As church buildings reopen (or stay open), it is tempting for relatively able-bodied folks, eager to exercise our religious and civic freedom, to claim the best seats in the house. But what of those who are physically unable to enter the assembly, or who are hesitant because health precautions are being ignored or boastfully defied? Are we essentially, or actually, telling them to go sit elsewhere if they’re physically uncomfortable, to go and be with their own kind? In this worship modality, the best places are for the strongest bodies; those who are wealthy in their health are the honored attendees in the worship of God. Wouldn’t James go apoplectic at such seating arrangements (James 2)? And if so, then isn’t this mentality of ableism, manifest in our modality of worship, an utter affront to the heart and commands of the God whom we gather to worship?

During times of profound providential pressures, the Lord blesses his church with severe mercies. One of those hard-to-receive gifts is the exposition of our insidious, indigenous idols. False, territorial gods are seldom evicted from our souls without a spiritually gory fight. Cleansing cultural idols from the true temple, God’s people, is practically an exorcism. While the power of the risen Christ compels us toward freedom, we add horror to that holy struggle by holding on hard to the biblically unfaithful ideas and affections which come costumed as piety and increasingly possess our thoughts and actions. When the people of the true and living God double down on idolatry during the times of personal and social pressure which expose it, the results are truly fearful for the witness of the church and for the people already pained by our unholy allegiances.

In these trying days, it’s not only been unnerving, it’s been terrifying, to see how we Christians try to sanctify unholy thoughts, words, and actions; how we praise ungodly people who personally defy the Lord but who publicly bless us with their political power; and how we hold in snide derision those within the church, and outside of it, who call us out for compromised faith and false worship. It’s frighteningly tempting to fancy ourselves the strong, the unfearful, the uncompromising. We creationists employ what we’d otherwise call a savage Darwinian social ethic as we mock or condescendingly tolerate people whom we consider emotionally or spiritually weak. And there are similar, more subtle discriminations among us, all the more cruel for their quiet evolution during our cultural crisis. The victims are not (usually) actively mocked, but they are subjected by physically stronger Christians to a passively expressed, personally insulting indifference which manifests as the latter vie for religious liberty. Pandemic pressures are exposing among us an idol called ableism.

If we’ve grown weary in keeping track of the multiplying ‘isms in our culture, we could simply call “ableism” by a Scriptural cognate term translated “favoritism” (Jude 16), and apply it appropriately. Ableism is ungodly preferential treatment which exalts the able-bodied and dehumanizes the physically less capable. These past many months, our culture’s attention has been drawn to those who’ve lingered long on the shadowy fringe of our collective concerns and priorities. Thank the Lord that sinful discriminations are increasingly called out and that verbal and physical abuse, including what’s occurred and been covered up in the church, is being exposed as courageous victims step forward. Sadly, the church has in many ways been dependent upon “the world” to spotlight such dehumanization. Sadder still, we believers have spent so much of our time of late criticizing the whistleblowers for their tactics and operational philosophies rather than directly addressing the injustices they’re bringing to public light. Without throwing shade at any person or group of people suddenly brought to the fore of our nation’s convulsion of social conscience, we’ll focus here on people who in our ever-shifting nomenclature have been labeled as the handicapped, disabled, physically, and/or developmentally challenged, as well as the aged who lack their life’s former physical strength and vitality. In a horribly ironic and painfully instructive way, recent ostensibly Christian struggles for religious freedom have pushed such people (further?) into the periphery of popular Christian concerns. In the process, a self-righteousness has been revealed among us which, until pandemic pressures hit, had masked itself quite comfortably as conventional Christian thought and behavior.

In the midst of sometimes maddening, often multiplying government mandates, how many of us have found ourselves morally outraged at having to live temporarily in conditions which comprise permanent life situations for others? I don’t mean business shutdowns or their torturous like, but rather our personal ability to move about as we wish, wearing what we want, free to assemble when and how we choose, whether for the big game at the stadium or for weekly worship in the church building. It seems that our efforts to regain such freedoms have been infected by an idol-revealing, unrecognized antipathy toward those who’ve never experienced them, or who, for whatever reason beyond their control, have regularly been denied them.

For example, consider the increasingly popular (but utterly unbiblical) claim that gathering for worship in a particular building is of the essence of the Christian faith. Notwithstanding legitimate discussions and debates about government authority, notice how this maxim immediately marginalizes those who physically cannot get to the building, as well as those for whom the building’s features are impossible to physically navigate. Are such saints missing out on the essence of the Christian life? Has their disability disqualified them from full participation in the worship of their Savior? God forbid!

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