Good
afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for inviting me to participate in
this important forum. My name is
Robert Bennett. I’m a staff writer for
WE magazine in Manhattan. I suspect I
was invited to this forum because of an article I wrote recently about
religious communities and people with disabilities. In that article I discussed some of the challenges and struggles
people with disabilities face in religious communities.
Today
I’m here to talk about two subjects your parents probably told you not to
discuss in polite company, politics and religion.
Religion
is a new subject for me. As I
understand it, religion is largely spiritual.
It is also, to some degree, political. Religion is an institution with a
great deal of power. It can suppress
people and keep them in the dark or it can liberate them and bring them into
the light. Religion also has the
ability to pull people together or drive them apart.
Re-read
the bible, or, for that matter, any other religious text. There, you’ll see why many people with
disabilities feel ostracized by the religious community. You’ll find references
about how unclean people with disabilities are considered. But, you might say, these religious texts
are thousands of years old, surely attitudes have changed. Well, they have and they haven’t. It’s really disappointing how little
progress has been made from the point of view of people with disabilities since
those ancient texts were written. Talk
to some of those in today’s religious community. Today one can still hear religious references that suggest
that people with disabilities are unworthy of being in god’s presence. Today people don’t use words like ‘unclean.’
Today they see us as ‘different.’ These
attitudes may not be embraced by a large part of the religious community, but
they do exist and they are verbally and non-verbally communicated to
us. These attitudes keep many of us
from participating in religious communities.
The preponderance of these attitudes have kept many physical and other
barriers intact when they should have been removed long ago.
What
it comes down to is a question of changing existing attitudes and practices and
making people feel welcome into the religious community.
It is all well and good that some religious centers
are installing ramps and lifts to help their disabled congregants enter the
church or synagogue. They’ve taken this
challenge on as a kind of moral imperative since the law doesn’t dictate
accessibility standards to religious organizations as it does to other places
of public accommodation. But, adding a
few ramps and elevators simply isn’t enough. Religious groups should look at where the
ramps and lifts are installed. Are they
easy to get to and operate? Are they
off the beaten track, making people with disabilities go out of their way in
order to enter the religious center of their choice? It’s kind of like going to your favorite restaurant and finding
out that, yes you can enter but you have to enter through the kitchen. People are made to feel unwelcome. So too are people made to feel unwelcome if
the door by which they will enter the religious center requires someone inside
to unlock it. And of course, at least
for someone who sits in a wheelchair as I do, feeling welcome means being able
to sit with the rest of the congregation as opposed to in the aisle. As someone
who has sat in many aisles, I can tell you that accessible pews go a long way
toward making someone feel comfortable and welcome. There’s nothing quite as embarrassing as sitting in the aisle
when a procession is trying to get past.
Unfortunately this happens more often than most people realize. I remember many weddings and funerals that
I’ve attended where I had to shift my position so I was not in the way.
Once you
get in the door there are still barriers to inclusion. The religious community is just that, a
community. People in a community are
used to greeting each other and talking to each other leisurely. However, many people feel uncomfortable
talking to someone with a disability. They don’t want to offend but they don’t
know how to react toward the disability.
Don Miller
knows this first hand. Miller, a man
with cerebral palsy & hearing loss, attends the Cavalry Church in Hampton,
Virginia. He says “When I first came
into the church people kind of shied away from me until I made myself
approachable. It’s really a matter of
educating people. The church and I do
seminars to show people what to say and what not to say to people with
disabilities.”
Miller
speaks very rapidly, more rapidly than even I do considering how nervous I am
up here. He knows he speaks fast and
expects people to tell him when they can’t understand. When they don’t tell him he asks questions
of them to see if they understood. Of
course they can’t answer his questions.
By engaging people and directly challenging their comfort with his
disability Miller breaks down barriers.
Miller
isn’t alone, not by a long shot. There
are those people who want to enter the religious community but feel they can’t
because they feel no one will be able to communicate with them. I’m speaking, of course, of those people who
use sign language as their principle means of communication. This leads me to another barrier that may
lend an unwelcoming air to a congregation.
Learning about disabilities is often seen as difficult. People don’t want to expend the energies
they think will be needed to welcome people whose needs they are unfamiliar
with. They don’t want to learn a whole
new language in order to communicate with fellow congregants. This particular form of unintentional
ostracism has convinced many people with disabilities that they need to form
their own religious community. And,
unfortunately, this idea of separatist religion is growing.
Okay, I’ve
talked about getting through the door.
I’ve talked about the kind of communication that usually goes on within
a community and how that community-forming communication might be seen as
difficult by the a largely able-bodied, religious community. What are some of the other barriers that
insensitive attitudes can breed?
Disability does mean a need to increase the learning curve and it does
mean a need for adaptation not only of attitude and structure but of procedure
as well.
What about those people who can not hear? Many religious centers do not offer sign
language interpretation. That
ostracizes a large portion of the community. Many people with hearing
impairments do not take part in religious activities because they feel that the
church offers them no incentives. What
is needed instead is the presence of sign language interpretation, at least at
the holiest of religious activities.
The same can be said for those people who have visual difficulties. Few religious organizations offer their
congregations the opportunity to follow prayers using braille readers. There may be many reasons why these accommodations
are not made. Some say it’s a matter of
time. Others say money is the problem.
No matter what the stated reasons are they all boil down to one concept,
attitude.
What are some of the attitudes I’ve been
speaking of and where do they come from?
One all
too prevalent attitude is the belief that people with disabilities need to be
taken care of. Religious institutions
haven’t always seen their role as integrating people with disabilities into
their community. Instead religion has often offered a kind of paternalistic
caretaking to those with disabilities.
Perhaps
the Reverend James Van Der Laan of the Christian Reform Church of North America
sums it up best when he says that … “There is a classic response to people with
disabilities that we find in the church just as in the general population. It’s a combination of avoidance mixed with a
kind of paternal fascination.”
And, Sara
Rubinow Simon, Director of the Consortium of Jewish Educators in Washington,DC
says that… “The deaf, classically, were thought not to be able to
communicate. In the jewish community
they were protected. It was a
paternalistic view. Developmental
disabilities or mental disabilities were also historically excluded, or
protected.”
Another classic attitude held by members of the
religious community is that people with disabilities are incapable of fully
participating in religious activities.
Mohammed
Ali, President of Daar-Ul- Ehsaan
Mosque in Bristol Connecticut, says, for example, that people with mental
disabilities are exempt from requirements of prayer in Islam. He also says there are also concessions made
for people with physical disabilities.
If one can not physically access the Mosque they are permitted to pray
at home. Mosques are not yet equipt
with elevators or lifts but there are always people willing to carry someone
into the Mosque. On the one hand you
might see all these concessions as being compassionate but on the other hand it
can be concluded that Islam has not found a way to incorporate people with
disabilities into religious life.
And,
Islam is not alone in their attitude of saving people with disabilities the
trouble of participating.
Becca Hornstein, Executive Director of the Council
for Jews with Special Needs in Phoenix, Arizona says …
“To be a practicing, traditional Jew you must
recite prayers, both throughout the day and throughout the holidays. You must perform certain commandments, and
you MUST study. For someone with
developmental difficulties the rigors or the religion are very difficult. In
the past developmentally disabled people could not participate fully because
even if they could recite the prayers it was felt that their recitations were
empty.”
Again, it all comes down to attitude and
practice. It all comes down to the
desire to help people with disabilities become part of the religious
community. In few cases is it a
question of out-right prejudice. It’s
just easier to let things continue the way they always have. It is easier to let people go about their
lives just as they have always done.
As Dr. Rosa Banks, Director of Human Relations for
the 7th Day Adventist Church says …
People who aren’t disabled don’t think of
those who are. In an interview I
recently conducted with her she said that she’s heard people say ‘we don’t have
time to help the disabled, let’s help the able bodied first.’
Faced with these attitudinal and physical
obstacles, what can be done to help people with disabilities enter the
religious community as full participants?
Well, the forum in which we are participating today is a good first
step. These kinds of Awareness Days
bring the able-bodied and disabled together.
They give each group the opportunity to meet and get to know members of
the other group. But, the limitation of these kinds of events is that when this
day is over the dialogue often stops.
What needs to be created and supported is on-going dialogue groups that
will allow people from the able-bodied and disabled communities to learn more
about each other’s challenges and opportunities. A necessary product of these dialogue groups is a task force that
studies barriers and eliminates them.
It may be a good idea to experiment, to see what each member of the
community can offer the whole. In this
way everyone benefits from the strengths of the people around them. This is how fear and misunderstanding
disappear. The result is a stronger and
richer religious community.
Finally, there are a few easy changes that can be
made to religious institutions, changes that won’t cost much but will have a
lasting effect. I’d like to see every
church, synagogue and mosque install a ramp so that people can get in the front
door. I’d like to see braille and large
print prayer books so that people with visual impairments can follow
along. I’d like to see sign language
interpreters present at the holiest of religious services, those event which
have the largest audiences and the greatest chance of bringing in people with
disabilities. These few relatively
minor changes will go a long way toward showing people with disabilities that
they are welcome.