Useful (and Useless) Idiots
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For other uses, see Useful idiot (disambiguation).
A useful idiot or useful fool is a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically being used by the cause's leaders.[1][2] The term was often used during the Cold War to describe non-communists regarded as susceptible to communist propaganda and psychological manipulation.[1] A number of authors attribute this phrase to Vladimir Lenin, but this attribution is not supported by any evidence. Similar terms exist in other languages.
I no longer give the benefit of the doubt to Super Catholics.
I no longer think there is anything “spiritual” about them.
They want power and control - control over their own lives; control over reality. Two plus two is five and Donald Trump won the 2020 election and COVID is both fake news and a dangerous disease that can be cured by essential oils and Putin is a great Christian because he hates gays and wears a cross around his neck and good for him for the mass murder he’s inflicting upon his innocent victims, at least he’s owning the libs!
This is psychotic. But it’s useful - to certain people.
The people who block aid for Ukraine today wish our own democracy ill. In the last few days and weeks we have witnessed, again and again, the overlap between Russian influence in American politics, opposition to aid to Ukraine, and hostility toward the American constitutional system. Putin knows that his only route to Kyiv passes through Washington, D.C., and he has acted accordingly.
And Putin’s route to Kyiv passes through not only Washington, D.C., but through the lives of each and every one of us - as it has since 2016 at least.
Snyder spells out how complicit with Putin’s illiberalism our supremely “spiritual” former cohorts have been …
The people working to assure the destruction of democracy in Ukraine also oppose democracy in America. We have just experienced a bogus impeachment proceeding against President Biden, where the chief accusation (long ago discredited by Ukrainian and other journalists, incidentally) arose from a Russian agent. Mike Johnson is in a submission chain that passes through Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin. Trump presents himself as an admirer of Putin and had been his client, in one form or another, for a decade. He has succeeded in conditioning the media by teaching his followers to shout "Russia hoax" whenever the subject comes up: but, all the same, Russia has backed him in every campaign and is backing him in this one. Johnson's 2018 congressional campaign, for that matter, took laundered funds from a Russian oligarch, and Johnson was one of the congressmen most deeply implicated in Trump's attempted coup in 2021.
But that’s in the political arena. My interest is in the religious one, specifically: is this idiocy and this acting in bad faith endemic to our form of religion in some way?
Let’s take a random example, which may help explore this question.
Scott Hahn is the most famous convert into the Catholic Church among the Revivalist Catholic sect. He came into the Church about a decade before I did, and he was on the rise as an EWTN Rock Star when I first began working at the Network. Hahn’s conversion story is inspiring because he made sacrifices to become Catholic, sacrifices based on his personal integrity. Only the Catholic Church was entirely true to Scripture, Hahn felt, and once he became convinced of that, he had to become Catholic, regardless of the price he was made to pay in his professional and personal life.
But here’s the Catholic Hahn on Jesus’ “brothers” (mentioned in Mark 6:3, Luke 8:19 and Matthew 13:55) …
Of course, Mary was ever-virgin and had no other children. The Gospel refers to Jesus’ brothers as Paul refers to all Israelites as his brothers, the children of Abraham (see Romans 9:3, 7).
This is a blatant misinterpretation of Scripture - from a man who says he became Catholic because he refused to put up with Protestant misreadings of the Bible. Our “brothers in Christ” (as we would say - which is more or less what Paul is saying in Romans) are not our biological brothers or even our close relatives, which is clearly what the Gospels mean when referring to the brothers of Jesus. Paul is being metaphorical and the Gospels are being literal. To suggest that “adelphoi” is being used in the same sense in both the Gospels and in Paul’s epistle is simply an example of academic dishonesty or of idiocy - albeit a useful idiocy, given the agendas of the Revivalists.
What I’m saying is this. The Catholic Church teaches that Mary was a Perpetual Virgin and therefore Jesus had no brothers born of Mary. To make this case from the evidence in Scripture entails some very strained arguments - but Catholics believe that Divine Revelation is bigger than the Bible, and therefore the Catholic Church (if teaching in accord with Divine Revelation) has the authority to teach something not found in the Bible, or supported in a direct way by the Bible. Hahn could argue this and be logically consistent as well as doctrinally orthodox.
But to pull a fast one as Hahn does here … well, how different is his playing fast and loose with Scripture before his adoring and more-or-less Scripturally illiterate fans, from other forms of prevarication? How different is this from willful blindness, from swallowing both the Big Lie and the little lies along the way? It seems to me that the difference is in degree, not in kind.
We are babies, tossed about by every wind and wave of doctrine and vulnerable to the cunning and craftiness of scoundrels who are taking advantage of us in their deceitful scheming, as St. Paul tells us in Ephesians. Scott Hahn does not appear to be a scoundrel. But Vladimir Putin is, House Speaker Mike Johson is, and Donald Trump is. The more the Religious Right allows itself to be swept away by the winds and waves stirred up by such scoundrels, the more we’ll become idiots - and the more we’ll become useful to those who are victimizing us.
Do we have the courage to resist? Are we all “brothers” of the Ukranians (metaphorical “adelphoi”)?
Snyder:
Perhaps the most insidious calamity we face is one of doubt: we cease to believe in ourselves, as human beings with values, who deserve to rule themselves in the system we call democracy. For most of this century, democracy has been in decline, and this decline has been accompanied by a discourse of passivity and a lack of resolve. Russia's attack on Ukraine -- the rare event of an armed autocracy seeking to destroy a peaceful democracy by military force -- was a turning point in this history. Which way we will all turn remains to be seen.
May we turn to the light and to the truth - both in our politics and in our faith.
Every time I read one of your columns, the line, "Put not your trust in princes" comes to mind.