Timothy S. Rodriguez

speaker

310 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 14 Jul

Timothy S. Rodriguez’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Sounds Like A Cult · The Cult of Conversion Therapy · 14 Jul 2026 podcast

But a lot of that was because of the pressure that I felt from my community where I grew up in the Midwest being raised evangelical Christian.

And so I believed that if I wanted to keep my relationship with God, if I wanted to keep the connection that I had in church, that that was the way I had to go.

And so I

You know, I never initially questioned if it was a cult or not because it just seemed like it was this force that was doing some good in the world by helping people overcome their unwanted same-sex attraction.

I initially was involved in an online support group where there were hundreds of other young people like me.

I eventually went to one of the big national conferences from Exodus International, which was the largest organization at the time.

There were thousands of other people there who all said that they had experienced this divine transformation.

And so I didn't really have any ground to stand on to question whether or not it was real or if it was effective just because there were so many other people that were bought into it.

But I guess it's like classic telltale sign of a cult.

I didn't know that at the time, but I would say over time as I got deeper into it and the more time I spent in conversion therapy, the more I realized that it was a controlling environment that was actually sucking the life out of us and not actually leading us to where they promised we would go.

It was a combination of things.

I think when I initially started in conversion therapy, the banner literally said freedom is possible.

And by the end of my time in conversion therapy, they started to change their tune a little bit because so many people were dropping out of conversion therapy, were leaving.

And so they were saying, hey, you might not change, but you can choose to like honor God and be celibate.

Or you can choose to live a heteronormative life and marry a woman that you might not be sexually attracted to.

But you're doing the right thing by fulfilling what God wants people to do by having celibate or straight marriages.

I would say, though, that the big catalyst for me was just seeing friends that I knew through my time in conversion therapy who started to fall away and embrace the lifestyle.

We were always told to lose contact with those people because they were going to drag us down.

And I couldn't do that.

though, because these were my friends and seeing how their lives started to unravel.

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