Ableism in the Church: Part Two

By Rebekah Palmer

Content note: mention of child sexual abuse

I’m left in my bottom bunk in my dorm room in tears and panicked breathing, again. Curled up as small as I can make myself under the covers, I feel ashamed because I need more medical care and access to appointments for managing ongoing progressive illnesses while having permission to continue to be a college student at this Independent Fundamental Baptist Bible college.

Dropping out of college or taking a leave of absence aren’t actions I feel I can take.

The pressure to keep my emotions from my parents and only discuss this with the dean of women and her husband is thickly laid onto me. It isn’t explicitly said, but during daily chapel preaching by guest IFB preachers from other IFB churches in the Midwest, the whole student body is told that God doesn’t approve of quitters. Anything, even natural life causes and circumstantial situations, is a reason the devil will make us drop out of their college.

They tell us God makes his will hard on purpose to weed out those who would become disloyal to their churches and colleges.

The dean of women is adamant that I could be scheduling my gastrointestinal appointments outside of her and the other teachers’ class times (we only have class from 7:30 am – 2 pm as English first language students) as the amount of excused absences I’d need for medical care would result in my removal in dorm housing due to becoming a part-time student who lives out of state. As an out-of-state student, I wouldn’t be allowed to live off campus as a part-time student.

She takes it upon herself to call my GI clinic, without my consent, and reschedule several appointments. She asked me why I didn’t just pick afternoon slots, but when I had called, the clinic mentioned morning appointments as the only option at that time.

Since she was able to switch them “on my behalf,” she tells me: “I guess they just liked my voice better.”

As someone living with cystinosis, that offhand comment sinks in deep and burrows in my chest. My body experiences muscle wasting as a symptom of cystinosis, which often starts in the vocal cords and / or swallowing muscles, along with the jaws, teeth (nerve wasting), upper palate, and lips.

I am also assigned female at birth, with a breathy, high pitched voice. I am self-conscious of this, so I often consciously speak in a lower register as clearly as I am able. 

As a sexual abuse survivor from one molester and one rapist in the IFB church of my childhood under the age of 12, this comment stings, and I feel as if my soul has fled out my body through my mouth.

I again have no say on when, who, and where I can receive assistance in health care for my body.

Any time I try to keep teachers and ministry leaders informed of the truth about my illnesses and what my current needs are, it is seen as either a personal affront to the college rules or to them personally. There are only two teachers who speak comfort to me and they are bound by these so-called school rules with what they are able to assist with in terms of accessibility in their classes.

There is also this sort of praise happening at the same time regarding who I am as a person. They see my rare disease life and the disabilities I manage day to day and consider me “overcoming” the flesh by attending their Bible college.

They openly use my story to guilt the able-bodied students to push harder with phrases publicly and privately said like, “If Rebekah can graduate, so can you.” But if I act as sick or disabled as I am, I cease to be their “inspiration” and instead become someone they punish verbally and emotionally and yes, even physically with assigning me trash pick up around the college campus when I miss mandatory activities due to illness.

During my student teaching semester, I quickly realized that my stamina peaks after 4 hours in the classroom. I am given permission to teach until the lunch hour at the academy associated with their church, then I am to go back to their college to rest — a reasonable accommodation. However, I am still expected to make up the total hour requirements like the other able-bodied student teachers, so it comes with strings attached. Instead of scheduling more class time into another semester or even training hours with the school secretaries, I am told to be the trash pick-up and cleaning human (unpaid and not counted financially towards my degree) the next semester, in addition to more college classes.

Many times, this has to happen during the heat of the day, which is a trigger for my newly-diagnosed migraines. There are no janitorial or landscape work majors at this college and my major and minor are in the teaching and secretarial sphere.

If I constructively criticize this “reasonable accommodation,” my parents will be called about my “rebellious attitude,” so I just pray for graduation day.

This isn’t unusual for IFB churches and their schools, from kindergarten to college level, to keep information from the families that enroll their students. IFB schools and camps exploit unpaid and unaccredited labor and activity or reward inappropriately based on supposed “character” of the minors and young adults under their supervision.

If the student is different in any way from their strict interpretation of humanity existing, that student gets treated even worse than their peers, and the peers are pressured to shun that human — or else.

My health needs continue to be exacerbated because the approved church member given unlimited access to the college females in particular attempted to sexually groom me, under the guise of seeming to be concerned about my health. He would also appeal to the rhetoric yelled from the pulpit by the pastor who made him head deacon until 2008 or 2009 by claiming my diseases were making me more emotional and bratty these days and that people “like me” shouldn’t be in college.

A person I considered a friend told the dean of women I was “milking my time off of church attendance” after having my gallbladder removed in 2010. I was verbally reprimanded and emotionally bullied for this in a classroom with public access. 

Due to the extra scar tissue from my kidney transplant of 11 years draining from a tube (an unexpected complication and not a typical gallbladder surgery result), my surgeon asked me if she could write “please be Christian and allow this girl to rest” on my doctor’s permission slip to take extra days off of all activities and class.

Looking back, I wonder and am grateful that this surgeon saw the signs of distress and abuse on my body at that time.

Even in my childhood church there was this demeaning yet coddling attitude around me. They all claimed to know about my health problems and that I wanted to be an educator someday, yet my then-youth pastor would often tease me about graduating from college so I could come home and clean the church building so he didn’t have to do it.

Cleaning and janitorial work are not shameful jobs.

I’m a cleaning lady’s daughter and if my mom hadn’t worked hard in that job, my family wouldn’t have been able to supplement finances for our life’s necessities. The IFB leadership often exploited my nurtured character to be hard-working as a midwestern farm girl and turned it against me by threatening to tell my parents of “my laziness.”

When church leaders can’t be bothered to do menial and manual labor, they have grown into privileged and elitist people who lord over many beautiful people in their congregation that honestly labor and are underpaid in their careers and work. And these same church leaders will demand their salaries be paid through engorged tithing without doing their job of caring for their congregation.

The point here is that regardless of my ability to educate, to write, to be a leader in ministry, they wanted to regulate me into work that my body had more limits in due to my disabilities and rare disease.

The Independent Fundamental Baptist church of the modern USA is misogynist, elitist, classist, and ableist and does not adhere to scripture’s command that Christians refrain from being respecters of persons. I have observed their racism and discrimination against ethnic minorities and sexual minority groups as well, while at the same time protecting child abusers and damning the survivors on earth.

My family and I were unaware and misinformed about their college accreditation status, as was the provider of a grant I received to attend there. Illness and disability were only ever framed in pitying conversations or in the context of testing and trials by a harsh and cruel God or the doting Grandfather in the sky if the testing and trial by health was in one of their sermons.

It wasn’t much better for me at university, except there was not a religious abuse component behind the ableism. Both universities I attended at least had a Disability Student Services so I could report recourse if I found a professor denying me reasonable access and accommodations.

COVID-19 woke up the public sector regarding equal access to education, but sadly this had zero impact on IFB churches and schools, because of their inherent systemic belief that Covid is a Chinese and USA conspiracy to keep the masses out of their churches.

Finding the disability justice and disability rights community was a game changer for my life’s happiness in realizing the harm and trauma I went through and that it was layered and nuanced.

I can heal more by sharing my story in hopes that people everywhere in any institution and system displaying ignorance regarding abuse tactics can be changed to find more healthy ways to provide access and services and spiritual help for their loved ones and themselves.

I sincerely hope particularly nonprofit organizations and churches read this so they can change the culture of sexual assault and abuse festered across today’s Western institutions and systems.

Rebekah Palmer (she/they) holds a degree in Professional Communication and Emerging Media from UW-Stout in Menomonie, WI in addition to a religious degree in parochial school teaching and secretarial training. She currently serves as the Vice President of Awareness and Education at Next Generation of Cystinosis. She is a dedicated rare disease advocate and a published author, and her articles have appeared on the rare news website PatientWorthy, digital magazine Rare Revolution, and #RareIs. She identifies as a white, disabled, Christian, queer and non-binary human.