 institutionalized disabled people at six gassing centers between January 1940 and August 1941, and historians estimate that at least 250,000 disabled people were killed across all phases of the program. Its methods and personnel became a model for the gas chambers of the Holocaust (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, n.d.). During the same era, the "German Christians," a Protestant movement that fused Nazi ideology with church life, worked to build a racially defined national church (Bergen, 1996). The most famous public protest against the killings came from a Catholic, Bishop Clemens August von Galen, in a sermon delivered on August 3, 1941. The lesson for Americans is not that any modern movement equals Nazism. It is that when faith fuses with a vision of national purity, disabled people are quickly reclassified as a burden, and meaningful religious protest tends to come from those who refuse the fusion.

Timescale Two: The Church Door Exemption (1989 to Today)

In March 1990, disability activists left their wheelchairs and crutches at the base of the U.S. Capitol and pulled themselves up its steps in what became known as the Capitol Crawl, demanding passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). At nearly the same moment, some of the country's most influential religious organizations were working to ensure that the new law would not reach inside their buildings.

The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), which then represented tens of thousands of congregations, wrote to the Senate objecting to the idea that churches could be treated as places of public accommodation, warning of government entanglement in religion and of costs it argued would often exceed the needs of anyone actually attending. An NAE representative told Congress that "it is an improper intrusion for the federal government to be regulating the internal employment of churches" (Christianity Today, 1990). In 1989, the NAE had also adopted a resolution urging churches to remove barriers facing people with disabilities. The organization endorsed access in principle while resisting any legal obligation to provide it.

The lobbying succeeded. Title III of the ADA, which requires accessibility in places of public accommodation, states that its provisions do not apply to "religious organizations or entities controlled by religious organizations, including places of worship." Title I, which covers employment, applies to religious employers with 15 or more workers but allows them to give hiring preference to members of their own faith.

What the exemption means in practice: under federal law, a house of worship, a church-run school, a catholic hospital, or a day care or camp controlled by a religious organization is not required by Title III to build a ramp, provide a sign language interpreter, make restrooms accessible, or modify policies for a disabled child. Some state and local laws fill part of the gap, and many congregations provide access voluntarily, but federal public accommodation law stops at the church door.

The story includes a complicating voice. Joni Eareckson Tada, an evangelical author who became quadriplegic after a diving accident and founded a major disability ministry, supported the religious exemption while urging churches to become accessible voluntarily.

"We don't want the long arm of federal bureaucracy telling us how to run our churches," she said at the time (Christianity Today, 1990).

Her position captures the gamble built into the exemption: access would depend on goodwill rather than law.

Research suggests how that gamble has played out for families. Using three waves of nationally representative data collected between 2003 and 2012, Whitehead (2018) found that children with certain chronic health conditions were significantly more likely to never attend religious services. The odds of never attending were 1.84 times higher for children with autism, 1.73 times higher for children with depression, and 1.71 times higher for children with brain injuries, compared with children without those conditions. Children with primarily physical conditions, such as asthma, diabetes, or hearing and vision problems, showed no significant difference. Exclusion concentrated among children whose conditions affect communication and social interaction - the very children who most need congregations to adapt.

When the Employer Is a Church: The Ministerial Exception

Ministerial exception - A legal doctrine rooted in the First Amendment's religion clauses that bars employees classified as ministers from suing religious employers under anti-discrimination laws. Courts decide who qualifies largely by examining what the employee actually does, not simply the job title.

Cheryl Perich taught at a Lutheran school in Michigan. After she was diagnosed with narcolepsy and took a leave of absence, the school resisted her return. When she raised the possibility of legal action, the school fired her. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued on her behalf under the retaliation provisions of the ADA. In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC (2012), a unanimous Supreme Court held that because Perich was a commissioned minister with religious duties, the ministerial exception barred her claim.

Eight years later, the Court widened the doctrine. Kristen Biel taught fifth grade at St. James Catholic School in Torrance, California. Her religion instruction amounted to about 30 minutes a day, four days a week, using materials the school selected, and she did not lead prayers. After she told her principal that she needed time off for breast cancer treatment, the school declined to renew her contract. Biel died in 2019 at age 54, and her husband continued the case, later recalling her conviction that "they can't do this to people." In Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru (2020), decided together with Biel's case, the Court ruled 7 to 2 that teachers in her position fell within the ministerial exception. In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that the decision removed legal protection from thousands of schoolteachers.

These cases did not involve Christian nationalism in any narrow sense. They reflect something structurally related: the steady expansion of religious exemptions that allow faith-based institutions to operate outside civil rights law. For a worker who becomes disabled or seriously ill, the practical result can be the loss of a job at precisely the moment it matters most, with no legal remedy.

Timescale Three: Sovereignty Panic and the Disability Treaty (2012)

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), adopted in 2006, drew heavily on principles pioneered by the ADA. The United States signed it in 2009. Supporters stressed that ratification would not change American law or create new rights enforceable in U.S. courts, while it would strengthen American influence in raising disability standards abroad, including for disabled veterans and other Americans traveling or working overseas.

On December 4, 2012, the treaty reached the Senate floor. Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, a disabled World War II veteran, appeared in his wheelchair to urge ratification only days after leaving the hospital. The vote was 61 to 38, short of the two-thirds majority required for treaties. Much of the opposition was organized by the religious right. Among the most prominent opponents was Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association and of the evangelical Patrick Henry College, and later chief executive of the Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom. Farris and his allies argued that the treaty would threaten parental rights and homeschooling and would surrender American sovereignty to international bureaucrats. Groups including the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, and Eagle Forum joined the campaign, and former presidential candidate Rick Santorum argued that the treaty's reproductive health language could be used to promote abortion.

Disability organizations, veterans groups, and legal analysts disputed those claims, pointing out that the treaty created no domestically enforceable obligations. What the episode revealed was the power of the Christian nationalist narrative at the institutional scale. A treaty about access, education, and equal treatment could be defeated by framing it as a danger to the Christian family and to national sovereignty. The United States has still not ratified the convention.

The Theology of Blame: Healing, Deliverance, and Mental Illness

Law and politics are only one scale of harm. Much of what disabled people experience in religious settings happens at the intimate scale - in a sermon, a prayer line, or a well-meaning comment after a service. Here the issue is less Christian nationalism itself than ideas found across organized religion that place disability inside a moral or spiritual framework.

The idea is ancient. In the Gospel of John, the disciples meet a man blind from birth and ask Jesus, "who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus replies that neither the man nor his parents sinned (John 9:2, 3, King James Version). The text itself rejects the sin explanation, yet the disciples' question has proved more durable in popular religion than the answer they received.

Mental Illness: Churches Are in the Dark: Churches must address mental illness with compassion, education, and practical support, moving beyond stigma to create inclusive, supportive faith communities.

Mental Illness and the Prayer-Only Response

A 2013 Lifeway Research survey found that 35 percent of Americans, and 48 percent of evangelical, fundamentalist, or born-again Christians, agreed that with Bible study and prayer alone, people with serious mental illnesses such as depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia could overcome them (Lifeway Research, 2013). For someone whose condition responds to medication and therapy, advice to rely on prayer alone is not neutral encouragement. It can delay treatment and can imply that persistent symptoms reflect weak faith.

Deliverance and Its Victims

At its extreme, the spiritual explanation of disability becomes physical. In August 2003, eight-year-old Terrance Cottrell Jr., an autistic boy, died in a Milwaukee church during a prayer service meant to drive out what adults believed was the cause of his autism. Adults held him down on the floor, and the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide caused by asphyxiation. The minister who led the service, Ray Hemphill, was convicted of child abuse and sentenced to prison.

Faith Healing and the Law

Some religious communities reject medical care in favor of prayer. Pediatrician Seth Asser and child advocate Rita Swan (1998) reviewed 172 deaths of children whose parents withheld medical care on religious grounds and concluded that 140 of those children had conditions with survival rates of at least 90 percent under ordinary treatment.

Federal policy helped entrench the problem. Beginning in 1974, federal child protection rules required states to include religious exemptions in their child abuse and neglect laws as a condition of receiving certain federal funds. Legal historian Alan Rogers (2014) traces the rule to the influence of the Christian Science church, which had allies among senior aides in the Nixon administration. The federal requirement was dropped in 1983, but the state exemptions it produced proved durable. For children with treatable conditions, including illnesses that can leave lasting disability if ignored, these laws can mark the difference between recovery and permanent harm.

The Prosperity Gospel's Hidden Arithmetic

A different theology delivers a quieter version of the same judgment. The prosperity gospel teaches that faith, positive declarations, and financial giving unlock health and wealth. Historian Kate Bowler (2013) documents how widely this movement has shaped American Christianity. Its implicit arithmetic is harsh for disabled people: if health is the reward of faith, chronic illness and permanent impairment start to look like evidence of spiritual failure. This theology has also moved close to national power. Prosperity preacher Paula White-Cain, a longtime spiritual adviser to Donald Trump, was named in 2025 to a senior role in the newly created White House Faith Office.

The Pandemic as a Stress Test

Engineers test a structure by loading it until its weak points show. COVID-19 did something similar to American society, and Christian nationalism appeared along the fault lines.

Using survey data from the same Americans before and during the early pandemic, Perry et al. (2020) found that Christian nationalism was the leading predictor of incautious behavior, such as eating in restaurants and attending large gatherings, and also predicted fewer precautions. Religious commitment pointed the opposite way: once Christian nationalism was taken into account, more religious Americans were more likely to wear masks and sanitize their hands. The ideology, not the faith, tracked with risk.

A companion study using data collected just before the pandemic found that Christian nationalism was consistently one of the two strongest predictors of anti-vaccine attitudes, including the belief that vaccines cause autism (Whitehead and Perry, 2020b). That belief rests on a thoroughly debunked claim, and autistic self-advocates have long pointed out that the fear behind it treats autism as worse than dangerous and preventable diseases.

The people most exposed to these choices were often disabled. An analysis of 64 million patient records found that people with intellectual disabilities were 5.9 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than the general population, making intellectual disability the strongest risk factor for death after older age (Gleason et al., 2021). The pandemic also produced a new disabled population: in July 2021, federal agencies issued guidance that long COVID can qualify as a disability under the ADA. When a culture elevates personal liberty over collective protection, the costs are not shared evenly. They flow downhill toward the people whose bodies have the least margin for error.

Measuring the Attitude Directly: Christian Nationalism and Ableism

Ableism - Stereotyping of, or prejudice toward, people with disabilities based on the assumption that non-disabled bodies and minds are the standard for human value and ability.

For years, connections between Christian nationalism and disability had to be inferred from policy fights and neighboring attitudes. In 2025, Whitehead tested the relationship directly using a large national random sample, publishing the results in the journal Social Problems. Americans who most strongly embraced Christian nationalism, a group he calls "Ambassadors," were far more likely than those who rejected it to agree with three ableist statements:

• About one-third of Ambassadors agreed that the situation for people with disabilities is good as it is, compared with 6 percent of Rejecters.
• Roughly 30 percent of Ambassadors agreed that disabled people are demanding too much from the rest of society, compared with fewer than 10 percent of Rejecters.
• About 41 percent of Ambassadors said there have already been enough societal efforts in favor of people with disabilities, compared with 14 to 16 percent of those who resist or reject the ideology.

Whitehead reports that Christian nationalism remained one of the strongest predictors of these views even after accounting for political views, religiosity, age, gender, and whether respondents knew someone with a disability or had a disabled family member. The association was also moderated by age, disability status, and political views, meaning its strength varied across groups (Whitehead, 2025a).

These results fit a wider pattern. Earlier research found that white Americans who embrace Christian nationalism show less support for welfare spending and more support for spending on border security and crime control (Davis, 2018). Put simply, the ideology tends to favor a state that protects and punishes over a state that supports and accommodates, and disability rights belong almost entirely to the second category.

Schools, Vouchers, and the Federal Retreat

Education is where ideology and daily life now meet most directly. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) guarantees eligible public school students a free appropriate public education, an individualized education program, placement in the least restrictive environment, and procedural safeguards when disputes arise. When parents move a child into a private school, including a religious school, most of those individual guarantees no longer apply.

That shift has become more consequential as private school choice programs expand, a cause championed by many Christian conservatives, among others. A 2017 federal review found that 83 percent of students enrolled in voucher or education savings account programs designed specifically for students with disabilities were in programs that gave parents either no information about changes in their IDEA rights or information the Department of Education confirmed was inaccurate (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2017). Families were often trading away legal protections without knowing it.

At the federal scale, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 blueprint proposed eliminating the Department of Education and converting most IDEA funding into block grants distributed through the Department of Health and Human Services. On June 16, 2026, the administration announced that the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services would move to Health and Human Services and the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice. Special education advocates objected that separating special education from the rest of education and placing it in a health agency risks isolating disabled students in a medical framework (NPR, 2026). Whitehead (2025b) has argued that Christian nationalist assumptions about disability and the limits of public obligation help explain why such proposals find a receptive audience.

Seeing the Pattern Across Scales and Timescales

Step back, and the evidence arranges itself into three levels that mirror one another:

• Immediate phenomena: a family that stops attending church because no one will adapt for an autistic child, a teacher dismissed after a cancer diagnosis, a person told that prayer alone should cure depression.
• System-level patterns: legal exemptions that place religious institutions outside disability law, advocacy coalitions that defeat a disability treaty, survey data linking an ideology to ableist attitudes, and funding structures that reshape special education.
• Meta-architecture: the deep story of a chosen nation that must remain pure, strong, and free from obligation - a body politic that cannot tolerate visible weakness.

These patterns also move at different speeds. Individual harms unfold over hours or days. Laws and court doctrines shift across years and decades, as the ministerial exception did between 2012 and 2020. The underlying narrative moves across generations, visible both in a 1920s fair medal quoting the Psalms and in a 2025 survey item about disabled people "demanding too much." The relationship resembles a river and its bed. Fast water - individual acts of cruelty or kindness - rises and falls, but the slow layer, carved over generations by the deep story, determines where the water flows and where harm pools.

Counterweights From Within Faith

A paper centered on harm should still be accurate about resistance, and much of that resistance is religious. Sociologist Nancy Eiesland, who was born with a congenital bone defect, wrote The Disabled God (1994) after reflecting on the Gospel account in which the resurrected Jesus shows his wounded hands and feet to his followers. She argued that the central figure of Christianity is a God who remains marked by impairment rather than one who erases it. Her work helped establish the field of disability theology, which challenges the sin-and-cure framework from inside the tradition, and many congregations have built inclusive ministries without any legal mandate at all.

The distinction running through this entire paper is one those voices insist on: faith that serves vulnerable people is not the same thing as faith fused to a vision of national dominance. The historical and statistical record suggests that disabled Americans are often the ones who feel that difference most sharply.

Religious Trauma Syndrome: Escaping Toxic Religion: Information regarding Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS), pervasive psychological damage resulting from religious messages, beliefs, and experiences.

Frequently Asked Questions

Were the American founders trying to create a Christian nation?

The Constitution does not mention God or Christianity, Article VI prohibits religious tests for federal office, and the First Amendment bars Congress from establishing a religion. The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, approved unanimously by the Senate, stated that the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. Many founders were Christians, but their personal beliefs varied widely, and they deliberately created a federal government without an official faith.

Is Christian nationalism found outside the United States?

Yes. Movements that tie Christian identity to national belonging appear in several countries, including Hungary, where political leaders promote a Christian national identity, Russia, where the Orthodox Church works closely with the state, and Brazil, where evangelical voting blocs have gained influence. Each movement reflects its own history, but all share the idea that authentic national identity depends on a particular form of Christianity.

How is Christian nationalism different from religious freedom?

Religious freedom protects the right of every person to practice any faith, or no faith, without government interference, and it applies equally to all traditions. Christian nationalism seeks a privileged public and legal status for one religious identity. Critics note that the two can collide, because favoring one faith in law can reduce the freedom of religious minorities and nonreligious citizens.

Can a disabled person do anything if a church is inaccessible?

Federal ADA public accommodation rules generally do not cover religious organizations, but other options may exist. A secular business or group that rents church space for public use may be covered, programs receiving federal funds can fall under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and some state and local building codes or human rights laws reach places of worship. Each state has a disability rights protection and advocacy agency that can explain which rules apply locally.

What rights does a student with a disability keep in a private religious school?

Public school districts must still locate and evaluate private school students who may have disabilities through a process called Child Find, and they must spend a proportionate share of federal IDEA funds on equitable services for those students as a group. However, students placed in private schools by their parents have no individual right to the full services they would receive in public school, and the private school itself generally does not have to follow IDEA.

What is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act?

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 is a federal law requiring the government to show a compelling interest, pursued by the least restrictive means, before it substantially burdens a person's exercise of religion. It passed with broad bipartisan support and has since become a major legal tool for seeking religious exemptions from federal rules. In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that it cannot be applied to state and local governments, and many states have passed their own versions.

How can churches become more welcoming to people with disabilities?

Practical steps include ramps, accessible restrooms and seating, large print materials, captioning, sign language interpretation, sensory friendly spaces, and quieter service options. Attitudes matter just as much, which means training leaders, asking disabled members what they need, welcoming disabled people into leadership and worship roles, and avoiding the assumption that disability signals a need for healing.

What is disability justice?

Disability justice is a framework developed in the mid 2000s by disabled activists of color and queer disabled activists, including founders of the performance project Sins Invalid. It builds on the legal focus of the disability rights movement by examining how disability intersects with race, gender, class, and other identities, and it centers the leadership of those most affected. Its principles include interdependence, collective access, and recognition of the wholeness of every person.

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Insights, Analysis, and Developments

Editorial Note: Christian nationalism is usually debated as an abstract threat to democracy, yet disability makes its consequences concrete, personal, and measurable. The harm documented here rarely announces itself as open hostility. More often it arrives as a legal exemption, a funding formula, a sermon about fitness, or a gentle suggestion to pray harder. Recognizing that pattern does not require rejecting religion, and some of the sharpest critics of these harms speak from inside faith communities. It does require asking any movement that promises to restore the nation to explain whose bodies and minds its vision leaves out, and who pays the price when disabled people are left standing outside the door.

Author Credentials: Ian is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Disabled World, a leading resource for news and information on disability issues. With a global perspective shaped by years of travel and lived experience, Ian is a committed proponent of the Social Model of Disability, a transformative framework developed by disabled activists in the 1970s that emphasizes dismantling societal barriers rather than focusing solely on individual impairments. His work reflects a deep commitment to disability rights, accessibility, and social inclusion. To learn more about Ian's background, expertise, and accomplishments, visit his full biography.