Heavy Burdens Quotes

“To the forgotten soul crying alone
in their bedroom with a Bible.
God loves you. No matter what.”
― Bridget Eileen Rivera, Heavy Burdens: Seven Ways LGBTQ Christians Experience Harm in the Church

“It would seem counterintuitive for Christians to embrace a word that prioritizes sex as the focal point of identity (homosexual) over a word that intentionally decenters the importance of sex (gay). But embracing terminology that emphasized the very thing that Christians believed to be sinful (homosexuality) served a dualistic function: it maintained the social-pariah status that haunted the gay community while simultaneously justifying that status. They were perverts after all, maybe even pedophiles. Christians gravitated toward language that centered the offending trait - sex - because it maintained the pathological categories popularized by Freudian psychology but with a Christian twist.”
― Bridget Eileen Rivera, Heavy Burdens

“Ruth Koker Burks saw”
― Bridget Eileen Rivera, Heavy Burdens: Seven Ways LGBTQ Christians Experience Harm in the Church

“BURDEN 2 SUMMARY We thus conclude the second burden that LGBTQ people bear in the church. No matter what queer people do, how they live, how they talk, or how they define their own existence, when many Christians meet an LGBTQ person they see a pathological sinner. A pervert. All people sin, but LGBTQ people are sinners without grace.”
― Bridget Eileen Rivera, Heavy Burdens: Seven Ways LGBTQ Christians Experience Harm in the Church

“To be queer is to be human.”
― Bridget Eileen Rivera, Heavy Burdens: Seven Ways LGBTQ Christians Experience Harm in the Church

“Instead, it describes a broader relational experience, one that is not just sexual but includes emotional, romantic, aesthetic, physical, and intellectual components, among others. These experiences impact everything about how any person relates to the world, but they don’t define who we are or what we do with our lives. They add color to our existence, but they don’t govern it.”
― Bridget Eileen Rivera, Heavy Burdens: Seven Ways LGBTQ Christians Experience Harm in the Church

“Gay people don’t call themselves gay and lesbian because they define themselves by sex. Rather, such language is a response to the sexual stigma of society. As long as LGBTQ people experience dehumanization on the basis of sex and gender, they will need a vocabulary to name that experience and ultimately reclaim their humanity.”
― Bridget Eileen Rivera, Heavy Burdens: Seven Ways LGBTQ Christians Experience Harm in the Church