88. Conversion Therapy Dropout (Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez's Story)

Well, you talked in your book about the thief in the night and the whole rapture culture.

So can you tell me a little bit about your experience with that?

Yeah, so I went to a Christian high school and we had horrible biblical education.

I mean, when I think about some of the things that we were taught now, I'm like, oh my gosh.

But for the book of Revelation, instead of taking it for what it could probably mean and not taking it at the literal sense, which I think is probably the best way to look at that part of the Bible, they had us watch the Thief in the Night movies instead.

And so if you're not familiar, which I know you are, but like, You know, it's these 70s movies that are really poorly produced that show people have been raptured and the people left behind have to either take the mark of the beast or get their heads chopped off.

And so it's just really intense, scary, traumatic portrayal of what some people thought would happen in the end times if the rapture actually was real and happened.

And so, I mean, they were kind of designed to, like, scare people into salvation and As a kid watching that, I mean, even though they were horribly produced and really cheesy, they were still really scary.

And the first one is the main one that most people watch.

We watched the whole series and it just got weirder and weirder and more trippier.

And so there were so many times I would like go home and my mom and dad wouldn't be there.

My brother wouldn't be there.

And I'd be like, oh, my God, it's happened.

I've been left behind.

It just put this fear in us that was if your life is not right with God, you're going to get left behind and you're going to have to suffer.

which is kind of terrible for a kid to believe about the Bible or believe about what God would do to people.

It's just, yeah, it was messed up.

Yeah.

How old were you when you were walking around and maybe you were left behind?

I don't think it was probably like freshman year, eighth grade, freshman year, maybe like pretty young, really.

I mean, but yeah, that's when we watched those.

And that was before the Left Behind series got really big.

So that was a little bit more old school.

I feel like younger kids had Left Behind, but we had Thief in the Night.

Yeah, I heard Thief in the Night, y'all have to tell me, might be more.