The Impossible Subject: Belonging as a Neurodivergent in Congregations

Abstract

Neurodivergent people have been reported in academic literature to not always feel a sense of belonging within church congregations. Previous scholarship has highlighted that some neurodivergent people may be stigmatized and/or excluded within congregational settings. However little attention has been paid to how neurodivergent people belong within congregations, especially from a neurodivergent perspective. Using an autoethnographic methodology, I interrogate my own personal narrative of belonging within congregational spaces. I blended Goffman’s social stigma theory and Scambler’s theorization of social stigma to examine a neurodivergent experience within church congregations, and to explore the interface between being neurodivergent and feeling a sense of belonging in a church congregation. This autoethnography highlights how impression management (particularly passing and masking) are central to the feelings of belonging, and lack of belonging, I experienced. How church is “done” also appears to influence feelings of belonging, with norms in the churches mentioned in the narrative often shaped by normalcy.

Keywords:

• Belonging
• church
• congregation
• neurodiversity
• normalcy
• stigma

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the following individuals for helping show the “clutter and dust” of the narrative, and proofreading: Dr Naomi Lawson Jacobs, Fiona MacMillan, Holly Smith, Katrine Callendar.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Goffman (1963) refers to individuals without a stigma as “normals”. Given the main tenet of the neurodiversity paradigm is the inherent value of all brains and cognition (Walker, 2021), and how “normal” can be value laden to mean neurotypical by some scientists and researchers within autism studies, “individuals without a stigma” or “individuals who are not stigmatised” will be used in lieu.

2 Discreditable identity: an identity that is socially devalued and concealable from, or made invisible to others

3 Sociologists may argue that they are less interested in stigma when the stigmatised individual is not aware of it (Goffman, 1963, p. 93). However in relation to my story, I would argue I was always stigmatised – not necessarily as Autistic – but as “weird”, “odd”, “shy” or “strange”. I would therefore posit that in the case of people who are neurodivergent from birth, the stories pre-identification remain relevant to social stigma theory.