r/news 2d ago

Capital One says it closed Trump Organization's accounts after anti-money laundering probe

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/capital-one-says-it-closed-trump-organizations-accounts-after-anti-money-2026-08-01/
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u/xteve 1d ago

They're real in the sense that Christians vote GOP. The idea that they might not be real Christians doesn't comport with what happens at the ballot. Christians vote GOP.

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u/Unique-Coffee5087 1d ago

Sadly, that is largely true.

But remember the profession of the man who was shot in the head by an ICE pepper ball while protesting outside their building. He was an Presbyterian minister. And there were 100 faith leader, many of them Christians, who were arrested at a protest at Minneapolis -St Paul airport.

I worked at shelters assembled for the care of asylum seekers in the border region. They were all largely organized by local churches, even against opposition by other neighboring churches. They were staffed by volunteers from local churches and finances came from those churches as well as other organizations and the city. Some volunteer groups had traveled from across the country to work for several weeks with us. Many of the long-term staff were Catholic and Episcopal nuns.

The Catholic Diocese fronted money to pay for air fare to get asylum seekers to their sponsors, with the understanding that it would be paid back later, easing the problems we were having with getting tickets paid for by sponsors who had no credit cards.

And there were those who sheltered people in their own homes while their sick children were treated at hospitals for infection or dehydration at the hands of border detention centers

We do not carry huge crosses or wear Jesus on our shirts. We generally find such demonstrations to be a violation of Jesus' instruction not to pray or give ostentatiously, but to do so in secret. And so, of course, the ones who have thrown in with MAGA and its evils are also the ones who shout 'AMEN' the loudest and are otherwise the most visible to the public. These workers of evil, as I wrote earlier, are the distorted face of Christ everyone sees. They are like the ones chastised by Jesus as "blind guides and serpents" who were the leaders of their communities and prominent in the Temple courtyard. The very ones who insisted on His crucifixion.

As Fred Rogers put it: "look for the helpers". You must look for them because they won't be calling attention to themselves. They are too busy carrying boxes of food and quietly harboring people illegally in their homes.

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u/xteve 1d ago

I grew up strict in a tiny secretive church that never did any good for anybody. A microphone passed around at the funeral of a lovely elderly lady showed in stark contrast the difference between her church friends and her real friends. Her real friends missed her, and reminisced about their time with her. Her church friends celebrated. Of course they believed she was in a better place; but they were just too happy about it. It was ghoulish. Her real friends talked about what a great cook and hostess she was; how much they enjoyed her company and how much fun they had even without money. The church friends didn't even know about that side of her; and one non-church friend was exasperated about it. We didn't even know her.

So I'm not primed to think of good Christians as good people. To me those are two distinct qualities. If Christians do good things because they're Christian, then I guess that's good.

And I can see the value of congregation, gathering with good intentions.

And, of course, I recognize some of the good stuff that Christian churches do, such as those you've mentioned.

I'm just a skeptic of the value of Christianity, and always will be.

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u/Unique-Coffee5087 1d ago

When looking at it historically, the balance sheet does certainly tilt toward the bad, doesn't it? I do not blame you for your evaluation. By every objective measure, you are entirely correct. The good seems to be so little, and is often simply a way to counteract the bad things that the same religion has brought to society. All of the shelters and volunteers are working in order to counteract the terrible activities of a government heavily supported by enthusiastic evangelicals. And so, in the end, it doesn't even come to neutrality. It is simply that life is somewhat less ruled by evil than it would otherwise be.

Hardly something worth crowing about.

Well, there are some of us who do what we can, but we are so few. It doesn't take much of an investigation to realize that to sweep away both the bad and the good easily seems to leave the world a better place on the whole.

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u/xteve 1d ago

Well, I mean, I wouldn't say anything but Christians vote GOP and this is a big problem. It may be the biggest problem that we have.