“The whole world had only one language, and everyone spoke it.” So begins the story of the Tower of Babel. This story, found in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, is often interpreted to show multilingualism as a punishment doled out by God. Humans get too puffed up with pride and attempt to build a city, marked by a tall tower, where they can make a name for themselves. In response, God knocks them down a peg by scattering people across the land and confusing their speech. 

This isn’t the only way to read the story, though. Some biblical scholars argue that humanity’s real sin at Babel was forcing migration to a single location where everyone spoke the same language. This homogenization prevented them from “filling the earth,” as God first told Adam and Eve to do, with distinct cultures and speech. Babylon aspired to a homogenized humanity, unified “around an imperial dream of elevating one city’s name into the heavens.” In contrast, God’s dream was to see humans multiply into diverse languages and cultures.

Speaking about God is a paradox: human language can never fully capture the ineffable in words, and yet language is one of the best tools we have for approaching and apprehending the divine. Words are at the heart of most religious rituals, from prayer and reading to scriptural interpretation and teaching.

Judaeo-Christian traditions see linguistic diversity as a way to speak more faithfully about a God who exists beyond language. In Judaism, the rabbinic midrash approach to scripture encourages alternative and creative interpretations. Christianity came into being in a multi-lingual environment that included Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, among others. But for the most part, this reverence for creative ways of speaking about God hasn’t included neurodiversity. How does a neurodiverse approach to language offer fresh ways of interpreting religious texts and metaphors? And how might it help religious communities communicate more faithfully about God?

Rocks and Gates and Sheep

How we speak about God shapes how we think about God. How we think about God shapes our view of ourselves, others, and the world. Researchers estimate that 15-20 percent of the global population is neurodivergent, and many forms of neurodivergence—from dyslexia to autism—impact the way people process language. Yet research into the neurodiverse experience of religious language is scant. 

To fill this gap, a team of scientists and theologians are collaborating to investigate linguistic (neuro)diversity within Jewish and Christian traditions. By studying how minority speakers approach religious language, the team hopes to reveal the role that linguistic diversity plays in the life of faith.

Joanna Leidenhag, a theologian, is the project leader, and her research focuses on how neurodiverse Christians respond to religious metaphors. “Metaphor informs how we think,” Leidenhag says. Image-laden speech helps humans grasp and understand complex ideas; it brings abstract concepts down to earth. “Metaphors typically take things that are more ordinary and embodied—like rocks and gates and sheep—to help make what seem like complicated concepts more immediate and real and concrete in our lives.” 

Most people think in metaphor, too. Rather than translating something literal into something figurative using a two-step process, the brain jumps straight to metaphor. But this isn’t exactly the same for everyone. Specifically for people with autism, the way neurotypical people intuitively interpret metaphors can confuse rather than clarify. 

“Broadly speaking, neurodivergent people tend to disprefer the use of non-literal, figurative language,” says Napoleon Katsos, a professor of linguistics and autism researcher. “In research in our lab, we have seen that autistic people rate the aptness of metaphorical language systematically lower than their neurotypical peers.” 

This matters particularly in religious communities, which are rich with metaphors that hold deep spiritual meaning. These religious metaphors aren’t always straightforward; take the Gospel of John, which refers to Jesus both as a gate that sheep go through and a shepherd to the sheep. For people who are neurodiverse, metaphors like these can be a stumbling block.

“Spiritual language often uses figurative, analogical, and allegorical language,” Katsos adds. This kind of language is designed to express complex truths and allow humans to move closer to capturing the ineffable in words. “However, we now know that humans differ substantially in our ability, propensity, and appreciation of figurative language.”

Katsos emphasizes the importance of using a neurodiversity-conscious approach in research—something linguistic studies have historically lacked. For example, a traditional study might offer participants the metaphor, “John was a volcano.” The “correct” interpretation (selected by neurotypical researchers) would be that John felt angry. But this approach excludes alternative, and potentially more imaginative, understandings. An autistic participant might understand the metaphor as indicating John’s creative state. “John was a volcano” could also mean that he was exploding with ideas.

Studies that approach neurodiversity with this perspective will generate more comprehensive and illuminating results. While research on neurodiverse language processing is ongoing, scientists have identified certain patterns. People with autism, Katsos says, tend to produce “more creative, unusual, and unconventional understandings of abstract and of figurative language.” Someone who is neurotypical may arrive at a single interpretation when confronted with a metaphor. A neurodiverse person might generate two or three or five possible interpretations. Or they might come up with a single, but more unusual, response. 

Psychologist Hannah Nash adds, “Some studies have shown that when you compare autistic adults to neurotypical adults matched for general language ability, instead of finding they have difficulty understanding metaphors, you find they generate more interpretations and that these are judged to be more creative.” These studies move beyond a traditional “deficit approach” by assuming that neurodiverse interpretations are rooted in differences, not difficulties.

A Midrashic Approach

All Abrahamic faiths wrestle with scripture. Judaism, in particular, values subverting and expanding scriptural interpretations to get closer to an infinite subject. One way it does this is through midrash. 

The word “midrash” refers to both a genre of rabbinic literature written between the third and fifth centuries and a method of scriptural interpretation. A midrashic approach to scripture is one that generates alternative readings. “In most everyday contexts, people would want to reduce ambiguity and get it down to one most likely understanding,” says Daniel Weiss, Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Cambridge. Not so in midrash. 

The rabbinic authors who created the genre would approach a text and come up with a standard reading. Then, they’d generate an alternative reading, then another, continuing to expand the textual possibilities. Or, they might arrive at new meanings by playing with punctuation. Because the original Hebrew text contains no punctuation, one can make use of this ambiguity to shift the phrase boundaries, add or remove expected punctuation, and generate less-obvious readings. Other midrashic interpreters might swap two words with similar sounds, “squinting [their] ears” at a passage to generate new meanings.

Midrash deliberately seeks out less-typical interpretations of religious metaphors. In some ways, this creative reexamining of scripture imitates how a neurodiverse person might naturally respond to the text. “These rabbinic texts might be doing something that looks similar to neurodiverse approaches to patterns and interpretation,” says Weiss.

The rabbinic midrash authors believed that the depth of religious language calls for more imaginative interpretation. They didn’t carry this approach over to everyday language, Weiss adds. When someone asked them to pass the salt at dinner, they wouldn’t pause to consider all possible meanings of the request. “But they thought that God’s speech has a greater richness that call[s] for finding greater depth through these linguistic means,” he says. “They might see Scripture as revealed by God, but [also] having all these different possible dimensions to be explored—precisely because it’s divine speech that functions differently from everyday human speech.”

Neurodiversity and Spiritual Belonging

As research on neurodiversity in religious communities deepens, Leidenhag hopes that churches will grow more inclusive of their neurodiverse members. In particular, she hopes that faith leaders will think beyond simply changing sensory environments to address their use of language as well.

One step congregations can take is to diversify the ways in which scripture is taught and absorbed. For better or for worse, Christian churches today are heavily text-based. “That’s one way to describe churches: a community of people gathered around a text,” says Leidenhag, who is dyslexic herself. But Christians throughout most of history didn’t read texts at all, and certainly didn’t read them on their own. The modern Protestant emphasis on reading one’s Bible alone marginalizes many people. “Thinking creatively about how the Bible is consumed communally and individually is an area worth churches doing more work in,” she adds.

When it comes to making space for alternative readings of Scripture, she thinks that discussion-based Bible studies and small groups are a good place to start. This would require training leaders, who are often laypeople, to hold multiple interpretations open for longer. Leidenhag acknowledges that this can make people uncomfortable, especially when it challenges long-held assumptions about what a given text or metaphor means. But dismissing alternative perspectives too quickly can do far more damage. 

“One of the most hurtful things is when people are shut down really quickly and told they’re wrong, [especially when] some notion of Biblical authority is used to do that,” she says. “In that case, the person doesn’t feel just that they look a bit silly but that they did something heretical or damaging.”

Keeping multiple interpretations open during a discussion creates more space for neurodiverse perspectives. What’s more, it can expand the group’s collective imagination. Not only does interpretative openness foster inclusion, it also helps neurotypical people deepen their understanding of scripture. Thanks to a friend’s neurodiverse perspective, a neurotypical person might uncover new resonances in a metaphor they’ve read the same way since childhood. 

Certain religious communities may find it easier to make space for neurodiverse perspectives. Congregations that are familiar with midrash-like approaches to scripture are more likely to value people who approach religious texts differently, says Weiss. Communities that prioritize a single interpretation as the correct one are more likely to experience tension. In these contexts, neurodiverse individuals may feel that their perspective isn’t welcome. Yet the act of subverting typical understandings has roots tracing back to the third century. Understanding the historical precedent for creative interpretation could help religious communities widen their embrace.

Ultimately, Leidenhag wants religious leaders to understand how neurodiverse members might lead the whole community in speaking more faithfully about God. She hopes the research that she and the team are undertaking will prompt a greater appreciation for “the creativity of different minds” in religious spaces, and that more people will come to view diverse linguistic perspectives “as a potential benefit that allows God to speak afresh through the text.” With finite words to speak about and write about an infinite God, alternative perspectives can enrich an entire community’s understanding of the divine.

Annelise Jolley is a journalist and essayist who writes about place, food, ecology, and faith for outlets such as National Geographic, The Atavist, The Rumpus, and The Millions. Find her at annelisejolley.com.