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There goes the neighborhood
Tim LaHaye responds to this Nick Kristof column with a letter to the editor in The New York Times:

Comparing my book "Glorious Appearing" to "fundamentalist Islamic tracts" is a real stretch. The Islamic radicals who bomb the innocent are not nice people!

Should Christ overlook their rebellion and welcome them into his kingdom? They would ruin it for everyone. You don't choose to live around people like that today; would you want to spend eternity with them?

LaHaye portrays heaven as a (pearly) gated community in Orange County. It's a good, exclusive neighborhood inhabited by good, exclusive people. God's main role is to keep out the undesirable types -- the people who are not "nice" and whom the saints like LaHaye would not "choose to live around."

LaHaye's vision of heaven, in other words, sounds remarkably like that of the Pharisees -- the devout evangelicals of their day. Jesus repeatedly warned them that prostitutes and tax-collectors would be getting into heaven ahead of them. (We always read this as former prostitutes and reformed tax-collectors, but that's not what he said.)...