If we want to ensure that autistic people don’t fall through the cracks, apostatize, or reject the messages we try to deliver, we need to take seriously the work of contextualization for the autistic population. The good news is that Christianity has been doing this for a long time. We don’t need to reinvent anything. We simply need to borrow from this past.

My motivation was partly personal. At the time I began my research, I suffered from a complicated relationship with Christianity. I wanted to better understand both how I related to it and how Christians related to me. For many years, I had been part of a statistical cohort that showed a pronounced negative correlation between autism and Christian practice.

To put it simply, autistic people are less likely to be Christian than their non-autistic counterparts, and far less likely if they live in more secular areas (when you control for other factors).

I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at age sixteen. I then deconverted from conservative evangelicalism at nineteen during my second year of military college. Eventually, I made my way back to Christianity after ten strange and meandering years. But for a very long time, I, like many autistic men my age, directly attributed my lack of religious belief to my autism.

I’ve now spent the past twelve years researching the intersection of a belief in a normative orthodox understanding of Christianity and Level 1 autism (ASD 1).1 I’ve sampled and surveyed around 26,000 online Level 1 autistics. The findings have been illuminating—but bleak, and they should be of concern to all Christians. When it comes to Christianity, many of us are falling through the cracks.

But the good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Table of Contents

• Is autism incompatible with Christianity?
• Contextualizing Christianity for autistics
• How do we do this? 5 practical takeaways
• Conclusion

Is Autism Incompatible with Christianity?

The exact reasons why we are less likely to be Christian are complicated and would take an entire book to litigate. But the summary is this: The necessary work of translating Christian ideas into forms that autistic people can more readily grasp has often not been done.

This stems mostly from the fact that within many Christian circles, autism in all its forms remains little understood. Autistic ways of thinking and processing are often construed by pastors and clergy as problems to fix, rather than as different ways of understanding.

A Foreign Language

Consider the distinction many Christians draw between “head knowledge” and “heart knowledge.” In many Christian circles, intellectual knowledge is seen as “nice to have,” while the truest expression of the Christian faith is associated with the “heart.” This poses a fundamental distinction that most autistic Christians simply do not make and often do not understand. For many of us, systematized analysis and intellectual rigor are our heart language, the mother tongue to which we most naturally respond. Pastors often fail to understand this, and so send us searching for a “heart knowledge” that is simply not compatible with the way we process reality.

Another example that routinely comes up in my research is the concept of a “personal relationship with Jesus.” I’ve conducted around 640 long-form interviews with autistic Christians and ex-Christians about their understanding and experiences with Christianity. One finding that often surprises people is that 85 percent of autistic practicing Christians are confused by—or unsure what is meant by—this concept. This is less surprising when you consider that autism is characterized by the DSM as involving social and communication deficits affecting social-emotional reciprocity, non-verbal communication, and developing relationships.

Other common forms of Christian expression—like spontaneous verbal prayer, ecstatic emotional expression, and emotional spontaneity—are foreign and confusing to most of us and often difficult to naturally express.

A Failure to Translate

Unfortunately, we often fail to work with these quirks in cognitive styles that process the world in very different ways. Instead, we try to fit the square peg of autism into the round hole of a form of Christianity that was not built for people who think like us.

One of the most common sentiments expressed by autistic people online is: “Christianity is a religion by neurotypicals for neurotypicals.” While I disagree with this, I understand why they say it. Often, when pastors preach, when Christian authors write books, when we build guides for mentoring Christians, the assumption is almost always that the target person does not have autism.

This is a reasonable assumption—we make up at most 3 percent of the population. But it often creates a situation in which our needs are not met, our concerns go unaddressed, and the particularities of people with our condition are treated like a burden. While I don’t think the church should change everything it does to suit our needs, a very good case exists for reasonable accommodation.

Contextualizing Christianity for Autistics

The good news is that there is no need to force the square peg into the round hole. Christianity is a very rich and diverse tradition. There are plenty of square holes in every Christian denomination for us to slot into, if we learn where to look.

There is nothing about autism that makes us inherently less likely to be Christian. The problem, rather, is that we have simply not heard a form of Christianity that makes sense to us. That, or we’ve tried to force an incompatible expression of Christianity through a brain that couldn’t comprehend it.

Christianity and Contextualization

In 1 Corinthians 12:12–27, Paul uses the body as a metaphor for the diversity of the church and those in it.

He rightfully asks, “If all were a single member, where would the body be?” (1 Cor 12:19). In many ways we have forgotten Paul’s words. Instead of letting our autistic brothers and sisters be a different part of the body—one that functions differently, processes differently, and interprets the world differently—we try to force them to be a body part they are not. Or because they are different, we treat them as outsiders with no use to the body of Christ.

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