Neurospicy and Made in God's Image

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Recently, a lot of our conversations together have been about questions where people have confused what is common or dominant (cisgender identity, male dominance in culture) with the depth of the divine life. The results is that anyone who falls outside the boundaries of what is deemed “normal” is seen as an outlier to God’s intent for the world we live in. Today, I want to tackle one particular way that narrative plays out in an area of which we are only recently more aware—the concept of neurodiversity. Many people assume that there is one kind of normal brain, and that people who don't have it are somehow less than fully who they should be. This is a myth definitely worth breaking. I want to talk about what the neurodivergent—or neurospicy, which is my own favorite term—can teach the rest of us. The term was "neurodiversity" was coined in 1998 by autistic Australian sociologist Judy Singer — and she was very clear that it wasn't a medical term. It was a political one. Her idea was simple: no two human minds are exactly alike, and that variation is not a defect. It is a fact about our species. Autism activists took that idea and ran with it, pushing back against what they call the "pathology model" — the assumption that there is one correct way for a brain to develop, and that every deviation from it is a disorder to be cured. Daniel Bowman Jr., a poet and English professor who is also autistic, puts it plainly: autism is his operating system, not a bug. He is not broken. He is different. And the neurotypical insistence that their way of being human is the standard makes the lives of neurodivergent people unnecessarily hard — not because their brains don't work, but because the world keeps telling them they don't fit. Now here's where the theology gets interesting. Christians have long wrestled with what it means to be made in the image of God — the imago Dei. Over the last century, a dominant answer has been: relationality. To be fully human, in the image of God, is to be in relationship — the I-Thou of Martin Buber, taken up by Barth and Bonhoeffer and half the systematic theologians of the twentieth century. The problem, as scholar Joanna Leidenhag has shown, is that when you define personhood primarily through the capacity for certain kinds of social and emotional relationship, you have — almost by accident — defined autistic people as less than fully human. Some churches have even used this framework to suggest that people with autism are incapable of genuine sanctification. That is a theological catastrophe, and it needs to be named as one. Here is what I think is closer to the truth: God, in Scripture, reveals a mind that is both deeply systematic and profoundly empathic. The orderliness of creation, the precision of the tabernacle instructions, Paul's declaration that God is not a God of disorder but of peace — these point to a divine mind that finds beauty and meaning in pattern and structure. But God also weeps. God notices Jonah's sulking over a withered plant. God is moved. Both modes of knowing and being belong to God, which means both modes of knowing and being belong to the image of God we carry. And here is what our neurospicy siblings can teach us: they often experience one or both of these modes with astonishing intensity. Bowman writes that his autistic friends are every bit as feeling, compassionate, and caring as his neurotypical ones — sometimes more so. What looks like emotional flatness from the outside is frequently a nervous system overwhelmed by the depth of what it is taking in. That is not a deficit. That is a different kind of depth. Scholar Lauren Calvin Cooke makes a related point about how the church has mistakenly equated deep faith with cognitive articulation — the ability to explain sanctification, to recite the creed, to answer the right questions in confirmation class. But the Word did not become a proposition. The Word became flesh. Embodied, sensory, particular human experience, that is what God entered. Which means knowledge of God lives in the body… in the bread on the tongue, in the knees that learn to kneel, in the hands that learn to receive. Our neurodivergent siblings, who often experience the world through their senses with extraordinary vividness, may have access to embodied, incarnational knowing that those of us who live mostly in our heads have been trained to overlook. To be clear: the neurospicy don't need to be fixed so they can participate in our church. Those of us who are neruotypical need to expand what we think participation looks like. We need to build communities where the fidgeter and the avoider of eye contact and the person who needs the same seat every week is not seen as a problem to manage, but as a bearer of the divine image — offering us a facet of God we might never otherwise encounter. The myth is that normal is the goal. The truth is that the image of God is far larger than any one of us — or any one kind of brain — can contain. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.