Tags
Asperger's Syndrome, Autism, bullying, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, mental health, Mormons
About a month ago, I shared a story about a so-called Christian school banning Autism Awareness Week because the pastor claimed it put people over Christ. I said it then and I’ll say it now, What a load of baloney! However, this article got me thinking about how other religious faiths might view people on the Autistic Spectrum. I know in the church I went to in my teens, I was viewed as ‘weird’ and even some of the bullying I experienced as a result went unnoticed.
Having spent the 1990s in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Mormons for short, I can say that I wasn’t treated as such. Probably because I was much older and learned how to deal with it, somewhat. However, the article I’m going to share with you, written by a woman who grew up in the faith and is on the Autistic Spectrum is quite shocking. Here it is in full:
I’m an autistic person that grew up in the Church.
In theory, it’s very accepting. If you see the material put out about autistic people, it’s generally positive. It’s overly vague and tends towards infantilization, but this is a problem with media in general.
In practice, the Church does not live up to what it preaches. At a basic level, leadership had a strict standard for how much youth should be socializing and in what ways they should be socializing, and we were essentially required to attend a large number of social events very often. This process has doesn’t account for autistic people in the slightest, or really any neurodivergent person in general. This requirement to attend a large number of specific social events can remove agency for neurodivergent youth (and I suspect youth in general), and it feeds into many of the problems I’m about to talk about.
The people I grew up around in the church were very cruel to me and anyone else that was “different”, and this led to basically every neurodivergent kid being mistreated. Adults would most often do nothing about it, and when they did it was usually to blame me or any of the other kids being harrassed. Because of required attendance, attempting to escape from these situations was viewed negatively, and the standards on socialization reinforced the ideas of the people harassing me and others that they were in the right. Additionally, these adults and most oftthe less judgemental kids saw me as “slow”, so when they did take my side or try to include me, it was almost always in a way that was very infantilizing, which only served to reinforce my self-blaming and made me feel like I deserved it.
Why didn’t I speak up? In part, because when the adults reinforced and sided with the bullies, it made me blame myself for everything. But a big part of it was that I didn’t understand what was happening to me, and I didn’t know how to explain anything to my parents, who would’ve sided with me had they known what was happening. It’s difficult to articulate, but autistic people don’t develop the same way neurotypical people do, and this leads to many of us learning how to express ourselves, comprehend social climates and certain kinds of communication, or even understand how all of this makes us feel or effects us on the inside much later in life than most others. When our environment is built for people that don’t experience these issues and expect us to behave the same (AKA systemic ableism), which is exactly the kind of environment I grew up in, it exacerbates every other problem that’s also happening.
In general, this happens because most people are never taught how to deal with abuse, the Church has severely insufficient mechanisms to deal with abuse, and the culture of a significant number of Mormon communities is saturated in a fear of difference. My family moved to other communities after this, and while none of them were quite as bad, they all still exhibited the same fundamental problems, and I was still regularly mistreated.
So how does the Church treat autistic people and view ASD? In my experience, very poorly. I did some research, and I’ve found a large number of autistic people and parents of autistic people that have talked about very similar experiences. Even though I fully believed when I was younger, I separated myself from the Church in highschool to avoid the abuse. I’m atheist now, but the only reason I left initially had nothing to do with belief, and everything to do with how I was treated. I invite people to consider what it means about the community that someone would separate themselves even from “essential” services like the sacrament while still fully believing because of how others were treating them. I’m sure the LDS people I saw answering this mean well, but I do think they’re blind to/don’t realize what’s really going on. And not just to people like me, the Church has an abuse problem in general, and my experience was only a small part of that dark underbelly. Yet, most times I have shared my experiences with mormons, I am ignored, shrugged off, made fun of, and sometimes even blamed for what happened.
The Church needs to do better. Utah has a disproportionate number of autistic people committing suicide every year, especially autistic women. I don’t want to depress anyone with the statistics, but they’re not good. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen, the Church would rather ignore the issue and sweep it under the rug.
There are similar accounts from others. It seems the LDS church talks a big game on Autism but they don’t practice what they preach. Their many rules and forced social interaction doesn’t help those on the Autistic Spectrum. That was why I eventually left the Church. I said this in ancient posts, I have a lot of regard for the teachings of the faith but I don’t want to live by all of their rules. Furthermore, if any person, anywhere, treats someone with Autism badly, then I don’t want to associate with them.
Some in the Mormon Church have said that people with mental health conditions might be the result of being valiant spirits in the war in heaven and God has put them in these bodies to protect them. That may be true, but it’s not a reason to mistreat anyone. If these people were valiant spirits, then they should be revered, not bullied. That’s what I think.
Peaceful Rampage 