“Piss on Pity”: A rejection of the charity model in the church for the thirtieth anniversary of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.

Image description and alt text for profile photo: photo of Sorrel in their electric wheelchair from above the waist. Sorrel is a young white person wearing pink cord dungarees over a black turtleneck, a green bucket hat with most of the words “Revolting Christians” and the United Reformed Church logo visible, a green lanyard, and their dungarees pocket is full of coloured voting cards. They’re smiling in a keen but tired way, as one would on day three of the United Reformed Church’s General Assembly.

Piss on Pity. The rallying cry of the UK disability civil rights movement remains relevant to Christians today. In 1989, on the BBC television programme Network, lead campaigner Barbara Lisicki explained, “If you make a disabled person an object of charity, you’re not going to see them as your equal.”. It’s an explanation the church must remember. At the time, disabled people were the object of charity donation drives but had no legal recourse against discrimination, and no access to public transport. I recommend When Barbara Met Alan on BBC for an excellent and historically informed dramatization of the UK disability civil rights movement. The protests resulted in the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, now superseded by the Equality Act 2010. While exemptions from the Equality Act 2010 exist regarding sexual orientation and religious beliefs for religious organisations (a whole other article), I have found no such exemptions regarding disabled access. Inexcusably, 15 – or 30 – years later, many church buildings remain woefully inaccessible.

“Piss on Pity” is too uncouth for church. Too uncomfortable, for those who see pity towards the “less fortunate” as a cornerstone of Christian charity. Respectability politics cannot hide the shaping of public attitudes towards disabled people for generations by interpretations of Biblical concepts of pity and charity. I have neither the space nor the inclination to delve into the healing gospels here. Disabled theologians examine them in detail – see Nancy Eiesland’s The Disabled God: Towards a Liberatory Theology of Disability (1994), or for a quick watch, this talk I gave a few years ago, with transcript. Nevertheless, as people of the church, we cannot deny our complicity in the limitations imposed on disabled people by the charity model. Even while we acknowledge the disabled lives saved by Christian charity, we must honour too the lives lost through the cruelties members of the Church have meted out.

Putting history aside, in their seminal work At the Gates: Disability, Justice, and the Churches, Naomi Lawson Jacobs and Emily Richardson problematise the positioning of disabled people as object of charity and pastoral care in the church. Too many congregations assume that disabled members will not contribute to church life. This leads to disabled Christians being overlooked for volunteer roles, perhaps able to access the congregational seating in the church but not the high altar or other physical spaces used by church leaders. Or disabled members are constantly and often inappropriately “helped”, but never allowed to use their own gifts in the service of others.

This feels especially jarring after acting as a full member of the church. I am a multiply-disabled wheelchair user. In my university church, I was a serving Elder and trustee with all the responsibilities that entails. One Christmas holiday I went down to the nearest church in my hometown, to be greeted with a syrupy voice better suited to toddlers. “You’re such a brave girl! Have you come on your own?”.

So, what does good Christian access look like? It starts from the assumption that disabled people will attend and lead at all levels. In 2023 I joined the Bonhoeffer in Berlin pilgrimage with the Student Christian Movement. We crossed Europe by train, which anyone who has tried to reach even the next town by train in a wheelchair will recognise is no mean feat. The physical accessibility of the journey and the historical buildings we visited was by no means perfect, and only possible at all thanks to the tenacious work of my disabled elders. I was really straining my disabled body-mind to take part at all. And yet, the whole trip felt more accessible than many church events with less practical access challenges. Why? Because my disabled body was never treated as an inconvenience. On the trains, I was sequestered in my wheelchair space, but with a designated German-speaking companion and advocate, who documented everything in this blog post . Friends old and new took turns to come down to my carriage to join us for a chat and a game of UNO. The SCM members and staff worked with me to ensure that I was never othered or excluded, despite the physical constraints that could easily have led to social isolation. I was not pitied, rather I was both deeply and casually seen as one amongst the pilgrims.

This does not mean that practical access needs can be overcome by “thoughts and prayers”, that endlessly frustrating Christian counterpart of good intentions. It does mean that an event can be held in a building with the most modern of practical access arrangements and yet still be inaccessible and isolating for disabled attendees if the prevailing attitude is one of pity and not of radical inclusion.

I close with the words of fellow disabled SCM member Shanika Ranasinge. Shanika sums it all up: “You don’t need to feel sorry for me, but you DO need to accommodate me”.