He Survived Christian “Love”
Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez was 19 years old when he was outed in one of the worst ways imaginable. But what it led to was somehow worse.
Tim grew up in Illinois, but followed a youth pastor to an internship in southern Washington state after high school. But everything changed when his mentor-turned-internship-supervisor stumbled upon his browser history near the end of the internship.
“It told a secret that I had been keeping to myself for a long time,” Tim told me in an interview recently. “It was also a moment that I was really grateful for because I wanted to tell someone about it. I wanted to talk about it.”
That feeling didn’t last long. Tim was out visiting a church family when his boss called. He was to come to the church right away.
“When I got there, it was just his car and the lead pastor’s car,” Tim said. “And that’s when my heart started to race a little bit because I was like, obviously, something’s wrong.”
When Tim sat down in the lead pastor’s office, the senior minister pushed a file folder with Tim’s browser history inside. “What do you have to say about this?” the he asked coldly.
Tim broke down in tears. It was humiliating; he had never told anyone. He admitted to what he was struggling with but couldn’t bring himself to say the actual words, “I’m gay.”
In some other universe, a person claiming to follow Jesus — whose two big rules were love God and love your neighbor — might have hugged Tim and told him that no matter what, God still loves you. Jesus still loves you.
But we don’t live in that universe. In this one, Tim was immediately dismissed. His former mentor dumped him in a seedy hotel near the Portland, Oregon, airport, gave him $50 and some truly horrific words.
“He told me that there was no place for people like me in churches, that I was broken, that I would need to reconsider my future in ministry,” Tim recalled. “This was my hero, this was someone I looked up to.” And yet, it got worse.
A few days later Tim found himself at a Christian bookstore. He picked up a book that said there was hope for people like him — for people like us.
“I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a conversion therapy book. I didn’t know what conversion therapy was. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be the way that I was and believed what my youth pastor said, that I was broken. And there began my journey of eight years in conversion therapy.”
You have probably heard about conversion therapy. That’s really a misnomer — it’s not really therapy. The American Psychological Association, the World Health Organization, and the American Medical Association all agree it doesn’t work and instead causes real harm, especially to young people. [1]
For some it can include electroshock therapy and nausea-inducing medication. For Tim, it meant everything from weekly talk therapy and prayer circles to retreats and conferences that cost him thousands of dollars to attend. The only thing he didn’t do was a residential treatment program — which he calls, without much affection, rehab for homosexuality.
I asked (because of course being a gay guy myself I just assumed) if guys were really just hooking up with each other at these things. Tim admitted that maybe some did, but the vast majority went because they wanted it to work.
After years of being Evangelical-adjacent myself, I can understand that. You want to fit in. When your best friend tells you he can’t be your friend because he can’t “support your lifestyle” — which mine did — trying to change who you are is a perfectly normal response.
Failing to do so risks ostracization — from your community, maybe your family, and what you were told was God. And we’re seemingly programmed by evolution to fear nothing more than social ostracization as young adults. [2]
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For Tim, failing the program meant losing his job. Despite what his jerk ex-boss said, Tim found that there really was a place in the church for him. He began doing marketing and social media management for big mega churches. But his place was contingent on his progress — and silence.
The end result of this “therapy” usually isn’t anyone turning straight or coming to feel at home in the gender they were assigned at birth. Usually it results in depression, anxiety, and a measurably higher risk of suicide.
It took Tim the better part of a decade to come to terms with his sexuality. He kept going to therapy, going to conferences, and praying relentlessly, but none of it worked. Tim started to think it was him.
“I just interpreted that as divine rejection that I’m so broken, God cannot fix me,” Tim said. “And that obviously puts a lot of weight on your soul and your psyche.”
Eventually Tim had a breakthrough moment while running social media for a mega-church conference. After hearing one very problematic pastor speak, Tim went home and hit a breaking point. “I had a moment of saying, I either need to end my life or end the way that I’ve been living it.” He chose the latter.
Tim now works in marketing for Google, and has come to terms with his sexuality and his faith. “I think that God’s lack of an answer to my prayers was the answer. That there was nothing wrong with me to fix in the first place. And it changed the trajectory of my life to be able to say that. And to instead of praying for God to change me, say, God, thank you for making me gay.”
When I was talking with Tim, I couldn’t help but think of something someone told me once. There’s no hate like Christian love. What makes conversion therapy so hard to swallow is the reasoning behind it. It’s the insane notion that it’s driven by love.
There’s nothing loving about trying to tell somebody they aren’t perfect the way God made them. There’s nothing loving about telling somebody they’ll spend eternity in hell if they’re not attracted to who the church says you can be attracted to. And there’s nothing loving about electroshock therapy if you fail to obey.
None of that could be further from what Jesus actually preached. Never once does Jesus say a word about sexuality or gender identity. Jesus did not say, love thy neighbor — so long as they use pronouns you can understand. Jesus did not say, love your neighbor — so long as they only sleep with the opposite gender. That’s the insistence of humans — not of Jesus — and not of any God worth believing in.
The truth is that Tim’s story perfectly illustrates the difference between the religion about Jesus and the religion of Jesus. The religion about Jesus is doctrine, creed, who’s in and who’s out, and where you end up in the next life. The religion of Jesus is two rules — love God, love your neighbor — and has nothing to do with who you sleep with or what pronouns you use. And to be clear — you don’t have to pick one over the other. The Christians I know and respect most practice both.
When I asked Tim if he still considered himself a Christian, he said yes and no.
“I don’t want to be associated with anything that evokes people’s imaginations when they hear the word Christian today. This rise of Christian nationalism, just all the horrible things that we’re seeing happen in our country in the name of God and the name of religion — I am not aligned with that at all. I do not want to identify with that.”
Still, Tim is part of a faith community where he lives in New York City — a gay-affirming one. “I just want to be a person that tries to follow the way of Jesus and live the way that Jesus said we should live — and loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves.”
Sing it, sister.
To read more about Tim’s incredible story, including his battle with substance abuse, the hypocrisy of his megachurch employers, and how he’s continuing the fight against conversion therapy, check out his memoir, Conversion Therapy Dropout, which was just published earlier this year.
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FOOTNOTES:
- The American Psychological Association, the World Health Organization, and the American Medical Association have all issued formal statements opposing conversion therapy on grounds that it is scientifically discredited and causes documented psychological harm. The AMA cites depression, PTSD, and suicidal ideation among those subjected to it. The Trevor Project’s national survey data found LGBTQ youth exposed to conversion efforts are roughly twice as likely to attempt suicide as their peers who were not; a 2019 study found trans youth exposed before age ten were four times as likely. For more: The Trevor Project, “2024 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ Young People.”
- Social psychologist Kipling Williams’s decades of research on ostracism found that humans process social exclusion through some of the same neural pathways as physical pain — a response evolutionary psychologists trace to a time when expulsion from the group meant losing protection, food, and mates. Adolescents and emerging adults show heightened sensitivity to this threat compared to older adults, likely because the brain regions governing social cognition and rejection-regulation are still developing. For more: Kipling D. Williams, “Ostracism: A Temporal Need-Threat Model,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 41 (2009).
