Professor Molly Worthen wrote one of the most interesting books I've read. In this episode, we discuss her book, Spellbound, and her surprising argument that charisma isn't so much about charm or power. It's the ability to tell a story people want to live in. We unpack how different leaders build followings, why America is uniquely fertile ground for charismatic movements, and what kind of charisma can create a more resilient future.
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
BEN KLUTSEY: Charisma is one of those words we use frequently, but don’t quite understand fully. We know it when we see it, or think we do. But what exactly are we responding to when a leader walks into a room and something shifts? What does it mean for a republic like ours when certain individuals have had significant sway on the populace during different periods throughout our history? My guest today has spent years trying to answer those questions.
Professor Molly Worthen is the author of Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, a fascinating and wide-ranging account of the influence of charismatic leaders on American life, which is the main subject of our conversation today.
Professor Worthen, thanks for joining me today.
MOLLY WORTHEN: Thanks for having me.
What is charisma?
KLUTSEY: Well, most of us think we know what charisma is. We associate it with charm, celebrity, or a certain magnetism, but your book suggests we’ve been misreading it. What do most people get wrong about charisma? And what does it actually require from the leader and from the audience?
WORTHEN: I was certainly confused about charisma when I started this research, and it’s a major reason why I was interested in the subject and interested in the intersection between charisma in the original sense of the word—a word that we get from ancient Greek via the New Testament—and charisma in the sense that we use it in everyday conversation.
Theologically, it’s a word that, in the context of the Bible, means an unbidden gift from God, an act of grace. Paul uses it in his letters to mean different things. It can mean the free gift of salvation to all believing Christians, or specific gifts of the spirit: healing, speaking in tongues, this kind of thing. And for most of the past 2,000 years, that’s where the word stayed.
But a bit more than a century ago, the German sociologist Max Weber borrowed the word from the world of biblical studies and retooled it in an effort to give his colleagues in the burgeoning new social science disciplines a way to talk about this X factor, this form of authority that seemed to exist separate from a leader’s place in an institution, or having a big military, or some claim on tradition, had something to do with this force in the leader as a person and the relationship that he was able to craft with followers. But from there, the word is filtered into our vocabulary. And I think it’s often a term we punt to, when we are observing a dynamic between a leader and followers and we don’t really get it, and we have a sense that there is something going on there, but it’s not obvious to us why these people are so attracted to this individual.
So when I started this project, I very much confused charisma with charm. I thought I would be writing about loads of very charming people with very high emotional intelligence, really good at working the room at a cocktail party. I thought they would all be amazing public speakers. And those qualities show up here and there in my cast of characters, but really more as the exception than the rule.
The pattern that I found was that charisma is deeply polarizing. A charismatic person generally has a lot of people who think he or she is just irresistible, and a lot of people who find the person totally revolting, and not a whole lot of people who are just lukewarm.
So the definition I ended up settling on is that charisma is a relationship between a leader and followers based on a particular kind of storytelling. Charisma is a leader’s ability to invite potential followers into a new, transcendent narrative about what their life means and how it connects to a much bigger story. I think, as humans, we are constantly hungry for a sense that our puny, mortal lives and all of our suffering and chaos actually means something. We’re looking to slot it into a bigger story. And often, we get dissatisfied with the stories that are on offer in the culture, that institutions and elites are telling us. And so, a successful charismatic leader is one who comes along and says, “Here, let me tell you a new story. Let me arrange the facts you think you know into a new pattern and give you a new sense of your role and your agency, but also reassure you that it’s not all up to you, that you are also in the thrall of a bigger power.” And that helped me draw a throughline across four centuries of history and make sense of how certain leaders have resonated with different groups of people at different points in our history as a country.
KLUTSEY: On your point about polarization, is that inevitable of charismatic leaders? Is it a structural thing, or is it just incidental?
WORTHEN: I think it’s inevitable. And I think it has to do with what makes a good story. A good story doesn’t include lovely, heroic roles for everybody. It has to have villains, it has to have some heroes who really at the center, and then other people who are left out. So I think that our reaction to a leader has everything to do with whether that leader is offering us an attractive role in the story that he or she is telling.
Max Weber’s definition of charisma
KLUTSEY: And you mentioned Max Weber earlier, his definition. He uses the term creative power, I think. In your studying of this, what do you think Weber got wrong or missed in his studies of charismatic leaders?
WORTHEN: That’s a great question. I love Max Weber. He’s one of my heroes. I so admire his omnivorous intellectual curiosity. The man wrote about everything from the economics of German farming life to Hinduism, and everything in between. And I think he was a really perceptive student of Western culture and specifically of American culture. I got really into learning more about not just his writings, but also the time he and his wife, Marianne, spent touring the United States around 1904, and some time they spent at the World’s Fair in St. Louis.
It was so interesting to me that he was developing his definition of charisma at the very same time that charisma, in that original New Testament sense, the sense of the Holy Spirit falling on people, was also exploding in the Pentecostal revivals that really launched modern Pentecostalism right at the turn of the century.
So, I think that Weber got more right than not. He famously called himself, in reference to his own lack of religious faith, “religiously unmusical,” as in a kind of tone deafness, which I don’t think he was really doing justice to himself and his perception there. But perhaps he didn’t fully appreciate the way in which charisma in the New Testament sense remains, I think, quite intertwined with charisma in the sense that he was identifying. And to me, the two are related, if separate phenomena.
One of my goals in the book is to make secular and religious people a bit more legible to each other. I think that, as human beings, we have a fairly fundamental religious impulse. And it’s there, regardless of our own metaphysics or whether we go to a house of worship on weekends. We have this desire to connect ourselves to a transcendent narrative, to a source of power outside ourselves. And whether you do that in the course of activities that you think of as totally secular and in the lane of modern, pluralistic politics, or whether you do that in a house of worship, perhaps those are not totally alien, unrelated phenomena, and we can see some similarities across the differences.
Political charisma
KLUTSEY: In the book, you use the term political charisma. I wonder if that is a distinct category, or it’s mostly used to refer to politicians or people in politics who happen to be charismatic?
WORTHEN: These are terms that are partly terms of convenience. I think part of being a historian is you are bringing to life the tremendous variety of just weird, fascinating human behavior. It’s also your burden as a scholar to make some generalizations. So in the book, I try to step back and forth between characters for whom the primary arena was mainstream, secular, national politics, and those for whom the primary arena was more religious. But there are so many interesting cases. There’s probably no figure in the book who is purely in one or the other, right?
I start the book with the story of the infamous Puritan heretic Anne Hutchinson who really got under the skin of the magistrates and clergy of Massachusetts Bay in the mid-1630s, because she started having these weekly and then twice-weekly discussion sessions at her house, first just for women, but then the women would bring their husbands, ostensibly to just have a friendly discussion of the sermon the previous Sunday. But it turned out she had a lot of critical things to say about the ministers and thought that most of them preached what, in her view, was an incorrect, heretical message that you can earn your salvation—very much not in line with her understanding of salvation as a free gift from God.
Now that sounds like a totally religious matter. How could that have political implications? But certainly, in Puritan Massachusetts Bay, there was no separating the two. And once the disciplinary machinery of the colony got churning against her, she was put on trial twice. She had a trial at the hands of church officials and was found guilty of heresy, essentially. But then she also had a civil trial that resulted in her banishment.
Now we can say, “Okay, well, that’s the Puritan’s theocracy. They didn’t separate religion and politics.” But I think the connection between religious authority, our sense of authority, and the priorities we seek in worldly government remains in place.
I got fascinated by the career of the Pan-Africanist nationalist Marcus Garvey and the kind of political theology that he brought to bear as he built up his organization, The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), in Harlem in the 1910s and early 1920s. This organization was for a brief period the largest mass movement of people of African descent in the world, in history, up until that point.
His vision was one that was political as well as theological. His speeches—we should really call them sermons—are shot through with religious language calling on his audience to recover their true sense of identity. It’s a sense of divine chosenness as a race for whom God intends a very specific destiny, but it’s a destiny with political implications, which he began to map out in a vision for taking a certain degree of political control over parts of the African continent as well as a vision for black economic autonomy. And I think it’s the very fact of the kind of inherent political power on display in the UNIA mass rallies and parades, hundreds of people dressed in resplendent uniforms, and the signal that sent to white authorities that led to him being arrested on trumped-up charges of mail fraud, and put in prison, and eventually deported.
So, I don’t think it’s ever totally possible to separate the religious from the political.
Arranging the history of charisma
KLUTSEY: Now, as a scholar, which charismatic leader first captured your attention? And was there a chronology to how you worked through the figures in the book? Did you follow the history forward, or did one figure lead you to another? To me, it seemed chronological initially, but then it varies across.
WORTHEN: Broadly, I was trying to find a way to tell a story, which is a challenging thing. One hazard of this project was that every time I would tell somebody I was writing a book about charisma, they would immediately have in mind 10 people that surely I’m going to include, right? I’m constantly disappointing them.
I sought initially for a mix of characters I’ll call “usual suspects”—big, famous people that the average reader will expect to find in a history of charisma. I thought, “Okay, I’ve got to say something about George Washington. John F. Kennedy has to be in there. Got to deal with Napoleon. Got to deal with Hitler.” But then I wanted to leaven the narrative with a number of unexpected figures who might surprise the reader, who might seem at first glance to not bear a clear connection to the narrative they think they know about political leadership in this country, but whose presence in the narrative would really help illuminate the story that they think they know.
So, for example, I divide the narrative of American history into these epochs in which a particular charismatic style—a flavor of charismatic storytelling, you might say—is really culturally ascendant. And most of the 19th century is consumed by the era I call “the era of the conquerors.” That period includes some obvious conquerors. I write about Andrew Jackson, I write about Napoleon, but I also got very interested in what I’ll call “metaphysical conquest.”
I plunged into the founding story of the Mormon church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the way in which Joseph Smith, in really an act of religious genius, responded to many people’s frustrations with the kind of post-Puritan mainstream Protestantism of the Jacksonian era, but blended his imaginative, theological vision with a vision of conquest, conquest both of the American continent and in that early Mormon vision prioritized not just building a new Zion—what eventually becomes the Mormon kingdom in the Great Salt Lake Basin—but also evangelizing and assimilating Native Americans, who they believe to be the descendants of an ancient Semitic people, essentially a lost Israelite tribe called the Lamanites, who are the bad guys in the Book of Mormon narrative. But they are crucial to the early Mormon understanding of what it means to really awaken God’s people to their true identity, including Native Americans, and restore this North American plotline to the divine story. And this, in addition to a whole cosmology that Joseph Smith developed, in which there are tiers of heaven and living a devout Mormon life—it culminates with an eternal existence in the celestial kingdom. It’s really a vision of manifest destiny, but on a cosmic scale. Again, it’s a kind of conquest.
So that was my basic plan, also allowing for the fact that sometimes you just discover characters who you didn’t know existed, and you get sucked into their story and you have to follow your nose. So, there’s a little bit of that as well.
The five archetypes of charisma
KLUTSEY: Yes. I wondered [about] your five archetypes—the prophets, the conquerors, the agitators, the experts, and the gurus—were there a couple of figures that were hardest to classify and why? I imagine that there are probably a handful of them that were incredibly difficult because they overlapped, or maybe even all five of the archetypes.
WORTHEN: This is something that I learned from Max Weber. Max Weber was a great typologist who was not afraid of giving his readers straightforward, definitive theories about how humans operate. Any theory like that, any typology that purports to sort charismatic leaders across American history into five categories, obviously it’s going to be wrong here and there, right? But it’s fun to think with, and I stand by it as a useful tool.
One pattern I began to notice fairly early in my research was that leaders who stood out to me as successful—if by success we mean able to instantiate their policy visions, their ideas, their narrative of what America is about in a set of procedures and institutions that outlive their personal career—that’s one definition of success. It tended to accrue not to leaders who stuck narrowly to the ascendant charismatic type of their age, but rather to those leaders who showed a certain agility, a certain flexible ability to adapt, to sense what kinds of charismatic story was resonating with people, but then to maybe combine that with other lessons from other ways of connecting with an audience.
An example of this is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in the beginning of his career very much channeled a desire in those early years of the Great Depression among Americans for simply a voice of reason and cool order. If you listen to his early radio fireside chats, you hear him trying to really summon Americans to the most reasonable version of themselves. He’s inviting them to turn over the reins to his class of experts, his brains trust, and those experts who are developing this phalanx of relatively technical solutions to American problems. And I think his early success is a testament to the way he detected an appetite for that in an era that was generally one of quite a lot of chaos. And it’s an era that I label in my narrative, “the era of the agitator,” in which so many charismatic leaders are anti-institutional, anti-expert grenade-throwers, essentially.
But a few years later, he begins to struggle with greater and greater political threat from his left flank. And I focus especially on the threat of the great Louisiana populist, Huey Long, who was sort of an agitator par excellence. And as he became more and more grumpy that FDR didn’t give him adequate credit for his own political success—Long thought that he’d really played a significant role in getting FDR elected—Long becomes very critical of the New Deal, calling it essentially too conservative, not a radical enough solution. He’s got his own set of proposals, the Share Our Wealth Plan, and he’s this very flamboyant character. And it was so interesting to read accounts of FDR’s rallies in 1934, responding to this populist threat on the left, and his own speech writers and advisors standing offstage, watching FDR and Madison Square Garden and thinking, “Who is this guy? He sounds like a demagogue. He’s going on about evil Wall Street fat cats and this sort of thing. Is this the man we work for?” And they’re horrified.
But this is FDR taking a page from the agitators to his left and cheating in that direction, even though he’s not going whole hog. So some of the most striking case studies in leadership in the book are those that don’t narrowly fit these categories.
Kwame Nkrumah and charisma in an international context
KLUTSEY: One figure who caught my attention was Kwame Nkrumah. I grew up in Ghana, West Africa, so I was very intrigued by this. His inclusion made sense, but I was surprised to find him placed under the expert archetype rather than the prophet, right? Given his Pan-African vision, his almost messianic ambition to unite an entire continent, and the spiritual register of his rhetoric—he had a kind of soaring cadence with his rhetoric, very much like MLK Jr. He seemed prophetic to me. So what drove that classification, and what does it reveal about how the eras or archetypes work at their edges?
WORTHEN: I completely agree with you. And he’s important in the narrative, not so much because he embodies the archetype of expert charisma, but because he’s part of the story of how especially American journalists, scholars, and observers in different subcultures think about the development of leadership in an international context.
So this part of the narrative is really about the long after-effects of World War II and this sense in the aftermath of the war that is held by many academics and thought-leader types that the shorthand for charisma is Adolf Hitler. And if that’s what charismatic demagoguery and [a] emotional relationship with followers, if that’s where it leads to, this sort of maniacal genocide, then charisma has no place in a modern, Western democracy. That’s the lesson.
And so, what follows is about 20 years. It’s this anomalous period in American history when experts and the story that experts tell has the charisma. Otherwise, I think American history is shot through with a real ambivalence toward experts. But there is a tendency in this period to trust the technocrats in the Kennedy administration and this story about America: “If you trust the expert class, they will spread democracy around the world. They will get us to the moon.” Part of this is a story about the world.
And I was so fascinated to watch this generation of social scientists who were writing about the newly independent countries in the global south, trying to piece together a big theory of modernization and a sense of how civilizations develop over time. They began to use the word charisma to describe leaders in newly independent African countries, as a way of identifying this survival of, what was in their view, a pre-modern, inappropriately religious dimension to the connection between this new class of political leaders and their followers that really, in their view, had no place in civilizations, countries they saw as more modern, more developed. I think this was a huge blind spot. I think they lean into this narrative in which the dynamics between Kwame Nkrumah and his constituents are this kind of holdover from an earlier way of relationship between leader and follower that they think is a growing-pains phase that Europeans and Americans have outgrown. And they’re just wrong about that.
But Nkrumah, I think he had a certain agility. I was so fascinated to learn about the way he leveraged his time in Western universities and the elaborate, often very technical quality of his ideological writings that combine different ways of claiming authority into one. But I completely agree with you that one of his major registers was the prophetic.
How media shapes charisma
KLUTSEY: Now each era seems to produce a medium that charismatic leaders learn to inhabit: lyceums, radio, television, and social media. But does technology merely amplify charisma, or does it actually reshape what charisma looks like? I imagine FDR, as you mentioned earlier, may have required a different kind of charisma that JFK’s televised debates needed to be a little bit different. What does that tell us about the present moment and the kinds of technologies that charismatic leaders have to inhabit or learn to shape?
WORTHEN: This is a great question, and it’s one that has really limited historians’ study of charisma. I think there’s been this assumption among many scholars who are interested in the topic that it really doesn’t make sense to even talk about charisma before the age of mass media—that there’s some intrinsic relationship between charismatic leadership and mass media in the modern sense. I think that rules out a whole range of interesting questions about continuity over the long arc of American history.
Where I landed was to conclude that mastery of the age’s most powerful means of mass communication is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of building a charismatic movement. So I’m not sure I could point to a charismatic movement of any lasting consequence where you don’t see successful use of media. And indeed, this is an important part of understanding how charisma travels. And for me, tracing the relationship and the use of media was part of the process of decoupling the power of charisma from the individual leader. The leader is important, but charisma is not just a matter of this ineffable, electric relationship that you have when you are in the presence a leader in a rally or something like this.
A case where this came home to me early on in my research was in tracing out the career of the early Mormons. I became fascinated by these hundreds, north of a thousand, Mormon converts in the United Kingdom who convert to the Mormon faith very early, within a few years of Joseph Smith founding the church. These individuals pack up their lives in the UK. They move across the Atlantic, sight unseen, to this tiny town on the banks of the Mississippi, Nauvoo, Illinois, where their prophet has set up shop. But they’ve never laid eyes on the guy. So it can’t be a story of succumbing to the personal, compelling presence of Joseph Smith. Something else is going on.
It’s an encounter with a story. They are encountering the story of the Book of Mormon, which, of course, features Smith as a major character. He’s important. They’re encountering it through missionaries, through reading the Book of Mormon themselves. And so it’s always the media. The media is the medium through which the story travels.
I think that is what has enabled charismatic leaders in our own time to so successfully cordon-off the story that they are telling their followers from other sources of information. As we have seen the media landscape polarize and fracture, I think it’s become easier for a leader to silo-off followers in the narrative that he or she is crafting. Of course, it’s a story that accelerates with the internet, but it’s a narrative that predates the internet. You can see so many of the core dynamics that have become familiar talking points among people who lament the state of polarized social media and echo chambers. You see all of that certainly by the time Rush Limbaugh is really at his peak in the 1990s.
I think, though, that charismatic leaders in our own time have an outsized cultural authority precisely because institutions are so weak. Charismatic leaders across American history have existed in this kind of delicate, symbiotic relationship of action and reaction with institutions. But I think in the past, more Americans had a stronger, more coherent relationship with institutions and with traditions, all of which provided alternative narratives. So if you’re hearing a guru, a would-be leader, making a sales pitch to you, you hear it. But then, you’ve got other contexts that are functioning as sounding boards. And my suspicion is that in our own time, we are so atomized that we don’t have that thick, embedded sense of connection with these other stories.
Does America generate more charismatic leaders?
KLUTSEY: Now, does America generate charismatic leaders with unusual frequency and intensity, or is that itself a myth? Is there something distinctive about American political culture, its notion of the self-made man, its distrust of inherited authority that makes it especially fertile ground for charismatic leaders to emerge? Maybe not. What do you think?
WORTHEN: I think, for sure, the story I’m telling in this book is very much an American story. There are certain features of the charismatic relationships I’m describing in the book that I think suggest questions and interesting lines of inquiry that apply to other cultures. And the book, as you note, I talk about Nkrumah. I talk about other non-American figures who are operating in conversation with and informing the American story.
But the marrow of the plot of the book is really a story about the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and the way in which the Protestant Reformation cracked open the Catholic Church’s effective monopoly on European connections with the divine and a monopoly on the charismatic story, charisma in both the religious and political sense. And then following the aftermath in this particular American narrative, in which certain dimensions of the Protestant Reformation metastasize that seed of radical individualism, Martin Luther’s insistence that the core of reality is your relationship with your God, God’s justification of you as an individual, and this is in some fundamental way an interior matter that has to do with the state of your conscience—that, of course, for Luther, was not a call to anarchy. He was an institution man in many ways, whatever you make of his “priesthood of all believers” slogan. In the form that impulse takes in America because of a confluence of factors, the messy mix of European immigrants from a range of religious and cultural backgrounds, in conjunction with the particular set of political compromises that the founding fathers come up with—the First Amendment and the disestablishment of religion at a federal level—creates the most open religious marketplace in the world at the time. It’s totally unprecedented.
And so there’s a way in which America becomes this haven for spiritual entrepreneurship, you could say. And it’s also a country with a pretty unique suspicion of centralized authority and institutions in a way that I think has destabilized the authority of institutions in a way that’s quite different from Canada or peer countries in Europe, and that, too, has empowered charismatic leaders.
KLUTSEY: Can charisma help restore that?
WORTHEN: Yes, in so far as charisma is morally neutral, and that’s so important to remember. I’m so glad you asked this question.
I think we tend to use the word charisma in a very charged way. Either we deploy it as a compliment or we use it to describe a kind of snake oil, morally dubious act of manipulation on the part of a leader. And it’s important to stress, in my view, charisma is a dynamic that exists between a leader and followers. Whether a charismatic leader is an agent of moral progress or not has everything to do with whether the story he or she is telling is fundamentally grounded in empirical reality.
So, I write about Martin Luther King Jr. in the book. While being far from a morally flawless person, I think it’s more than fair to say the charismatic movement that he built was an agent of moral progress, precisely because the story he was inviting followers into was not a confected story. It was an invitation to see the facts of their lives in a new light. For African Americans, it was an invitation to reclaim a sense of agency and see themselves as protagonists in a new way, who were not trapped, but could act and act as change agents in history. And then, of course, he was also simply engaging in a prolonged act of waking up white Americans to this reality that they were only dimly conscious of.
And I think that’s in stark contrast to charismatic leaders who absolutely have acted only in the interests of their own power, often with deeply murderous consequences. And when we think about the ideologies and the stories with the most vile consequences, whether you want to look at Nazi ideology or anything in that mode, I think our attention is immediately drawn to the series of simply false claims about humanity and about the good and evil that go into the building of those stories.
So the task for the citizen, for the average person, is to develop a way to fairly evaluate these stories. I think that’s precisely the challenge of responsible citizenship in our own time. It’s become harder to do just that.
What charismatic archetype comes next?
KLUTSEY: Your book ends with President Trump, but obviously history doesn’t end there. If each era generates the charismatic form it needs or deserves, what comes next?
And here is a bit of an unfair question because I’m asking you to forecast a little bit. But can you anticipate the archetype that’s already forming in response to the current moment?
WORTHEN: Boy, I would like to think we’ve hit peak guru as a culture, I hope. I do think there are signs of real exhaustion with the kind of radically anti-institutional, anti-establishment flavor of our current era.
I’m very intrigued by some of the unexpected patterns among younger Americans, Gen Z especially. It is an exaggeration to call their renewed interest in organized religion a revival. I think that’s too strong. But something’s going on.
We’ve seen now for a few years that a plateauing in the number of Americans who call themselves “without any religious affiliation whatsoever.” And we’ve seen a slight, but noticeable, uptick in rates of religious profession and church attendance among millennials and Gen Z, and especially among young men, which, I need to stress, has never happened in the history of modern sociology of Western religion. It’s always women who outnumber men in the pews. And something is happening.
And when I combine these broad demographic shifts, which are not limited to America—there’s interesting poll data coming out of the United Kingdom. France has seen more baptisms in the Catholic Church there than it has for 20 years or more and some of the Scandinavian countries.
When I put those poll numbers into dialogue with conversations I have with my own students, in which a growing number of them just seem to see through the lies that they’ve been told about what constitutes happiness and freedom in modern culture, the lies they’ve been told about their little glowing rectangle as the key to happiness. A surprising number of them are radically unplugging from social media and seeking out in-person relationships. So I think there is a craving for a rootedness and a sense of institutional connection.
But in some important respects, we can’t put the genie back into the bottle. So there’s a way in which the legacy of the second half of the 20th century in America, the post-1960s cult of personal authenticity, the message of the positive psychologists that you are fundamentally a beautiful flower or snowflake—whatever your preferred metaphor—and as soon as you free yourself from the strictures of tradition and the rules of other people, you can fully realize your authentic self. There is some version of that that continues to persist, and I think it infects someone who has become a quite ardent convert to traditional religion. There’s a way in which they bring the 20th century with them into that relationship. So, we certainly will not see a reversion to some earlier period of strong religious institutions. We’ll see the fruit of the ongoing historical dialectic.
KLUTSEY: You anticipated my question because I was going to ask, given that you teach courses like God and Government in America or Sin and Evil in Modern America, what are you seeing amongst your students and whether this—you mentioned the data on young people embracing religion a bit more. I guess it’s deepening. You’re seeing it as a kind of religious seriousness. And whether that sustains over a long period of time or not, I guess it is yet to be seen.
WORTHEN: That’s right, but it’s clear that there’s a real spiritual hunger right now.
A call to self-awareness
KLUTSEY: Yes. Now, studying charisma this closely, spending years inside the logic of how it works, how it seduces, how it manipulates, or how it moves people towards a more moral world, did it change how you experience it yourself? Do you find yourself more susceptible or more immune? And honestly, did you discover any of it in yourself?
WORTHEN: I suppose writing the book has made me more conscious of my own hunger for a story with meaning. I don’t see myself as immune from the broad patterns I’m describing in the book. In many ways, the book is presenting just a theory of what humans are like.
So, I suppose it has wrought for me a lesson that I hope it offers to readers more broadly, and that is a call to self-awareness. There’s almost a spiritual discipline that comes out of being attuned to the power for good or for evil that charismatic leaders have in our culture. And that’s a set of questions that I think we are called to pose to ourselves whenever we feel ourselves compelled by a leader in a way that is tugging on us with new power, but also maybe, more importantly, a set of questions we should ask ourselves when we are struggling to understand our fellow voters or people in another unfamiliar cultural context who are convinced by a leader whose message we find repellent.
I think that it’s important to not stop with the feeling of revulsion and turn away, but to ask, “Okay, what is the story that this leader is telling? And why do I find it so revolting? Is it that he’s telling a false story?” And maybe that’s true. Or, “is it that he’s offering me a role that is deeply unflattering and not in line with how I see myself?” And, well, then, if that’s the case, that should prompt a new round of conversation.
And it’s also an invitation to see categories of people who can sometimes seem very alien, right? If you’re a personally religious person, secular people are baffling and vice versa. It’s a call to see the common substrate of hunger for the transcendent that is there for all of us.
Charismatic leadership and resilience
KLUTSEY: Now, as we wrap up, this podcast is about resilience. By that, I mean the ability of a society, its institutions, and its people to absorb shocks, adapt, innovate and bounce back stronger from challenges. To what extent do you think charismatic leaders can contribute to the kind of resilience that we hope to see, or do they undermine resilience? I think given your previous answers on it being neutral, it all depends, you might say.
WORTHEN: It depends, and I also think it’s useful to distinguish between the career of particular leaders and mass movements and the careers of the stories, which are often much more long lived.
Charisma, as a means of authority, is usually the refuge of the weak. If you as a leader have access to more reliable mechanisms of power, if you have access to high elected office, you have a large military force at your command, you would be much better off putting your chips on those levers of power. So throughout history, those leaders who turn to charisma and rely on a transcendent narrative as a way of fomenting a following, they often do so because they have no other options. They’re closed off from access to institutions, whether it’s because they’re women, or non-white, or otherwise have a marginal status because of their eccentric theologies—you name it.
But there’s a way in which even a movement or a leader whose career is just this brief effervescence can have a very long tail. I would say that while Anne Hutchinson managed to keep a following energized behind her only for a matter of months and ended up banished and murdered in an Indian attack in the Bronx shortly after she was banished, there’s a way in which she had the last laugh. When I think to myself, “Who had more to do with the abiding character of what becomes the American, evangelical Protestant tradition and its vision of the individual’s direct line to the divine for confirmation of personal assurance?” I see that in Anne Hutchinson rather than the Puritan town fathers who had their victory over her in the courtroom in Massachusetts Bay.
So, I like taking the long view of these questions. That’s a historian’s job.
Conclusion
KLUTSEY: Well, Professor Molly Worthen, thank you so much for joining us today. This book, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, it’s one of the most interesting books I have read in a very, very long time. So thank you for writing it.
WORTHEN: Thanks for having me. This has been fun.
