EP 39 – Sammi Burkart – Religious Trama
What happens when something that’s supposed to provide comfort, belonging, and faith becomes a source of fear, shame, control, or rejection?
This week on the GayPHX Podcast, Bily sits down at the Rainbow Tinted Microphone with Sammi Burkart for a deeply personal conversation about religious trauma in the LGBTQ+ community — and what healing can look like on your own terms.
For Sammi, this isn’t simply a subject she’s studied.
She lived it.
Sammi grew up in an extremely strict fundamentalist religious environment where control reached into nearly every part of life. It wasn’t until college that she began encountering people who shared a Christian faith but lived and believed very differently from what she’d been taught was possible.
Then came another realization: Sammi was gay.
Rather than abandoning faith entirely, Sammi began the difficult process of separating what she believed from what she’d been taught to fear. Today, she’s an author, speaker and workshop facilitator who also works with an affirming Phoenix church, helping create the kind of safe space she once needed herself.
Bily and Sammi dig into what religious trauma actually is, how high-control religious environments operate, and some of the effects people may carry long after they’ve left.
They talk about shame, fear, learning to trust your own instincts again, finding healthy coping mechanisms, therapy, spirituality, and why simply telling someone to “pray more” isn’t necessarily helping them deal with what they’re experiencing.
And they explore a question many LGBTQ+ people who’ve experienced religious rejection eventually face:
Do I have to choose between being authentically myself and having faith?
For Sammi, healing isn’t about telling someone what they should believe. It’s about helping people rediscover their own voice and giving themselves permission to decide what comes next.
Sammi also shares her book, Fundamentally Healing, a workbook designed to help people identify how religious trauma has affected different parts of their lives and begin working forward from it.
Plus, Brian, our Desert Den Daddy, has this week’s Hot 3, and the Amory Pack is behind the microphones to get us started and bring us home.
October is coming — and Phoenix is going to be BUSY.
Leather Pride and Phoenix Pride are happening the same weekend this year, and GayPHX is working to keep up with the events, changes, additions, and everything happening around town.
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