As someone who has often felt like I didn’t quite fit, online spaces have allowed me to connect with people who seem to be a lot like me. Particularly, people who take their faith very seriously and have spent their lives asking existential questions that others don’t want to engage with as they try to figure out what it means to live a life committed to following the way of Jesus. Maybe that’s you too, and there’ll be things in here you can relate to. Maybe that’s totally foreign for you and this will be a glimpse into a different world.
Either way, when a writer1 I’d been following online connected her lifelong approach to faith with her recent autism diagnosis and identified God as her “special interest”, it led to some uncomfortable reflection for me. I thought I’d found my people but perhaps I didn’t belong here after all.
I messaged her: “I can relate to ALL of this… except I’m neurotypical.2”
Her response: “Well maybe I’ll ask you what my therapist asked me . . . What makes you so sure you’re neurotypical?”
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My earliest memories of faith are of trying to work out if people really believed what they said. The primary school I went to was Catholic, where we recited prayers to God and Mary, and classes on morality based on Bible stories were part of the curriculum. Most of my friends called themselves Catholic but didn’t attend church regularly. It was my impression that many of their families, along with the teachers, didn’t really take the religious education particularly seriously.3 Not like my family and the others at our Baptist church. We were Born Again. We had a ‘personal relationship’ with Jesus and were committed to following the moral imperatives found in the bible.
The summer I turned twelve I went to my first bible camp.4 This was a huge milestone for me in gaining a sense of self away from my family and school friends. It was also where I first came to understand that it was up to me to seek closeness with God, learn from the Bible and commit to following Jesus independent of my parents. I loved every second of this camp, and came home with a new sense of purpose.
Through my high school years, faith continued to be the central focus for me. I had a framework for how to live, confidence in my connection with God, and I was responsible for sharing what I knew with others. I’d been taught that committing to the Christian faith was the only way to avoid the eternal punishment we all deserved.5 How could I logically do anything other than give every part of my life to this mission?
In school, everybody outside my small group of Christian friends was someone I should be aiming to tell about Jesus in the hope they’d join the faith. Outside school, I attended all the church youth groups I could. The Baptists and Presbyterians, where I’d sit out all the games but loved learning how passages in the bible were God’s blueprint for us to follow. The Anglicans, where we learnt how to approach people on the street and tell them their souls were stained black with sin but Jesus wants to wash them clean.6 The Pentecostals, where I would feel overwhelmed with emotion as the worship band played and was convinced that the Holy Spirit would give me supernatural powers if I could only believe without any doubt.
I hear now about how hard high school can be socially and how many teenagers struggle with mental health challenges, but this is far from my experience. I had a group of people to belong to, who shared the same passion for the Christian faith that I did. With everything I learned, every heartfelt prayer and every part of my life I committed to God, I felt more confident in my identity as someone who was loved by God. Every moment and interaction in my life was imbued with meaning. I had purpose and direction and saw a life ahead dedicated to Christian ministry: sharing what I was learning and experiencing with people who didn’t yet know Jesus.
My parents were less enthusiastic about my zeal. I knew it was important to them that I identify as a Christian and they encouraged the youth group involvement, but they didn’t seem to understand how seriously I took it all. In fact, I was increasingly aware that while in youth groups we talked about being ready to sacrifice everything for Jesus to the point of literal martyrdom,7 the adults in our churches didn’t seem to be doing much of this. People within each church I bounced between were quick to criticise other denominations but questions that challenged their own practices, beliefs and priorities were swiftly shut down.8 True belonging in these churches seemed to be for those who would blindly follow a leader, and that didn’t make any sense to me. I would need to find ways to reconcile these different understandings and figure out what it really meant to follow Jesus for myself.
The path ahead was going to be lonelier than it had first seemed.
D. L. Mayfield has been been writing about being late-diagnosed autistic over the last year on her newsletter, God Is My Special Interest.
Neurotypical is defined as “showing patterns of thought and behaviour that are typical of most people”, as opposed to autistic, ADHD, or other different ways brains may function.
Please note that my childhood impression may have had little reflection on a reality! I’ve come across plenty of Catholics since then who take their faith Very Seriously.
I went to Scripture Union horse riding camps every summer for the rest of my school years, and they were my favourite place in the world. Will I encourage my kids to go to SU camps?That’s one to deliberate over another day…
Yeah, yikes. For a lot of Christians, particularly those that identify as ‘evangelical’, this belief is a non-negotiable. Is it any wonder asking difficult questions feel so dangerous?
We need to talk about Little Black Book evangelism. And yes, I did sit down with people outside the mall and preach to them, didn’t you?
We were just gagging for a chance to profess our faith at gunpoint like that girl at Columbine. Even thought that story was probably falsely reported. This Vox piece on the Christian martyrdom fantasy my generation inherited from our American evangelical counterparts is a great read.
Fowler’s Stages of Faith would suggest many adults find a permanent resting place in the ‘Synthetic-Conventional’ stage. "While beliefs and values are deeply felt, they typically are tacitly held . . . there has not been occasion to step outside them to reflect on or examine them explicitly or systematically."