I’m really kind of stunned that this self-styled prophet, this man who haunted my childhood and made me afraid to sleep at night, didn’t even write his own material.

Evangelical eschatology is pretty awful stuff, filled with extreme violence and God’s eternal torture of most humans ever born. It’s … frankly the antithesis of the sort of loving Christianity so many people think about when they think about Christianity or Jesus.

I remember being 10 years old and walking home from school one day shaking while watching a cloud formation, convinced Lindsey’s terrifying Jesus was about to blow his trump and I was about to be left behind to be tortured.

I remember maybe a year before that going for months lying in bed every night squeezing my eyes as tightly shut as I could, terrified of Jesus’s return, the Antichrist and hellfire, far too terrified to fall asleep.

Somebody had got the brilliant idea to show small children the Christian film “A Thief in the Night" with all its gory images of the Tribulation and hellfire. All of that gore and violence of course was directly inspired by “The Late Great Planet Earth,” which had a revered spot in my home right along with the Bible.

I accepted it all with the unquestioning faith of childhood. Every adult I knew and trusted told me Lindsey’s book was the Gospel truth, so I knew it must be so.

When the prophecies started not coming true, those adults' faith in Lindsey didn’t seem shaken. But mine started to be, never mind the fact he kept writing new books explaining why his prophecies were slightly off, calendar wise.

He was such a force in the Evangelical world, responsible for so many people adopting his particular view of the end of the world. Of scaring people into church because the world was about to end on a schedule God had made him privy to.

What’s so very strange, is that even though he has proven over and over to be a charlatan and false prophet, the empire he helped build on falsehoods doesn’t seem to care.

They just keep tweaking the prophecies and moving on as if nothing had ever been wrong with them in the first place.

As for me, learning that he had a ghostwriter just hits me so personally, given he convinced me for a good deal of my formative years that Jesus was a hateful figure who killed and tortured children.

How dare Lindsay do that, I find myself asking right now. How dare he?