Autism & Christianity: A Square Peg in a Round Hole?

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.

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.

Autistic ways of thinking and processing are often construed by pastors and clergy as problems to fix, rather than as different ways of understanding.

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.

In Acts 17:16–34, the Apostle Paul speaks in the Areopagus to the gathered Athenians after noticing an altar dedicated to “the Unknown God.” In this speech, Paul presents the gospel in ways his hearers would understand, using their own philosophy, context, and cultural concepts. Instead of expecting the Athenians to adapt to him in order to hear the gospel, he accommodates to the concepts and language they understand in order to explain what Christ had done for them.

Christians have been following Paul’s example ever since. For the next two thousand years, Christian missionaries would bring the gospel to countless different cultures and shape its message into terms and concepts that local peoples could more intuitively understand. This process of shaping the gospel message into terms more readily understood by a host culture, without compromising its essential nature, is called contextualization. It is widely seen as a necessary precondition for evangelization.

This work has taken many interesting forms. One of my favorites is the Heliand, a ninth-century work written to explain the gospel to a resistant population of Saxons. It retells the Gospels using language, context, and concepts familiar to a Germanic warrior society; that is, it retells the gospel narrative as a Germanic epic poem, with the Scriptures reimagined as “secret runes” and Jesus as a “warrior–chieftain” who, powerful in divine knowledge, defied “Fate” (i.e., Death) and won, proving himself mightier than even the likes of Odin and Thor.

But not all examples of contextualizing are cross-cultural. Many Christian writers have taken up the great work of contextualizing Christianity to their own (often Christianized) cultures. For example, C. S. Lewis is one of the great contextualizers of the twentieth century, as most of his writing is best understood as contextualizing Christianity for a secularizing Britain. Every act of translating the Bible into the vernacular is another example of contextualization.

The animating motivation behind contextualization is the belief that Christianity should be accessible to everyone, and that making it accessible requires translating it into people’s mother tongue.

Autism and contextualization

To be autistic often feels like you were born on the wrong planet. In fact, one of the earliest autism internet forums was named Wrong Planet. Most people seem foreign to you. The way they act is confusing, the way they talk doesn’t make sense, their social expectations seem arbitrary, their rules are not intuitive, and nothing you say or do ever seems quite right.

Another common way autistic people describe their experiences is to compare it to constantly speaking in a second, learned language and never your mother tongue. Autistics often describe feeling lost in translation. For many autistic people, their experience with Christianity is no exception.

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.

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.

How do we do this? 5 practical takeaways

While there is no single solution, several initial principles can guide this work.

1. Commit to the work

One challenge is that autism is a very heterogeneous condition: The accommodations needed and the way each person will think and process things differ greatly between individuals. As a result, contextualizing Christianity for autistic people will not be as simple as producing a new translation. It will require a long and continuous process of shaping and refining how we communicate to autistics who are wrestling with Christianity. There will be no silver bullets when it comes to translating Christian concepts into a form more easily understood by Level 1 autistic people.

That said, translation is possible. For example, while around 85 percent of autistic Christians are confused by or unsure about the term “personal relationship with Jesus,” only around 7 percent struggle with “discipleship.” Doing something as simple as changing conversations about a personal relationship with Jesus to ones about discipleship can significantly reduce confusion without changing much, if any, theological or biblical teaching.

2. Don’t mistake difference for sin

Autistic people will see things differently; they will process information differently; and they will interpret relationships and social dynamics differently.

Christians often interpret these differences as sin, disobedience, defiance, or a lack of spiritual fruit, when in fact they are simply differences in neurodevelopment. While autistic people are undoubtedly imperfect and sin like everyone else, differences that are often benign are treated as matters of spiritual failure.

One very common example: As part of their spiritual development, autistic people will want to “get to the bottom” of a question. This typically involves asking many questions, pointing out inconsistencies, and debating in order to work through their problem. This often gets misread as combativeness or challenging authority. Often the autistic person is completely unaware of how they are coming across and gets confused when they receive correction. For example, many an autistic person gets into hot water for engaging their group Bible study less like a cordial discussion and more like a debate to uncover the truth.

3. Expect varied fruit

Because people are different, the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22–23) will often express themselves differently in an autistic person than a non-autistic person. What love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control look like in someone without autism will often be quite different from what they look like in an autistic person.

We know that these qualities take different forms across different genders, ages, and cultures. Yet for some reason, we fail to extend that same expectation to differences in neurodevelopment. We unfortunately expect these fruits to appear identical. But fruit looks different when it grows on different trees.

For an autistic Christian, joy can look like sharing long, monotone monologues about a book by an obscure Dutch theologian. It might not look like ecstatic emotional expression, or much emotional expression at all. In fact, trying to force them to fit that mold can actually make them less likely to genuinely possess that fruit.

4. Be flexible

Autistic people can be a bit odd. Your conventional approaches may not work as expected. Even as someone who has autism, studied autistic Christians for twelve years now, and spent the better part of five years working to translate Christianity to autistics, I still don’t know what will work with a specific person.

Go into your engagements with an open mind and be willing to change course. As they say, throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. Don’t be afraid to try things, explain things, or move on when something clearly isn’t working.

5. Entertain questions

Autistic people will have questions—hundreds, maybe thousands. Many will seem very odd. Most won’t be of the type you could anticipate. Their level of specificity might be startling. But even if you don’t understand why a question is being asked, or even if you think it strange, take it seriously. Your rule: There is no such thing as a dumb question. Those with autism often need the full picture before we can commit to something. The gist often doesn’t cut it.

I sometimes jest that the autistic love language is intellectual engagement—but it’s a joke that isn’t far from the truth. A very concerned young man once came to me with a question about the inspiration of Scripture. While I thought his question would be about Bible contradictions or historicity, he was much more concerned with figuring out timelines. He had brought a diagram with him containing two columns: “If Paul wrote Timothy” and “If someone else wrote Timothy.” He had read 2 Timothy 3:16–17 and concluded that its referents excluded “scriptures” not yet written at the time. So he was trying to figure out which books of the Bible were “God-breathed” based on the dating of 2 Timothy. Answering his question took around five hours of discussion about canonicity, followed by many more hours of follow-up questions.

Conclusion

So is Christianity a religion by neurotypicals and for neurotypicals?

My response: That might feel true. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Share your thoughts

How can Christians work to embrace autistic ways of understanding within their churches and relationships? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Resources for further reflection

Related content

• What Does It Mean to Be Human? Theological Anthropology
• When Autism Comes to Church: Practical Advice for Parents & Pastors
• Is Your Church Truly Healthy? Look to Love, Not Metrics
• Mental Illness and Ministry: A “Whole-Person” Pastoral Approach
• Who Sinned? Maybe No One: Mental Health & Broken Embodiment

1. ASD 1 is what used to be called Asperger’s syndrome or high-functioning autism.