Anxiety is growing across the country, especially among disability advocates, as the Trump administration and its Christian Nationalist allies target public education and social welfare programs for massive cuts and an ideological overhaul.
President Donald Trump and his appointees are dismantling the Department of Education along with its Office of Civil Rights. Private school voucher programs, which take money away from the public school system, are spreading across the country. And Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” — being debated in Congress as this issue of Church & State went to press — heralds devastating cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and more. The White House says these cuts are necessary to curb “government bloat.” Those being affected, their families, advocates and caregivers argue these cuts are much more insidious.
White Christian Nationalism is the belief that America is — and must remain — a Christian nation founded for its white Christian inhabitants. It’s fairly well known that Christian Nationalists oppose equality for people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, religious minorities and the nonreligious. What’s less known is the movement’s longtime resistance to the inclusion of people with disabilities in schools, workplaces and public life.
The Christian Nationalist vision of America is one of strength, purity and conformity, promoting an idealized citizenry defined in able-bodied, neurotypical terms. By comparison, people with disabilities become burdens on this divinely chosen society. Initiatives like the early 20th-century American eugenics movements that openly advocated for sterilizing people with disabilities (and others) are examples of attempts to lessen or minimize the “societal burden.” Today’s Christian Nationalist rhetoric may seem more subtle, but the underlying rationale is disturbingly similar: People with disabilities are government bloat, not equal citizens.
Trump has been notoriously clear about his opinions of people with disabilities throughout his political career. He has publicly mocked people with physical disabilities, regularly uses “mentally disabled” as a slur against opponents and blamed Federal Aviation Administration workers with disabilities for the deadly Jan. 29 crash of Flight 5342 at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Most recently, the Trump administration withdrew 11 sections of the Americans with Disabilities Act guidance that helped stores, hotels and other businesses understand their obligation to make public spaces accessible for everyone.
But perhaps most chilling are comments his nephew, Fred C. Trump III, said President Trump made in May 2020 after a White House meeting about the needs of children and adults with complex challenges. “Those people … The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die,” President Trump said, according to Fred Trump in his memoir, All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got to Be This Way.
Charity versus equity
In Christian religious traditions, Jesus often demonstrated compassion for people with disabilities: He healed the sick, the lame and the blind, and he challenged the belief that disabilities were God’s punishment for sin. So how does the “Christian” in Christian Nationalism justify the movement’s advancement of discriminatory legislation from the “ugly laws” of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which prohibited poor and disabled people from being in public, to the “autism registry” that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently proposed?
Christian Nationalists disguise bigotry as Christian goodwill by calling for personal charity over government assistance. They praise the so-called golden years when houses of worship ran hospitals and mental health facilities despite the reality of that “care” including rampant neglect, abuse and segregation of people with disabilities. The Trump administration’s attempt to make America great again by cutting back disability benefits would make America great only for ableists, returning us to the days when an estimated one million children with disabilities were denied access to public schools and another 3.5 million received inadequate or segregated services with little academic rigor or integration.
The nature versus supernatural debate
On the other side of the Christian Nationalist coin is the literal demonization of disability and difference. Fundamentalist and evangelical Christian leaders have long taught that disability is punishment for sin — or the embodiment of sin itself — rather than a natural variation in human genetics. The late televangelist Pat Robertson famously attributed illness and disability to demonic spirits. In 2017, he told a “700 Club” viewer with multiple sclerosis, “I do believe there is a spiritual component in MS, it’s like a demonic — it’s one of those things that you literally have to cast out.”
Bob Marshall, a Virginia politician and Christian Nationalist, made headlines in 2010 when he said at a press conference that children with disabilities are God’s “vengeance” against women for abortions. “The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children,” Marshall said.
Greg Locke, a Tennessee evangelical pastor and Christian Nationalist influencer, in a 2022 sermon claimed that obsessive-compulsive disorder and autism are signs of demonic possession: “Your kid could be ‘demonized’… your doctor calls it autism.” This messaging was echoed by other Christian Nationalist pastors including Rick Marrow, who claimed autism can be treated by exorcism: “I know a minister who has seen lots of kids that are autistic, that he cast that demon out, and they were healed, and then he had to pray and their brain was rewired and they were fixed.” Marrow was a member of his local public school board in Missouri when he gave that sermon.
Despite these opinions being heavily criticized by Christian theologians and disability advocates, belief in demon possession and divine punishment continues in Christian Nationalist communities and is easily incorporated as a tool to push the imperfect to the fringes of the public sphere.
Disabled and disenfranchised
The current Christian Nationalist strategy to disenfranchise people with disabilities is two-pronged: defund public education and dismantle social welfare programs. Early childhood and special education programs play a pivotal role in shaping employment prospects and job security for youth transitioning into adult services. Research shows a strong correlation between inclusive, well-supported education and improved employment outcomes later in life. Better outcomes for students with disabilities mean more adults with disabilities living and thriving in public spaces.
Public education is built on the principles of equality, accessibility and inclusion. The Department of Education, established in 1979, symbolizes our collective commitment to educational equity for all students. Christian Nationalism’s aim to reshape public education threatens these civil rights protections. Using voucher programs as a primary tool, lawmakers are actively diverting public funds to private, often religious schools that are exempt from federal anti-discrimination and civil rights laws. The result? Students with disabilities are denied admission and proper accommodations, or excluded entirely while public school districts are financially unable to provide the “free and appropriate” education mandated by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
The second step targets post-educational supports. Social welfare programs are vital to adults with disabilities and their families. These programs provide financial assistance, health care, access to job coaching, day programs and other resources that help people with disabilities live fulfilling and independent lives. Defunding these programs would significantly increase educational exclusion, economic disempowerment, housing instability and social marginalization.
Church-state separation protects civil rights
Church-state separation ensures that all people — whether they are religious or not, whether they are able-bodied or not, whether they are neurotypical or not — are treated the same. That means everyone has the promise of equal access to hospitals and medical care, public schools and government services — full civil rights regardless of their religious beliefs or the religious beliefs of others.
Protecting the constitutional promise of freedom without favor and equality without exception requires all of us acting together — educators, activists, parents and allies — to shine a light on the harsh ideological roots of white Christian Nationalism and expose the intent behind these legislative actions and the reality of what Trump and his allies making America “great” again really means.
“At the end of the day, church-state separation is about all of us being equal, being able to access government services equally, being able to access public schools equally, health care equally,” AU Vice President of Public Policy Alessandro Terenzoni said during a public education panel at the Summit for Religious Freedom in April. “It’s so obviously about civil rights.”
Amy Couch, AU’s director of digital communications, received a B.A. in Philosophy and Classics from the University of Tulsa, and a M.A. in Political Science from Fordham University. An ex-evangelical and conversion therapy survivor, Amy has spent her career advocating for church-state separation, disability rights and inclusion, and LGBTQIA+ equality. Amy lives with her wife and their four children — three of whom have disabilities — in Maryland.