I grew up in a relatively religious family and during my elementary school years I attended a couple of private Christian schools.
When I was in the first grade I was with a couple of my friends in the school library. If I remember correctly, the class had been taken there so that each student could pick out a book they wanted to read for an upcoming book report. One kid was rummaging around the bookshelves when he pulled out book number one of the Left Behind children's spinoff series
Left Behind: The Kids. "Oh, sweet!" he cheered for some reason now unimaginable to me. "They have Left Behind!" A couple other kids "Ooh"ed and "Ah"ed at this kid's revelation and I, being like, six and not yet having much of a concept of peer pressure, figured that for whatever reason these junior novellas must have been the hip thing for kids my age. So, once the book had made its rounds, I decided that I would begin to read this Left Behind kids' adaptation and see just why this book series was so great.
It was boring as fuck.
@Spellskite is absolutely right. To this day I have no idea why the hell this series appealed to my demographic at the time. I'm not sure it actually did. The first one was mildly interesting because it actually dealt with what happened during the supposed "Rapture" event and the fallout that would have happened thereof to a group of teenagers who were left behind. The second and third ones (the only other books in the
FORTY BOOK SERIES that I read -- I don't think I even finished the third) I don't really remember anything else about because they were just so fucking boring. I can remember laying sprawled out on the couch in my living room with the stupid book in my hands literally begging my parents to let me go and do something else instead of read for my stupid report because the books were so indescribably dull.
On another occasion when I was in about fifth grade my class watched the Left Behind movies (not the Cage one. There were two or three that were released in the early to mid-2000s which were all still dumb in their own rights). Stupid, cheesy movies with terrible acting, a ridiculously hammy story, and awful knowledge of actual Christian eschatology, but when you are eleven years old with a belief background that these dumb movies claim to validate, that shit traumatizes the hell out of you. I can remember the fallout of seeing these movies affecting me well into my early teen years. And while in some ways I am actually grateful for being exposed to them (my fear of the events portrayed in the movies actually motivated me to learn more about what I believed and ended up strengthening my faith through the knowledge I gained), I still hate this stupid franchise for how much it terrified me as a child and to this day I hold a lot of disdain towards the tactic of "scaring kids into heaven" by hamming up things like the unbiblical concept of "rapture".
