Beyond Disability Identity
Beyond Beautiful: Disability, Liberation, Love
Season 3, Episode 11 - Beyond Disability Identity
🧭 Episode Summary
What happens when your faith and your understanding of disability begin to change?
In this deeply personal episode of Beyond Beautiful, Mandi shares the evolution of her relationship with God—from discovering faith as a child, through seasons of rebellion and conservative Christianity, to confronting the ableism, shame, and spiritual violence that shaped how she understood disability and herself.
Mandi explores how church spaces, inaccessible practices, traditional interpretations of Scripture, and assumptions about healing can communicate harmful messages about disabled bodies. She also shares the moment Nancy Eiesland’s The Disabled God transformed her understanding of disability theology and introduced her to the radical possibility of seeing the resurrected Christ as a wounded, disabled body.
This episode isn't about having all the answers. It's about asking harder questions, reclaiming faith after religious trauma, and discovering a theology that makes room for disability, queerness, justice, grace, and joy.
If you've ever been made to feel like your body was a problem to be fixed, your questions were a threat to your faith, or your identity made you less worthy of God's love, this conversation is for you.
⚠️ Content Notes
This episode discusses religious trauma, spiritual violence, ableism, shame, and harmful experiences within Christian communities.
💬 Key Themes
Faith, Religious Trauma & Spiritual Violence
Disability, Ableism & Christian Spaces
Disability Theology & the Disabled God
Reclaiming Faith Through Questions & Deconstruction
Disability, Worth, Liberation & Joy
🚨Partnership
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📜 Full Transcript
Mandi: Welcome to Beyond Disability Liberation Love. I'm Mandi, your Queer Christian Disabled host.
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Mandi: Today I'm going to be talking about religious trauma, spiritual violence, ableism within Christian spaces, and some of the ways that faith communities can cause harm to disabled people. I'll also be talking about some of my own experiences with shame, questioning and the ways certain beliefs I was taught affected how I understood myself and my relationship with God. If those topics are difficult or activating for you, please take care of yourself. You don't owe me this episode.
You don't owe this podcast your attention. You are welcome to pause or even skip it and maybe even come back another day. One of the things I've learned through all of this is that your spiritual life should not require you to abandon your own safety. And with that said, let's talk about God and disability.
I wasn't raised in a religious household. I was culturally Catholic, meaning I knew what Catholicism was. I knew about God. I even knew about Jesus.
But I wasn't really practicing. Faith wasn't something that was truly woven into my family life. So when I became a Christian, it wasn't because my parents sat me down and told me what to believe. It wasn't because I was born into a particular denomination, and it wasn't because Christianity was simply the religion of my family.
In a lot of ways, I came to faith on my own, or at least that's how I experienced it. I now believe the Holy Spirit was always calling me. My relationship with God has gone through many chapters and seasons. When I look at my relationship with God, I see some of the same things that I see when I look at my relationship with my queer identity.
I had seasons of discovery, of hiding, seasons where I thought I had everything figured out, and seasons where I questioned everything. There were times that I left faith and times when I came desperately back to it. I think it's important to say this because sometimes we talk about faith as though it's this straight line. You believe, you get saved, you figure everything out, and then you just keep believing the same things forever.
But that hasn't been my experience. My faith has been a journey, and so has my disability theology. But to understand where I am today, I have to take you back. When I was growing up, I went to a Christian summer camp.
I started going around the age of 6, and I went every summer until I was 12 years old. There was something about that place that drew me in. It wasn't necessarily the doctrine or a theological argument. It wasn't somebody convincing me that Christianity was intellectually superior to every other worldview.
What drew me was the softness. It was people. It was nature being surrounded by trees and open space and all of the beauty of creation. It was experiencing what I understood to be God's handiwork.
There was something about being there that made me feel close to God. God felt present and safe and beautiful. And I think that's where the foundation of my relationship with God really began. Not in a classroom, not in a theological debate, but in relationship.
In relationship with people and creation. But then I got older and life got complicated. There were years when I rebelled. There were years when I didn't want to be different from my friends.
I wanted to fit in. I wanted to experience life without constantly feeling like there was something different about me. There were also things happening at home that made me question God's love for me. I had experiences that made me ask, if God loves me, why is my life so hard?
If God is good, why am I experiencing all of these bad things? If God is here, where is God? Those questions stayed with me for a long time. Some of the darkest years of my life lasted until I was about 17.
And at 17, I recommitted my life to God. That recommitment changed the trajectory of my life. I started becoming much more serious about my faith. I became more conservative in my worldview.
And for a while I thought I had finally found the answers. But here's the complicated part. The more conservative my theology became, the more difficult it became for me to accept certain parts of myself, including disability. If the framework you're given tells you that difference is something to overcome, something to be healed from, something that represents brokenness or something that doesn't fit into God's intended design, then eventually you start asking, what is wrong with me?
And I carried that question for a long time. I had questions, so many questions. There were things I believed that didn't quite sit right with me, things I couldn't reconcile and things that I wanted to understand more deeply. But I was part of a community, and community is powerful.
Community can hold you. It can give you belonging. It can give you language and purpose and friendship. But community can also make it very difficult to question the beliefs that hold the community together.
I remember hearing versions of we can't fully understand God's ways. God's thoughts are higher than our thoughts. You just have to trust God and listen. There is truth in the idea that I cannot fully comprehend God.
I don't believe human beings can completely understand God. But there is a difference between humility before mystery and being told that asking questions is evidence of a lack of faith. I didn't understand that difference at the time. I thought blind acceptance was faith.
I thought questioning was dangerous. I thought doubt meant I wasn't trusting God enough. It took me many years to realize that sometimes “you just have to trust God” can become a tool of control. Because if you're never allowed to question the interpretation, if you're never allowed to challenge the teaching, and if you're never allowed to say, this doesn't make sense to me, then the people interpreting God for you become the ones who determine what God is allowed to mean.
And that's where spiritual violence can happen. This is where my disability theology really begins. Because before a church ever preaches a sermon about disability, if they do at all, the building can preach a sermon. You go through the doors.
Is there a ramp? Is there an automatic door? Can I actually get into the sanctuary? Can I sit with my family?
Or am I separated somewhere else? Can I access the bathroom? The communion table? Can I participate in baptism?
Can I access the children's ministry or participate in worship? Can I hear the sermon and see the materials? Can I communicate? Can I leave if I become overwhelmed?
Can I serve? Can I lead? How do I actually belong? We know that accessibility isn't just about whether a person can physically enter a building.
Accessibility communicates theology. It tells us who the space was designed for, and it tells us who the church imagined would be there. And then there are the practices. Many disabled people are welcomed as long as we're recipients of ministry, but not leaders.
Maybe we're invited to be prayed for, but not asked what we actually need. Maybe we're constantly offered healing and told that God wants to make us whole. Maybe our disability becomes a testimony instead of an ordinary part of our lives. Maybe we're treated as inspirational simply for existing.
Or we're told that our suffering is part of God's plan. Maybe we're told that our disability is a test of faith and that we should pray harder. Maybe we're told that if we have enough faith, we'll be healed. And sometimes those messages are wrapped in kindness.
They're wrapped in love and prayer. But good intentions don't automatically make a theology harmless. There are biblical stories that Christians have historically used to understand disability through frameworks of sin, punishment, healing, brokenness, dependence, or miraculous intervention. We see healing narratives throughout the Gospels.
We see blindness, lameness, paralysis, chronic illness. And there are passages that have been interpreted as connecting disability or illness to sin, judgment, spiritual condition, or God's purposes. John 9 is one of the most important examples. Jesus encounters a man who has been blind from birth, and the disciples ask, who sinned?
This man or his parents. And Jesus rejects the premise that the man's blindness can simply be explained as someone's sin. That is important. But even when Christians recognize that particular passage, we can still fall into the broader cultural assumption that disability is fundamentally a problem to be solved, that healing is the ultimate goal, that the disabled body is incomplete, that the non-disabled body is the ideal.
MANDI: And disability theology asks us to stop and say, wait, what if we've been asking the wrong question? What if disability isn't evidence that something went wrong with a person? What if disability isn't a theological problem that needs to be explained away? What if disabled people aren't waiting to become fully human?
What if we already are? And that question completely changed my understanding of God. My disability theology really began to bloom when I read Nancy Eiesland's The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability. I remember being mind blown because Eiesland asks us to imagine something that I had never really considered.
What if the resurrected Jesus is disabled? Think about that. We often imagine resurrection as the ultimate restoration of the body. Perfect, whole, fixed, no scars, no impairments, no evidence of suffering.
But that's not actually what the Gospel accounts give us. In John 20, after Jesus has been resurrected, Thomas says he won't believe unless he sees the wounds. And Jesus doesn't respond by saying, Thomas, that's not who I am anymore. Instead, Jesus invites Thomas to see and touch the wounds.
MANDI: John 20:27 says, Put your finger here. See my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. And in Luke 24, Jesus appears to the disciples and says, look at my hands and my feet.
It is I myself. Touch me and see. The resurrected Jesus still has the wounds. The body that comes out of the grave is not a body that has erased its history, the scars remain.
And this was revolutionary for me because Nancy Eiesland's argument is that the resurrected Christ can be understood as a disabled God precisely because Christ's wounded body remains part of the resurrected body. That doesn't mean every Christian has to accept this theological interpretation. It is a disability theology framework. But for me, it opened an entirely new door.
Suddenly I could imagine a God who wasn't standing on the other side of disability saying, one day you'll be like me. I could imagine a God who, who entered into embodied human vulnerability. A God whose body was wounded, whose resurrected body still carried evidence of what had happened to it. A God who didn't need to erase the scars in order to be resurrected.
And suddenly my body didn't feel like a theological problem. I think Christianity has often confused wholeness with able-bodiedness, and those are not the same thing. Maybe wholeness isn't the absence of disability. Maybe wholeness isn't independence.
Maybe wholeness isn't having the body society tells us we should have. Maybe wholeness is actually about relationship. Maybe it's about belonging, justice, love, connection, interdependence, being fully human. And if that's true, then disability doesn't automatically stand in opposition to holiness.
Disability doesn't make someone less made in God's image. It doesn't make someone less capable of loving God or less worthy of community. Disability doesn't make someone less worthy of leadership. Disabled people don't need to become less disabled to become more holy.
That sentence has taken me a long time to believe. I want to be clear about something. I don't have all the answers. No one does.
My disability theology, like all of my theology, is still evolving. My understanding of scripture has evolved. My understanding of God has evolved. I'm still asking questions.
And now I don't think questions threaten my faith. I think questions are part of my faith because I didn't stop taking the Bible seriously. I started taking it seriously enough to ask harder questions. I think that's where liberation has entered my relationship with God.
Because I no longer need someone else to tell me exactly what my body means. I don't need someone else to tell me what my disability says about my faith. I don't need someone else to tell me whether I'm worthy. And I don't need someone else to convince me that God loves me.
And while I share a lot here through my own experience having a physical disability and I talk about bodies, this also applies to all disabilities, including disabilities that impact a person's mind, emotions, mental health, disabilities that are dynamic and affect someone a certain way today and affects them differently tomorrow. You also don't need someone else to convince you that God loves you. If you've listened to this episode and you're a Christian, or you're questioning Christianity, or maybe you're somewhere in between, I want you to know something. I'm not sharing this episode because I want to convert anyone.
I'm not trying to convince you that you need to believe exactly what I believe. I'm sharing this because this is my story. This is the theology that has helped me make sense of my body, my faith, my queerness, and my relationship with God. And if you are carrying religious trauma or you've experienced spiritual violence, if you've been told that your disability or any identity is a punishment, if you've been prayed over when what you actually needed was to be listened to, if you've been made to feel like your body or your mind is a problem God needs to fix, I want you to hear me say: you are worthy.
All of you is worthy. Your questions are worthy. Your story is worthy. And if you're Christian, I hope you know that questioning the way someone has taught you about God isn't the same thing as rejecting God.
Sometimes questioning the theology that harmed you is actually part of finding freedom. And for me, that freedom has meant discovering a God who isn't afraid of my questions, a God who isn't ashamed of me, a God who doesn't require me to erase the parts of myself that other people find uncomfortable. A God whose resurrected son still carried his wounds, and a faith that can hold both justice and grace, both truth and questions, both disability and holiness, both queerness and Christianity, and maybe most importantly, joy. Because I don't want my faith to be another place where I have to earn my right to exist.
I want my faith to be a place where I can breathe, rest, ask questions, where I can love, where I can experience the fullness of God, and where I can be fully, beautifully, imperfectly human. Thank you so much for being here and for letting me share something this personal. And wherever you are on your own journey, whether you're deeply rooted in faith, questioning everything, rebuilding your faith, or leaving it entirely, I hope you remember this. Your worth was never dependent on someone else's theology. And your freedom matters. And remember, disability, liberation, love, are always beyond beautiful.
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