Scratch beneath the surface, and eugenic logic flows deep and wide. It is one thing to be moved by pity and engage in charity, or even to be moved by justice and seek to dismantle structural barriers that impede disabled people from flourishing. But it is quite another thing to imagine . . . how and why we might “conserve” disability against the possibility of a curative future.
The very characteristics that disabled people value about their embodiment are targeted as bodily states that will be ‘fixed’ in the resurrection. If the Kingdom of God is a place that eradicates disability, however, it may also eradicate our hard-won disability pride.
This Christmas season, what might it mean to live into the promise of hope fulfilled, when our pandemic experience means that hope strains against lost lives and lost livelihoods? Perhaps it involves visioning a redemption—one built on the social and economic implications of Jeremiah’s vision of those redeemed.