God told Donald Bell to buy a bank, but after years of shenanigans, regulators shut it down

Olathe builder Donald Bell Sr. has taken a well-deserved ribbing for positioning himself as Jesus’ moneychanger. Bell has claimed that God told him to buy a bank, an assertion discredited by Friday’s news that regulators had closed Security Savings Bank, which Bell built up after receiving his supposedly divine revelation in 1998.

The failure of Security Savings is more than a story about a vainglorious Christian businessman, however. It is also an instance of regulators falling down on the job.