They knew that they were an unlikely pair, and they knew that their work would, if nothing else, intrigue.
Laurent Clerc was a deaf, French, Catholic man1. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was a hearing, American, Protestant man. Together, in 1817, they launched the first permanent school for deaf people in North America: the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons in Hartford, Connecticut2. A few years later, the school became the first recipient of state aid for education in the nation. After Laurent Clerc petitioned the United States Congress and President James Monroe, the school became the first recipient of federal aid for what would later be called “special education.” The word “American” soon replaced the word “Connecticut” in the school’s name—an emblem of its role in training deaf teachers and planting deaf schools throughout the young republic. Clerc and Gallaudet’s work attracted so much interest in part because it challenged two notions that were widespread at the time. First, it challenged the notion that deaf people did not possess the same intellectual capacities as hearing people did. Second, by using sign language instead of spoken English as the primary language of their school, Clerc and Gallaudet also challenged the notion that spoken language was preferable to sign language as a medium for communication.3 In these two matters, the unlikely pair was eager to intrigue, even to provoke. But not on the matter of religion.
There was certainly nothing controversial about Gallaudet’s religious identity, from the perspective of the New England elite. Educated at Yale University and the newly founded Andover Theological Seminary, he had trained to be a Congregationalist minister—that is, a minister in the denomination that remained the official state religion of Connecticut until 1818. Gallaudet’s theological studies at both Yale and Andover were informed by the New Divinity tradition, adapting the staid Calvinism of previous Puritan generations both to the revival movements spreading across the nation and to more liberal, humanist concepts of human nature and agency. In Gallaudet’s hands, deaf education was, first and foremost, a Christian mission. For example, in one of his stock sermons, Gallaudet portrayed deaf people as “other heathen” for whom he “craved a cup of consolation…from the same fountain at which the Hindoo, the African, and the Savage is beginning to draw the water of eternal life.”4 As evidenced by this sermon and Gallaudet’s many other writings for religious organizations, deaf Christian practice in the early nineteenth-century United States took shape under the shadow of “the benevolent empire”: deaf people were to be converted into virtuous citizenship, their religious lives paternalistically molded into the likeness of devout white Protestants like Gallaudet.5
However, the Catholic identity of the school’s foreign co-founder, Laurent Clerc, presented a thorny issue. Throughout his career, Clerc subtly reminded his American audiences that he was Catholic and that American deaf education, including its religious dimension, was indebted to French Catholicism.6 Predictably, Protestant-Catholic tensions occasionally surfaced at and around the American Asylum. It seems, though, that Gallaudet managed these tensions well, delicately convincing the press, donors, and students’ families that “papism” did not influence the school’s religious instruction.7 So, there would be no religious controversy—not if Gallaudet could help it.
This article argues that he could not help it. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the use of sign language in religious settings—first in schools, then at revivals, and eventually in churches—generated provocations in religious thought and innovations in religious practice, which thrilled some hearing Protestant onlookers while disturbing others. These provocations and innovations, I propose, warrant conceiving of “Deaf Christianity” as a distinct, incipient religious tradition in the United States, birthed with the rise of deaf education in 1817 and imperiled with the ascent of pure oralism by the end of the century.8 Over the course of the nineteenth century, Deaf Christianity became increasingly shaped by at least three characteristics: first, an understanding of revelation and signification that was consonant both with revivalism and with emerging strands of theological liberalism; second, catholicity, by which I mean both an ecumenical ethos and a multi-faceted adjacency to Catholicism; and third, an emphasis on embodying faith, more so than on articulating faith. Each of these characteristics, in various ways, would facilitate a theological affirmation of the bodily difference of deafness. From its beginning, this religious tradition in the making was a source of concern for some hearing Protestants, who were nervous about what might happen when divine revelation does not stay put in ink on a page or in voices dutifully conveying that ink in speech. What might happen when revelation emanates from disabled bodies in motion?
To better understand Deaf Christianity and hearing Protestants’ anxieties about it in the nineteenth century, I have borrowed a framework that Sarah Rivett calls “unscripting.” In her study of early American missionaries and their biblical translation projects, Rivett shows how the analytical categories of missionaries “failed to account for the data accrued through the language encounter.” Indigenous languages and speakers, Rivett continues, “resisted the colonial scripts imposed on them and forced missionaries to confront the realities of multiple cosmologies and of language as a human construct . . .. The untranslatable aspects of indigenous languages have a disruptive impact on universal truths of either Scripture or Enlightened taxonomies.”9 Rivett aims to capture this disruptive impact with her term “unscripting.” This article explores how deaf people, through their use of sign language, resisted dominant religious scripts and embodied their own, in the process compelling people outside of deaf communities to engage their religious worlds. That engagement, I argue, left its mark. The impact of the sign language encounter for American religion was both disruptive and generative.
To flesh out this argument, I present three case studies that illustrate both the previously mentioned characteristics of nineteenth-century Deaf Christianity and the threats, theological and political, that these three characteristics posed to some hearing Protestants.10 First, we will analyze the earliest theological controversy over religious instruction in deaf schools, which sprouted in the 1820s. Second, we will visit a camp meeting where a deaf man preached in 1859. Lastly, we will observe the rise of deaf missions and churches in the second half of the nineteenth century. Together, these case studies illuminate an under-utilized approach in the study of disability and religion. Let us begin by returning to Gallaudet’s stock sermon to better grasp why some hearing Protestants felt threatened by the religious lives of deaf people.
“For it is a most singular trait of the language of gestures and signs,” Gallaudet declared, “that it is sufficiently significant and copious to admit of an application even to the most abstract, intellectual, moral, and religious truth.”11 Explaining this “singular trait” of sign language to a hearing audience required some theorizing on semiotics: “there is no more intrinsic or necessary connexion between ideas of whatever kind, and audible or written language, than between the same ideas, and the language of signs and gestures.” Moreover, Gallaudet wrote that the latter had an “advantage over the former, inasmuch as it possesses a power of analogical and symbolical description which can never belong to any combination of purely arbitrary sounds and letters.”12 With these lines, Gallaudet built on John Locke’s insights about the arbitrariness of signification and thus the inherent messiness of language—of verbal languages, at least. Less messy are sign languages, Gallaudet claimed (perhaps borrowing from one or more deaf thinkers): the bodily movements that constitute sign languages often have a more intuitive and even “natural” connection to the ideas they signify, more so than alphabets and the words constructed with them.13 Furthermore, this is so even when the ideas signified pertain to “the most abstract, intellectual, moral, and religious truth.”14 Even in such realms, sign language has an “advantage.” Thus, Gallaudet could preach with confidence that “intellectual and religious truth may be taught [to deaf people] by the language of signs, and even before they are capable of reading and understanding ours.”15
In other publications, Gallaudet more explicitly speculated that sign language may be more appropriate for religious expression than is spoken language. In the Annals of Education, in a lengthy account of leading a deaf student to conversion, Gallaudet testified, “I offered a short prayer in that expressive language of signs and gestures, which, to the deaf and dumb, is fully as significant, for all the purposes of devotion, as speech is to us. I have often thought that it is more so. For it is the language of feeling, deep and strong, and of picturesque thought.”16 Around the time that Gallaudet wrote those words, deaf poet John Burnet more boldly elevated this “language of feeling” in his account of prayer during a deaf school’s chapel service. In Burnet’s poem “Emma,” words restrict, while signs radiate; words obstruct, while signs unite; words shroud, while signs shine.
The feelings that burn deep in [the minister’s] own breast
Ask not the aid of words to touch the rest;
But from his speaking limbs, and changing face,—
In all the thousand forms of motion’s grace,
Mind emanates, in coruscations, fraught
With all the thousand varied shades of thought.
Not in a cloak of words obscur’d, confined—
Here free conceptions flash from mind to mind,
Where’er they fall their own bright hues impart,—
And glow—reflected back—from ev’ry heart!17
Though Gallaudet was less emphatic than Burnet in suggesting that sign language was a better avenue for religious devotion than was English, the policies of the American Asylum effectively implemented this conviction. Like many other deaf schools in the early nineteenth century, teachers at the American Asylum used both “methodical signs” (a system for signing an orally-spoken language, such as English or French, mirroring its grammar and syntax) and “natural signs” (what we today would call a signed language such as American Sign Language). Under Clerc and Gallaudet’s leadership, most classroom instruction occurred in methodical signs, but students learned religion through natural signs.18 Moreover, as Gallaudet shared, students learned religion and underwent conversion through sign language “even before they are capable of reading and understanding ours.”
Which raised the question: Do deaf people even need to understand English, the language of the scriptures for American Christians, in order to receive religious truth and be saved? While Gallaudet’s sermons vehemently affirmed the importance of teaching students to read and write in English as well as the importance of written revelation in general, the necessity of written revelation for the salvation of deaf people was never clearly established in his work. Meanwhile, a whole host of theological questions could surface if the distinctly embodied medium of sign language was understood as equal to or even privileged over the traditional media of written and orally-spoken language for the purposes of conveying religious truth.
Some of Gallaudet’s observers noticed such questions surfacing, and they went out of their way to raise them. They did so, however, from a decidedly more familiar angle. Specifically, some observers placed those questions in the context of a longstanding theological debate over what they called “natural religion.” Associated with Deism in the early nineteenth century, the term “natural religion” referred to the idea that the essence of “true religion” could be derived solely from rational observation of the natural world, and thus there was no need for a supernatural revelation (“revealed religion”) in the form of scripture.19 Many of Gallaudet’s readers and funders detested this idea, and some of them feared that his work with deaf students could open the door to it. So, they rushed in and insisted that, on the contrary, Gallaudet’s work and the experiences of deaf people actually debunked natural religion.
In a review of Gallaudet’s stock sermon in 1825, the Christian Advocate, a Philadelphia-based Presbyterian paper, asked “whether the Deaf and Dumb have any distinct notions of a Supreme Being, before those notions are communicated to them, by the happy means of instruction lately devised.”20 The article introduced this question as a means of settling another question: “whether, without revelation, the knowledge of the being and attributes of God could ever have been possessed by mankind.”21 After relaying a dozen or so case studies with quotations from deaf people, the article stated that they “can know nothing of their Creator and Redeemer, nor of the life to come, while they remain uneducated,” but so long as deaf people were taught “to read the holy scriptures, they will of course understand the fundamental principles of revealed religion.”22 Note the slippage: the article began with “the happy means of instruction lately devised”—referring to sign language—but then ended with reading the scriptures to understand revealed religion. Certainly, Gallaudet’s students learned to read the scriptures, but that was neither the first nor the main medium by which they received their religious education and had religious experiences.
The Christian Advocate returned to the matter a year later in an article titled “The Deaf and Dumb Entirely Destitute of the Knowledge of God.” This article reasserted the value of using deaf people “as a means of solving the problem of whether the idea of God is innate; or whether the human mind will attain it independently of revelation.” The usefulness of deaf people here lay in the fact that they “are the only beings with whom we can have any communication, who are entirely cut off from the stream of traditionary revelation.”23 With additional case studies, the article stated that many “intelligent deaf and dumb persons have been found utterly ignorant on this subject, and after acquiring a knowledge of written language and of religious truth, have stated explicitly that they had previously no conceptions of a God.”24 Notably, the article emphasized written language, mirroring the previous article’s emphasis on learning to read the scriptures. This was in spite of the fact that Gallaudet’s sermon, cited at the beginning of the article, plainly declared that his deaf students can and do acquire religious truth before they know English—not because “the idea of God is innate,” as the Christian Advocate repeatedly discussed, but because of how sign language, and how signification, works. The article ended by affirming that “just and adequate conceptions of the Deity are derived from revelation only.”25 But “revelation” was never defined. It seems that readers were meant to assume that the term denoted the Christian scriptures in written form, notwithstanding Gallaudet’s numerous gestures beyond that form (and notwithstanding deaf accounts of religious experiences that “ask not the aid of words.”)26
The Christian Advocate was one of several religious periodicals to place the issue of deaf people and their language in the context of debates over natural religion. In 1836, the New Haven-based Religious Intelligencer and the New York Evangelist published pieces insisting that if deaf people are shown to be utterly lacking in religious knowledge prior to their education, then “the pretences of infidels to sustain such a thing as Natural Religion without Revelation will be so far demonstrated false, that none will be at all entangled with them, but through the most wilful perverseness.”27 By situating deaf people in the context of a well-worn anti-Deist project, these religious periodicals avoided discussing other theological provocations that could have easily arisen from reflection on the slippage in their discourse over what “revelation” means.
Again: What happens when revelation does not stay put in ink on a page? What happens when disabled bodies in motion—what John Burnet called “the thousand forms of motion’s grace”—are imagined as the most fitting conduits of divine messages?28 Most hearing Protestants who were paying attention preferred to ask, “Do deaf people need revelation in order to be saved?” “Yes,” they immediately answered, without lingering on the question of what revelation was to deaf people or how this more expansive concept of revelation might disrupt their own.
Some of Gallaudet’s observers were less threatened by the potential for religious innovation. Both the Christian Watchman in Boston and the New-York Observer celebrated the discovery that deaf people could encounter revelation through sign language before they could understand the written word. The New York-Observer compared it to the Day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus’s disciples and they “began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”29 Given that this biblical story in the Book of Acts marks the dawn of the Christian church, the comparison conveys, at the very least, momentousness. That said, such comparisons (common in revivalist circles) need not be celebratory. After all, the tongues of Pentecost, glossolalia, are unpredictable. Where might these bodies in motion be leading?
Consider a camp meeting in 1859, about twenty miles east of the American Asylum in Hartford. In an article titled “The Experience of the Dumb Man” for the Christian Recorder (the chief periodical of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the largest African American denomination), an anonymous author testified about “a silent sermon” at this camp meeting.30 Though silent, “it was one of the most eloquent and affecting discourses upon the atonement that I ever heard.” The italics are original to the article. Of course, the author knows that he did not hear the sermon preached by this deaf man. Through the italics, the author signals to his readers that language of hearing, though inaccurate, is the only way he knows how to describe a sermon that uses neither oral nor written language. Through the italics, the author admits that the language he has inherited cannot do justice to the religious experience he is about to narrate.
“First, the dumb man described his condition before he found a Saviour. He pointed to the ground, and represented himself as lying upon it and covered with dust. He had been an intemperate man, and he showed us, more significantly than if he had spoken, into how sad a condition his habit had brought him.” More significantly than if he had spoken. Years earlier, Gallaudet had posited that a sinner’s prayer signed was more “significant, for all the purposes of devotion” than a sinner’s prayer spoken; at this camp meeting, a sinner’s testimony signed is more significant than a sinner’s testimony orally-spoken.
“Now he painted Gethsemane and Calvary; the prayers, the tears, the agony of Jesus. He touched the places of the nails in His blessed hands and feet, of the spear in His side. He showed how His sacred head was crowned with thorns, while the blood trickled down His hallowed face.” Painted, touched, showed—now the narrator is finding language beyond hearing. Then the deaf man “stood still before the silent multitudes with his hands outstretched like one nailed to a cross. It was the cross itself preaching.” The deaf man signifies to the multitudes (now they are the silent ones), but his signs seem to transcend signification, seem to transform the mediated into the immediate. It was the cross itself preaching.
“He then turned his eye as looking intently upon the one hanging upon the cross. He lifted towards the cross his right hand and then brought it down upon his heart with an indescribable look of loving trust.” Indescribable—the word means more now. “It was as if he said aloud, but how much more impressively, ‘He died for me!’ What a shout broke from the lips of that congregation as they saw before their eyes, in that wonderful vision, the dying Saviour, and the despairing sinner brought together. How the peace that followed that union shone upon the dumb man’s face. The prostrate sinner was raised up. A pure robe was placed upon him. His heart gushed with overflowing love, and he lifted his hands and eyes to heaven in adoring praise, while the people, overwhelmed by this unheard, but felt, experience, shouted for joy.”
Through sign, the sinner and the Saviour are brought together in one body, a living body in motion, mere footsteps away. Through sign, the gospel is not read on a page or heard in a voice, but “seen and felt.” Through sign, Christianity not only changes script, but goes off script. This is Deaf Christianity: going off script and onto bodies.
Did the author of this Christian Recorder article leave the camp meeting with anything besides “He died for me”? Yes, according to his final paragraph, which moved from narration to exhortation. What he saw at the camp meeting, besides “the dying Saviour,” was “how much more powerful in their impression acts are than words.” His testimony concluded: “If we are the disciples of Jesus, others will know it, even if we do not tell them. We shall become like him; our words and tempers and acts of love be like his, and others will take knowledge of us that we have been with Jesus. How touching to think that our daily lives may become mute but eloquent preachers of the Gospel.” In this conclusion, “actions speak louder than words” became not merely an adage, but a theological precept. The hearing spectator learned from the deaf preacher that doing what Jesus did takes precedence over hearing what Jesus said or believing what Jesus taught. As the next section will show, other deaf Christians offered this lesson more explicitly in the late nineteenth century.
When bodies themselves are imagined to be “eloquent preachers of the Gospel,” and when bodies themselves become sites of divine revelation, then bodies, in their particularity, are infused with theological weight. Even as Christian theological traditions of sin and depravity endure, bodies and their differences can be distinctly affirmed, redeemed, esteemed. In the words of Laurent Clerc, addressing the Connecticut Legislature in 1818, “Every creature, every work of God, is admirably well made; but if any one appears imperfect in our eyes, it does not belong to us to criticize it.” Deafness specifically, Clerc declared, “proceeds from an act of Providence,” which means that deaf people are not “worse than other men,” and “we therefore cannot but thank God for having made us Deaf and Dumb.”31 Such theological affirmations of deafness planted seeds that would struggle to grow amid the weeds of hearing prejudices.32 While many deaf Christians were taught to treat deafness as a tragic consequence of human sinfulness, some managed to find those seeds, nurture them, and plant their own. For example, the deaf writer Laura Redden Searing, in response to a deaf student’s wish that “Christ would come on earth and put His fingers into my ears” to make him hear, shared that “I have learned to know very certainly that God makes no mistakes” [italics original].33
But again, it is an unpredictable Pentecost. Whatever form it takes, Deaf Christianity inaugurates a glossolalia beyond tongues. Who knows what these bodies in motion might signify? The question excited some and unsettled others.
Apart from deaf preachers, even deaf onlookers posed a threat to nineteenth-century revivals. Unlike the hearing narrator above, who rejoiced in what felt like an immediate religious encounter (“the cross itself”), many deaf people who attended revivals left them conspicuously underwhelmed. Often, no one took the time to explain to them what was being said, but even those deaf attendees who had access to an interpretation might very well remain unmoved. As Sari Altschuler has argued, the centrality of speech and hearing to the gospel of nineteenth-century evangelists led to “structural and rhetorical incompatibilities between the Deaf community and American revivalism.”34 Proclamation, confession, conversion, salvation—these were oral and aural phenomena, and they were imagined to be seamless transmissions, unmediated miracles. But deaf people, in Altschuler’s telling, called attention to the constructed and mediated nature of spoken language. The deaf haunted the hearing by showing them that all of their words—even their most sacred, even “the cross itself”—were still, in the end, signs.35
Intentionally or not, Christians who used sign language conveyed a philosophy of signification and a theology of revelation that were consonant with emerging strands of theological liberalism: acknowledging the necessity and embracing the beauty of human mediation in religion. In fact, Gallaudet’s work with deaf people might have influenced a key figure in the history of Protestant liberal theology: Horace Bushnell. The two were friends, both living in Hartford. In the famous introductory essay to his 1849 treatise God in Christ, Bushnell advanced the then-quite-incendiary claim that all language of thought and spirit is figurative—it signifies, it is a sign. This claim variously undergirded Bushnell’s influential challenges to prevalent understandings of trinitarianism, Christ’s atonement, and more. The connection between these two religious leaders and the possibility that the American Asylum shaped Bushnell’s thought is a topic for further research. For now, I will just note that Mary Bushnell Cheney, Horace Bushnell’s daughter, wrote in her biography of her father that he “really exaggerated a difficulty of hearing…speaking of himself as ‘deaf’ long before there was any real obstruction to his pleasure in social intercourse.”36 Given this anecdote, and given that Bushnell’s theology could be described as a theology of signs, it would be unsurprising to learn that the religious lives of deaf people were a source of theological inspiration for him—and, as a result, for American religion in the nineteenth century and beyond.
To say that deaf people posed a threat to nineteenth-century revivalism is to say that they posed both a religious and a political threat. Revivals served not only to convert the sinner, but also to Americanize the foreigner, and many deaf people rejected both conversion and Americanization. In some cases, that rejection took a more radical form, such as John Flournoy’s deaf nationalist movement in the 1850s.37 More commonly, simply embracing sign language over and against spoken English constituted a rejection of Americanization, a foreigner’s threat. As many historians and disability studies scholars have discussed, deaf Americans effectively became foreigners because of their language in the second half of the nineteenth century, given cultural waves of Protestant nationalism and xenophobia—waves that the ascendant oralist movement was riding.38 What scholars have not discussed is how an emerging Deaf Christianity was also becoming, as some hearing Protestants saw it, a foreign religion.
We catch a whiff of this perspective in the writing of Samuel Gridley Howe, a leading abolitionist and educational reformer who later founded the Perkins School for the Blind. In an 1866 report that aimed to persuade the Massachusetts state legislature to sponsor an oralist school for deaf students, Howe censured the Deaf Mute Christian Association of Boston, deeming it an affront to “sound sociological principles”, charging that it fostered the segregation of deaf people and “their formation into a special class.” Howe lamented: “If our mutes…had been taught articulation…they might attend public worship in our churches; they all would partake of the common spirit of religious devotion.”39 As Howe saw it, “our mutes” were developing, or were at risk of developing, an alternative devotion.
A published defense of Boston’s Deaf Mute Christian Association suggested that Howe may not have been far off the mark. Collins Stone, the principal of the American Asylum in Hartford at the time, countered Howe’s attacks on sign language and adamantly supported the Boston group’s “wish to enjoy intelligible social religious worship.” Stone continued, “What evils can arise from such an assembly, to which a company of French or Italian citizens gathered for a similar purpose, would not be exposed, it is not easy to see.”40 Though a Protestant leader of a Protestant enterprise, Stone compared this Deaf Christian community to “a company of French or Italian citizens”—presumably Catholic company. Like those citizens, deaf Americans formed a linguistic minority, but it also seemed like they might be forming a religious minority.
This religious minority was not a matter of denominational affiliation. Most Deaf Christian groups in the late nineteenth century were organized through the Episcopal Church.41 This was in large part thanks to one of Gallaudet’s sons, also named Thomas, who was an Episcopal priest. In 1852, immediately following his ordination, he founded the first independent church for deaf people in the United States: St. Ann’s Church in New York City. In the words of historian Jannelle Legg, St. Ann’s was “the social welfare and cultural center of the New York deaf community during the second half of the nineteenth century.”42 Within a decade of the church’s inception, Rev. Gallaudet was dedicating an enormous amount of time to launching deaf missions throughout the nation. By 1880, the Episcopal Church had facilitated weekly religious services in five other cities besides New York (Baltimore, MD; Boston, MA; Philadelphia, PA; Allentown, NY; and Rochester, NY), biweekly or monthly religious services in six other cities (Newark, NJ; Albany, NY; Buffalo, NY; Troy, NY; Cincinnati, OH; and St. Louis, MO), and more intermittent religious services in at least 66 cities and towns across 16 of the nation’s 38 states. When counting sites where a single service was held, the Episcopal Church conducted deaf missions in 32 U.S. states as well as in Canada.43
Meanwhile, Rev. Henry Winter Syle became the first deaf minister ordained in North America, also through the Episcopal Church.44 Born to missionaries in Shanghai in 1846, Syle contracted scarlet fever and became deaf at six years old. Despite suffering from chronic illness throughout his life, he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Yale (the first deaf American to earn a college degree from an institution other than the National Deaf Mute College [now Gallaudet University]in Washington, D.C.) and worked in the melting and refining department of the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. Shortly after arriving in the city, he became a leader in the local deaf mission that Rev. Thomas Gallaudet had organized. Syle was ordained as a deacon in 1876 and as a priest in 1883. Within the next five years, he organized All Souls’ Church for the deaf in Philadelphia and pioneered the first deaf religious periodical. Initially, the periodical was called The Silent Catholic, but “misunderstandings” about the name led to an immediate change to The Silent Missionary.45
As indicated by these misunderstandings as well as by Collins Stone’s comparison of deaf Christians to French and Italian citizens, this emerging movement of Deaf Christianity seemed to be distinctly marked by Catholicism—and not just because of the French Catholic origins of American deaf education.46 One likely reason for this was the outsized role of the Episcopal Church, which more closely resembled Catholicism than did many other Protestant traditions (in part due to the influence of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England during the nineteenth century). There are, however, at least two other reasons. First, many deaf people in this period, religious and otherwise, were deeply invested in erecting a public monument to Laurent Clerc. The very first issue of The Silent World, one of the first deaf periodicals in the United States, announced that associations dedicated to erecting this monument had been forming all over the nation since Clerc’s death in 1869. Two years later, these associations elected an organizing committee, the National Clerc Memorial Union, with Rev. Henry Winter Syle serving as secretary. By 1874, deaf Americans had collected nearly $4,000 to cover the cost of an 11.5-foot bronze bust of Clerc, located at the American Asylum in Hartford and bearing the inscription “The Apostle to the Deaf Mutes of the New World”—a term bestowed on Clerc by his superior, the Abbé Sicard, before he set sail with Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet to the United States. Though Clerc had been Gallaudet’s co-laborer, this foreign Catholic was not necessarily an apostle of “the benevolent empire” of American Protestantism.47
As a second reason why Deaf Christianity was distinctly marked by Catholicism, deaf Catholics and deaf Protestants were often part of the same religious bodies. While this may have been motivated by an ecumenical spirit in some cases, in most cases this was a result of a pragmatic spirit: the deaf population and its resources were small enough that maintaining more than one congregation in any given city was usually not viable. Moreover, according to Rev. Syle, because deaf people came from all manner of religious backgrounds, and because their family members often “view with a jealous eye any appearance of drawing [deaf family members] within another fold,” it was prudent for deaf ministers to confine their preaching to “fundamental truths” of God, sin, salvation, and devotion that transcended denominational particularity.48 As the Washington Post observed while reporting on the Episcopal Church’s deaf mission in the capital, “questions of doctrinal preference rarely trouble” deaf people.49 While some hearing Protestants framed ecumenism of this sort as a diabolical threat to orthodoxy, others praised deaf Christians on their more open posture. At the Episcopal Church’s sixth conference on deaf missions in 1889, for example, Bishop Henry Codman Potter of New York City lauded their work as “a strong illustration of the catholicity of the Church.”50
Perhaps more so than catholicity (i.e., ecumenism), though, this religious tradition in the making was characterized by its emphasis on embodying, rather than articulating, Christianity. One of the most prominent theological themes in deaf religious discourse from this period was the virtue of a silently embodied faith. Even the walls of deaf churches proclaimed this theme: the biblical verse “Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only” was emblazoned in the sanctuary of St. Ann’s Church.51 Religious articles in The Silent World frequently testified to the virtue and power of silence—a power that was manifested in “the greatest and best works of God” as well as manifested in the lives of deaf people, who could “be a greater blessing to the world” precisely because of this power.52 Sign language, too, was a singularly “blessed language,” with one author making a creative argument that sign language was present on “the unlucky day at Babel,” as narrated in Genesis 11.53 Though few deaf clergymen would have offered the same biblical interpretation, many of them seemed to agree that faithfulness in deed ultimately mattered more than faithfulness in word.
As a case in point, at an annual conference of deaf Christians in 1889, one of the items on the agenda for delegates to discuss was the lack of uniformity in the signing of scriptures and liturgies in church services. The Lord’s Prayer, for example, looked different in different communities. Apparently, half of the delegates at the conference did not see this lack of uniformity as a problem to be solved. Sign language is flexible, argued the deaf minister leading the discussion, Rev. A. T. Colt.54 That flexibility, he and others believed, was simply part of deaf religious life.
Again: Where might these disabled bodies in motion be leading? What all might this glossolalia beyond tongues come to signify?
Not long after these questions surfaced, those who were formulating answers came under attack. In the late nineteenth century and for more than half of the twentieth, Deaf culture was decimated by the oralist movement. Along with many white Protestants of the day, pure oralists deemed cultural, linguistic, and religious difference, whether hearing or deaf, to be a threat. Judging by the pure oralist Samuel Gridley Howe’s censure of deaf Christians for refusing “the common spirit of religious devotion,” the religious anxieties of hearing Protestant leaders reinforced the rise of oralism. Those anxieties, I argue, were fueled in part by what we could call, following Sarah Rivett, the unscripting of hearing Christianity: the theologically and epistemologically disruptive impact of a religion of signs. In the late nineteenth century, then, a nascent Deaf Christianity—with its unique and generative understanding of revelation, its multi-faceted adjacency to Catholicism, its ecumenical approach, and its prioritization of the embodiment of faith—became imperiled. The desired replacement for this rich, budding tradition? An utterly rote orthodoxy.
Oralism in the religious realm was not as successful as its proponents hoped, however. Even as oral methods of communication became much more prominent in the classrooms of deaf schools in the late nineteenth century and beyond, those methods did not flourish to the same extent in school chapels, where religious services “consistently promoted sign language” and “ultimately provided a link between Deaf students and the broader Deaf world,” as Susan Burch has discerned. Beyond the schools, Deaf churches were “an invaluable place of cultural sanctuary” and “a safe haven from oralism’s influence,” where sign language was preserved and transmitted.55 While Tracy Ann Morse and a few others have written about the role of churches in safeguarding sign language at the turn of the century, more research is needed on how Deaf Christianity and its distinctive characteristics fared throughout the oralist era.56 In addition, although the Episcopal Church practically dominated deaf missions in the nineteenth century, more research is needed on how other religious groups related to deaf people and interpreted deafness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.57
In the meantime, this article serves as an example of a line of inquiry that deserves more attention within disability studies and religious studies.58 At the intersection of these two fields, many scholars have skillfully explored how religion has shaped the experiences of disabled people and how religion has contributed to the construction of disability. The inverse exploration is much less common: How have disabled people—in variously engaging religious claims, unsettling religious norms, charting new religious paths—shaped religious experiences and contributed to the construction of religion, within and beyond their communities?59 This article reveals one possible destination for this line of inquiry. Its author hopes that future scholarship will reveal many more.