Christ looks the most religious men of His day in the eye and calls them morons. He does this not to demean but to awaken; not to shame but to judge rightly – and to invite us to do the same.

Have you ever had one of those jarring moments when the lyrics of a song you once jammed to as a kid suddenly hit you with grown-up clarity? Maybe it was hearing Free Bird and suddenly realizing the masses in your high school were swaying to a breakup anthem. Or perhaps at your kids’ Catholic athletic event it struck you that “if you’re into evil you’re a friend of mine” (AC/DC’s Hells Bells) might not be the best fire-up song (pun intended). One of my personal favorites was discovering the biting genius behind Bugs Bunny’s old jab, “What a maroon!” – a mispronounced moron, cloaked in Looney Tunes levity but hitting with uncanny precision.

In this age of moral preening – where every tribe, every talking head, invokes Jesus Christ as the mascot of their cause – here’s the mic drop no one saw coming: Jesus called people morons.

Let’s not sentimentalize or sanitize this. Let’s not mistake it for a clever quip or a throwaway insult. No, in the unflinching light of Matthew 23, Christ – the Incarnate Word, the Author of all goodness, truth, and beauty – looks the most religious men of His day in the eye and calls them μωροί (moroi). Fools. Morons. He does this not to demean but to awaken; not to shame but to judge rightly – and to invite us to do the same.

Not for the sake of casting stones but for the sake of being formed, let’s go there.

When Christ condemned the Pharisees, He did not merely call them blind – He called them μωροί (moroi), the very root of our modern insult moron. “You blind fools!” He thunders in Matthew 23:17. “For which is greater, the gold or the temple that made the gold sacred?”

This wasn’t a slight at their intelligence. It was a judgment on their willful disconnection from reality. The Pharisees weren’t stupid – they were the most educated men of their time. But in the words of G.K. Chesterton, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything but his reason.” That was the Pharisee: spiritually precise, morally unanchored.

The Greek word moros doesn’t mean “uninformed.” It means “dull,” “insipid,” “without savor.” It’s the same root Christ uses to describe salt that has lost its saltiness (Matthew 5:13) – once potent, now worthless. In Matthew 7:26, He warns against the man who hears truth but refuses to live it, calling him moros, a fool building on sand. The word points not to mental deficiency but to moral decay.

This is spiritual blindness: not the inability to see but the refusal to see. And not just among leaders – Christ warns of “the blind leading the blind” (Matthew 15:14) because moral deception often requires an audience that prefers the dark.

This spiritual condition has become the organizing principle of an entire culture. We live in a time when moral inversion is not the exception – it’s the rule. Our public rhetoric is laced with oxymorons not as occasional ironies but as systemic doctrines.

Consider the prevailing catechism of our governing elite:

* Abortion as “health care”

* Indicting political opponents as “justice”

* DEI mandates that exclude for the sake of inclusion

* Denying biology in the name of “gender identity”

* “Following the science” – until it challenges the narrative

* A “free press” that suppresses inconvenient truths

These contradictions aren’t random. They are the fruit of moros logic: when language is severed from reality and blindfolds are treated as badges of enlightenment.

And this brings us, not as a detour but as an inevitable illustration, to the figure who has most exposed this contradiction: Donald Trump.

For nearly a decade, Trump has been cast as a singular evil – fascist, racist, misogynist, dictator-in-waiting. Yet, under his first term, it was the “oppressed classes” – black Americans, Latinos, women, the working class – who experienced rising wages, record-low unemployment, and economic mobility.

In 2024, after four years of cultural gaslighting, censorship, and lawfare, those same groups moved toward him – not because they believed he was flawless but because they saw. They remembered. They refused to keep playing the part of blind followers in a theater of absurdity.

This is the great irony: those screaming “tyranny” the loudest were often the ones imposing it – from university speech codes to federal mandates, from the erasure of women’s sports to the surveillance of parents at school board meetings. The people didn’t just vote against that – they recoiled from it. They refused to call evil good, or good evil. They took off the blindfold.

As Catholics, we must not lose sight of what it means to affirm the truth in a person or policy without canonizing the man himself. Trump has boldly professed a pro-life stance, not only in policy – appointing justices that helped overturn Roe v. Wade – but also through quiet, often unseen acts of generosity: paying off mortgages for struggling families, stepping in to help veterans, funding educational scholarships. These were not headline-grabbing gestures but real assistance rendered quietly, human to human.

Yet, we must also call him to account. His support for IVF and his inability – or unwillingness – to confront the commodification of human life at its earliest stage must not be glossed over. A culture of life must be consistent, or it will collapse under the weight of its exceptions. As Catholics, we must be Trump’s grateful allies where truth prevails – and his prophetic challengers where it does not. We do not worship politicians. We worship a God who is Truth itself.

A Final Call: Let the Light In

The crisis of our time is not just political. It is personal. We are all susceptible to blindness. We all fashion narratives that flatter our preferences and blind us to our faults. But truth is not a matter of opinion. It is not determined by sentiment. It is revealed, immutable, and radiant – like the face of Christ to Saul on the road to Damascus.

To stand in that light is not to be condemned – it is to be forged. It is to awaken to our unsurpassed dignity: made in the image of God, capable of truth, destined for communion.

We need to cultivate spaces where such truth can be humbly considered again. Where debate is honest. Where ideas are tested not canceled. Where we reclaim the slow work of becoming the best versions of ourselves – not the ones branded by trends but the ones shaped by grace and reality.

Let us each stand before the mirror of truth – not to be shamed but to be sanctified. Let us take off the blindfolds. Let us, finally, see.

Written by Greg Schlueter for Crisis Magazine ~ May 28, 2025