How Charisma Reveals Our Idols

Molly Worthen

We’ve seen in our politics, this sense that there is something at stake in political debates now that seems far greater, much more existential, even cosmic, than just policy debates, right? So my question was, okay, that human religious impulse, it’s no longer in such a reliable way landing in the pews. Where is it landing? Though? I think that looking at the relationship between charismatic leaders and followers is one lens into what’s happened to that impulse as Western society has secularized.

Collin Hansen

It’s maybe the great paradox of humanity. We want to be able to control the world, or at least our own lives. We don’t actually want to be in control. That’s too much responsibility, so we’re willing to hand off that control to someone else. Molly worth and explores that paradox through the lens of charisma in her new book, spellbound how charisma shaped American history, from the Puritans to Donald Trump, published by forum books. Worthen is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m sure many of you remember her story from this podcast a couple years ago, and I’m thrilled that she’s back to discuss her new book now. Molly quips quote some vaguely disreputable revival is always going on somewhere in America, even if mainstream media are slow to know us. Notice, religion is one major way that we tried to resolve this paradox of control. She further explains this, if we define the religious impulse as a hunger for transcendent meaning and a reflex to worship, then it is a human instinct only slightly less basic than the need for food and shelter. And Americans are no less religious than they have ever been. They will always find a way to satisfy these desires, even if charisma carries them down strange and costly paths. Now, in studying charisma, we’re not looking for arguments, facts or even personality. Here’s how Molly defines it. Quote, the heart of charisma is the act of unveiling a hidden narrative and invites followers to take up roles in a roster of morally Stark characters and fold their lives into a plot line curving toward justice. All right, enough. Introduction. I’m intrigued. Molly, welcome back. Let’s hear more about this powerful impulse. Great to hear from you again. Thanks for having me. All right. Well, let’s start with an update. How are you what’s what’s life look like for you these days?

Molly Worthen

It’s, it’s good. I, you know, professionally, I’m, I’m this summer, gonna be be full professor. So that holds me at the top of the the food chain, which is very exciting. And academia, I I’m still a member of the same church that I was part of when, when we first spoke, summit church based in Raleigh, campuses all over the triangle this semester,

Speaker 1

good Christian community there, yeah, yeah. I think that

Molly Worthen

the picture is, I think when we spoke last I expressed a desire for more, more relationships with with Christians. And certainly, that’s that’s come to pass. And I am, this semester, co leading a Bible study for the first time, which is really great. I really, I love it. It’s, I mean, you know, as with all teaching, it’s the way I find I learn the most, is being actually responsible for helping other people wrestle with the text. And I’m really, I’m really enjoying that. And, you know, I think that the many non believers I’m close to, which is, you know, most of my world still have kind of, you know, I’ve been a Christian now for two and a half years. The sky didn’t fall. I’m still like a normal person. I think they’re mostly persuaded I’m not in a cult. So all that is positive, mostly persuaded. Mostly, you’re right. Mostly, it’s probably a good, good caveat.

Collin Hansen

Well, very good people are eager to hear that I’m I can’t tell you how many people after the last interview, reached out saying I sent Molly an email, and I said I’ll be her friend.

Molly Worthen

I it turns out. It turns out when you tell the evangelical internet that you’ve become an evangelical and you want friends, a lot of them, right, right? You it was, it was really the outpouring of affection and support and encouragement was, really mind boggling. I was so grateful.

Collin Hansen

Okay, you’re grateful for it. I thought it was pretty sweet. People just took it very genuine. They connected with you in that interview, just like, just like I did, hearing that story and just wanted to reach out and let you know that you’re not alone and encourage you.

Molly Worthen

I mean, I think my favorite was one guy who. Sent me this five volume collection of Charles Spurgeon sermons like he just, you know, I don’t know who he is, like some guy in Alabama that was awesome, you know. Well,

Collin Hansen

believe it or not, from this guy in Alabama, my copy of those exact same sermons are still on my shelf, so they weren’t mine. I didn’t drop a wasn’t you? Place must have been one of my many, many cousins here in the great state of Alabama. Let’s talk about spellbound, and we’ll go back and we’ll weave through some of these other questions. You must have been writing this book before and after your conversion, right?

Molly Worthen

Absolutely, I was about two thirds of the way through writing the first big draft when I got interrupted.

Collin Hansen

It’s a good way to put it notice any ways that your faith has affected your scholarship before and after

Molly Worthen

so something I’m thinking a lot about, and I think my my big answer is the changes are not are not enormous, and I think that’s because my whole life as a student of religious and intellectual history, I think perhaps I’ve always been operating on assumptions that are basically Christian or theistic in important ways, and my conviction has always been, and this is what attracted me, both to the study of religion and to my early, halting, failed attempts to become a Christian myself. You know, in college and in grad school, I had the sense that to understand humans, you have to understand religion, that this is, this is just core to who we are as a species. And so that that was a, you know, that was a view that I, that I came to long before, you know, I found, I found Christ, and in a sense, the arc of my own story. I mean, it just, it just confirms what, you know, maybe every, every scholar, has to confront some version of which is that as much as it is my job to maintain as much kind of objective distance on my subject, whatever it might be, as I can, at some important level, I am, I’m part of the human species too. I am subject to the same patterns that I am perhaps observing in the people I’m writing about. And so, you know, in that sense, I suppose it made, it made a certain degree of logical sense that I would find myself on that spiritual path at the same time that I was writing about the persistent religious impulse in humans across the centuries.

Collin Hansen

Now, some people, when they hear charisma, it’s, I mean, it’s really all over the map in terms of what they think that connotation is, and most people’s connotation is going to be about a certain way of behaving in a captivating way. I think let’s try to get a little bit more precise on this with this book and some other people, especially listening and watching this podcast, they’re going to think about charisma. They might actually go all the way back to the to the Greek in the New Testament there. So could explain, what is the relationship between New Testament charisma and then political charisma?

Molly Worthen

Yeah, this is a great question. And part of why I wanted to dive into this subject in a multi year research project was precisely because it’s this vague term that I think we throw around a lot. I think we punt to the word charisma. When we are watching something unfold between a leader and followers and we can’t quite figure out what is going on. There’s not like an obvious material quid pro quo happening. You know, there’s something about the dynamic that seems it defies reason if you are on the outside of it. And so you know what’s going on. One of the biggest surprises I had in this project is going in I expected I would be writing a lot about amazing public speakers, individuals who are really charming, good looking, great sex appeal, you know, have some ability to cultivate celebrity. And what I found is that charisma, while it can coexist with charm and celebrity, it’s distinct. And as you said in your introduction, I really found that the core of it, and this applies, at least in a broad sense, both to the religious kind of New Testament sense as well as as the more colloquial political sense we use the term in commonly today, is this ability to invite followers into into a transcendent story that puts their sort of puny mortal existence in a new, bigger frame with supernatural consequences. Now a more kind of targeted answer to your question is to look at the word charisma. Because, certainly, until a little bit more than 100 years ago, the term charisma was this obscure term that you would only encounter in Biblical Studies and church history. Three and, you know, it comes from the ancient Greek root charis, meaning gift from the gods, and has a, you know, kind of an ambivalent sense in ancient Greek contexts. Can be a gift that redounds to the benefit, or, you know, the one that comes with curses for the human recipients. And Paul takes that and he makes it charisma in the New Testament, and he uses it in a range of contexts. You know, in some cases, he uses it to really describe the gift of salvation, you know, grace in the broadest sense. And then in other in other contexts, he uses it to describe very specific spiritual gifts. You know, speaking in tongues, prophecy, interpretation of tongues, healing, this kind of thing. Now, around the turn of the 20th century, the German sociologist Max Weber was hearing lectures and reading in church history and and he was working on his own theories of Western modernity, and especially in the American context, he was working on his famous book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and was really interested in the persistent human hunger for divine assurance and how the Puritan theology gets kind of translated into worldly aspirations. And you know what he maps out as capitalism, and he decided to borrow the term charisma from his colleagues in church history and essentially suggest to this new burgeoning discipline of secular social scientists that this term is still useful for describing the Relationship between leaders and followers that is premised on some supernatural quality or feat that the leader claims to be able to execute, and a kind of bargain that he strikes with his followers, that he, you know, he can demonstrate that he is The he is the messenger sent by the gods now. Now, Weber was trying to make sense of a range of contexts. He was, you know, he writes about, you know, some particular leaders in the context of Austrian politics at this time, as well as someone like Joseph Smith, the founder of of the Mormon church. But What’s so striking is, as much as he’s trying to make this term palatable to secular colleagues. You read him on this and he is still retaining so much religious theological significance he can’t get away from, you know, even. And to call it just metaphors, I think, to understate the degree to which he’s still acknowledging that there’s something, there’s something that’s still necessary in appealing beyond kind of materialist, rationalist frames and Weber. I mean, he’s, he’s one of my intellectual heroes, because as much as he called himself religiously un musical, you know, he wasn’t himself a man of faith. And he’s this great theorist of modernity. He saw, in this clear eyed way, what was dangerous about the, you know, the growing edifice of bureaucracy and the kind of dehumanizing tendencies in the West. And he he saw charismatic leaders as this unpredictable sort of X factor that would, you know, occasionally break through what he called the iron cage of modernity. And so it’s through, you know, the kind of translation of Weber scholarship. And then, you know, the American English speaking scholars begin to sprinkle the word, you know, in our discourse. Journalists are using it by the 1960s and here we are throwing it around, you know, with this vague sense that it means a magnetic leader has got some power over followers.

Collin Hansen

Yeah, now, as I just reflect broadly on this, this concept in this book, are you trying to argue that this is a unique or interesting, at least, lens through which we can look at American religious history, including politics. Or do you see this as something like the secret to understanding how it all fits together? Which one like

Molly Worthen

all fits together? In the sense of, you know, a timeless master key to the human species?

Collin Hansen

Well, in the sense of, what in the world do the Puritans have to do with Donald Trump? Yeah, well, that’s what I mean, okay.

Molly Worthen

I mean, you know, it’s very much a book about about America, and so I’m not, you know, I would never suggest that the, you know, the charismatic types that I map, you know, and that kind of rise and fall in cultural effectiveness over these 400 years that I cover, that they would translate in a seamless way to other cultural contexts. I’m really, I’m really interested in America as a kind of proving ground for certain impulses that really come out of the Reformation. And this is, this is a post reformation story. About modernity and about what happens to the human search for intellectual and other kinds of authority in the aftermath of the of the kind of crack up that that happens in the context of the Reformation and the the, you know, diversification of, you know, much more pluralistic ideologies getting instantiated in you know, structures of authority that people are dealing with, and those tendencies and the tensions they get kind of supercharged in the context of America, because it is, you know, to a much greater degree than any other peer country, this kind of free for All that nurtures a kind of chaos and religious entrepreneur, entrepreneurial ism but I suppose the one of the driving questions for me going into this research project was the sense that the usual tools that scholars of religion and journalists interested in religion have used for generations to try to keep track of what people think and how, how their religious ideas interact with how they live their lives was playing out because, you know, we we’ve seen, of course, the poll data has gotten more complicated in the past year or two. But I mean, for for the past generation, every poll suggests, right, that a, you know, a greater number of Americans are disaffiliating with traditional organized religion. They’re not, you know, going to church as often, right? And yet, at the same time, we know that the majority of Americans continue to pray regularly, that, you know, almost 90% of them say that they believe in at least one new age belief, right? Like karma, reincarnation, telepathy, we’ve, we’ve seen in our politics this sense that there is something at stake in political debates now that seems far greater, much more existential, even cosmic, than just policy debates, right? So my question was, okay, that that human religious impulse, it’s no longer in such a reliable way, landing in the pews. Where is it landing? Now, I think that looking at the relationship between charismatic leaders and followers is not the only it’s not the master key, but it’s one lens into what’s happened to that impulse as Western society has secularized.

Collin Hansen

Yeah, one of the major argument they have in this book that what scholars call secularization. You contend primarily a story about traditional institutions losing influence over individuals, as you clarify, then this is not a collapse of Westerners spiritual needs, exactly. Yeah. Big argument there in the book is charisma, something you study, or something that just or in practice learn how to practice, just emerges. I’m just wondering, how do you gain the skill to convince people they can access secret knowledge, supernatural promise and special status as heroes? In

Molly Worthen

the later part of the book, I got interested in the rise of Leadership Studies. And this, this growing sense in, you know, the context of business schools and the burgeoning industry of management consultants, that there is a kind of formula that effective leadership, especially in the business context, but also in politics and in church life can be, can be taught. And there’s a way in which I think that that language of, you know, let’s sort of democratize this as long as you can, you know, afford to pay for the, you know, the seminar, conference fee or take the class you too can be charismatic. I think it is a bit of a false story, because it suggests a kind of leveling and democratization that I don’t think really lines up with what really, really was happening in corporate America or in our institutions at this time that said, I suppose you know, one of the one of the major lessons for me in in doing this research, is that if the heart of charisma is being able to to identify kind of communities in your in your surrounding context who are not who are getting left out of the kind of dominant narratives, and to identify the driving anxieties and the worries that that people are wrestling with, and then to to tell a new story about What is real, and to suggest to people a new way of understanding reality and their own roles in the path from where we are now to some distant source of meaning, then the answer to your question is to some extent Yes, a close study of context, a. That reveals those things can absolutely give, give an aspiring leader a road map. And, you know, I want to stress too, my view is that charisma is, is morally neutral, right? I think we, we often kind of have this, you know, nefarious or in some way negative association with that term. We manipulation exactly or

Collin Hansen

or an expression of populism. So it could be juxtaposed against elitism or against expertise, if you have that approach, yeah,

Molly Worthen

yes, yeah, absolutely, and it very much can be, you know, a kind of acid as a force, you know, dissolving things that we that we value. But you know, you can find it, and this is true in the narrative I lay out. You can find charisma in Hitler and you can find it in Martin Luther King, right? So it is. It is not in itself, a moral evil. It’s a kind of authority that it can exist separate from institutional power or military force or authority that comes from tradition and hierarchy. It’s premised on this special relationship between leaders and followers that can allow a kind of end run around institutions of power. But I think where it, where it slides into moral hazards, is commonly when it when it comes into alliance with these other forms of force. So that’s something that the historian has to kind of tease apart. Well,

Collin Hansen

I guess that’s part of the question. What’s the difference between charisma and demagoguery?

Molly Worthen

In my I wrote a fun chapter about the kind of 1920s and 1930s and the context of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his efforts to fend off challenges, especially from from Huey Long the former governor of Louisiana, then then senator. And I write too about Amy simple McPherson and the kind of cauldron of Pentecostal revivalism at this time. And one thing that stood out to me as I was going through the primary sources about Huey Long and also about FDR, you know, reading takedowns, by his criticism, by his critics, you know his rival, Al Smith and conservative journalists, I came away thinking, Well, to some extent, one one man’s charismatic leader is another man’s demagogue, right? I mean, the to call someone a demagogue is to is to observe perhaps that this, this a particular kind of charismatic relationship. I call the dominant type in that era, the agitator. And it is this particular anti institutional stance that derives authority from a particular kind of attack on established institutions. But if you are within that, if you are persuaded that you know Huey Long’s account of the raw deal that you know the big wigs and the fat cats are providing the American people is is the true picture of reality, then he is no demagogue. I mean, as one, as one of his, as one of his followers, wrote in a letter, he is like Jesus, right? Like this is the kind of language that you encounter. You know, reading about about Huey Long and people who resonate in that way, right?

Collin Hansen

Well, let’s jump straight from you. You mentioned Emmy simple McPherson. You mentioned Huey Long in there. You know, this starts in your account with Anne Hutchinson serves in the Puritan era. Do you personally admire any of the figures discussed in your book?

Molly Worthen

Wow, it’s so I mean, you, you asked that, and it strikes me as a question that should have been obvious to me, but it wasn’t. Yeah, I think, I think I never, I never consider it my, my job to ask that question myself,

Collin Hansen

right? It may not. It doesn’t have to be a moral category. Let’s we can. Let’s broaden it out. It can also just be somebody who’s just really interesting. A lot of interesting people in here, and Hutchinson is pretty darn interesting,

Molly Worthen

absolutely, yeah. And I mean, as I’m as I’m pondering your question, I’m realizing that I tend to be personally drawn to the the kind of characters on the edge of the story. We’re trying to make sense of it, like Max Weber, right? That’s cool, but that’s cool. There’s, I mean, there’s a there’s a great deal to admire in in Anne Hutchinson, who, you know, caused so much consternation for the the magistrates and clergy of, you know, Massachusetts Bay in the in the 1630s I do think that some of the ways in which that admiration comes out in kind of modern popular culture is based on misunderstandings that, you know, she, she was some kind of proto feminist. Or, you know, great, great speech, free speech. Bucha advocate. She doesn’t fit into any of the boxes that I think we would like to put her in today. She’s

Collin Hansen

not a conservative or a progressive in the ways that we would look at that because right she was the views she held would not be held by people who had described themselves as progressive later yet the same time, she clearly was upending the system right in ways that would come to be, that would become quintessentially American. That’s right, in some ways, she’s a she’s a prototype, I

Molly Worthen

think so. I mean, so. And she’s also, if you zoom out and you consider her in the context of kind of a transatlantic picture and the religious landscape that is developing in, you know, the British Isles at this time, especially just a few years later, in the context of the of the English Civil War, you see that she’s, she’s, she’s not an outlier, no, in her, in her core insight that, you know, the their Christianity, of course, is is built on A set of interlocking paradoxes. And one of the key paradoxes, this is not just true for Puritans. It’s a big picture paradox that’s been true for 2000 years, is the paradox between our free will and our responsibility, right and God’s sovereignty. You know, Puritans would say, reform. Folks would say, you know, the high view of election, right? And the Puritan town fathers saw that to really make this, this young, vulnerable, fragile community function, to get people to accept their roles in this community and a sense of responsibility, then they had to, they had to press on that paradox a little bit and emphasize, okay, yes, God ultimately has chosen whether you know you are elect or damned from the beginning of time. But you can do certain things to prepare yourself you know, for that moment when, when you know you feel you know his tap on your shoulder, and if you are truly one of the elect, your life ought to demonstrate it. Anne Hutchinson saw that that this, this paradox, was deeply uncomfortable, and that there was a hunger for more, more direct information, a direct line to the Holy Spirit, confirming divine assurance. And you asked about the, you know, the through line from from Anne Hutchinson to Donald Trump. And I do think that what the Puritans articulate as that desire for divine assurance, that desire to to know in some certain way that I am chosen, I am part of this bigger story. And with that comes simultaneously a sense of empowerment, like I am, I am part of this divine Vanguard, and yet also comfort. You know, God is taking care of this. Ultimately, I will see justice no matter what I’m suffering in this, in this time that that, you know, the Puritans call it divine assurance, and maybe the language changes, but that is this persistent human desire, you know. So as much as we want to stress all of the ruptures and discontinuities between our own era of smartphones and social media, and you know, all of this and and the context of the 17th century, I just don’t think humans have changed quite as much right as as they, as we sometimes flatter ourselves when we when we say we are, you know, we are modern. And then Hutchinson wasn’t well,

Collin Hansen

Molly, this is your third major book. Did you just describe your through line in all of your works, that intellectual paradox. Essentially,

Molly Worthen

I think I’ve always been preoccupied with questions of intellectual authority, yeah, and how do people find a path through modernity? I don’t, I mean, I’ve never. I’m someone who just sort of Bumbles into things I don’t have, you know, a grand plan. But when I look back over the biography I wrote of a diplomat turned professor and my own kind of wrestling through higher education was my first book, last book, apostles of reason. And then this one, you’re right that that is, that is a common thread. Well,

Collin Hansen

I mean, it’s an interesting one. I just think all of your works explore the different intellectual paradoxes that we have to navigate in the discontinuities and continuities of the progress of history. So the the continuities in terms of, we’re still human beings, but the discontinuities in terms of, like, the the conditions of modernity do, do change in some substantial ways? I think you probably already answered this question as well, but in your previous answer. But can you explain why President Trump seems to get along so well with Pentecostal pastors such as Paula white? Yeah. This is this is really

Molly Worthen

interesting. I. And, you know, it’s been, and this is probably true for you, too, for the past 10 years. Like I just it’s the question I’m asked most, most frequently, you know, explain Trump’s relationship to religious Americans in general, and then this particular subculture has gotten more attention lately. You know, I think, I think part of the answer has to do with with political pragmatism and and, you know, alliances that make sense when, when people are willing to prioritize a particular policy interest, whether it’s, you know, a more effective elimination of abortion or a kind of rollback of secular liberal, you know, picture of human sexuality in mainstream culture, and then that means a certain willingness to look aside and ignore bigger worldview differences. But I think there’s more going on here with Trump and his relationship with charismatic Christians. First of all, it’s worth remembering that, you know, while I think it’s a stretch to describe the President as an Orthodox Christian in any recognizable sense, he grew up attending norman vincent Peale’s marble Collegiate Church in New York. Right? Peale was the grandfather of American prosperity gospel. And the more I study American religious history, the more I think that that prosperity gospel kind of New Thought you can think or pray, the reality you want into existence, just you know, your personal material success is about aligning yourself with the energies of the universe, this kind of amorphous tradition that goes back at least to the early 19th century. It’s one of, if not the dominant American spiritual traditions you know, like it or not, and it is Trump’s native theological language, in a sense. And while you know, one can only speculate on his true heart views when it comes to Jesus. I think it’s pretty clear that he has a great deal of of heartfelt faith in in his power to speak reality into existence in a way that you know resonates with this long standing pattern in American thinking that’s that’s broader than the independent charismatic pastors he has formed alliances with. I think that that story, the Paula white story, and that kind of network of charismatic pastors and evangelists, is one of, I think political and cultural navigation on both sides. I think Trump correctly saw if we were, if we put ourselves back in 2015 when the evangelical establishment was largely still quite skeptical of him, he saw there were these other actors who had enormous numbers behind them in terms of people listening to their media ministries and attending their churches. You know, he was aware of Paula white as early as 2002 he saw her TV show. He liked her, her shtick and her, you know, I mean, she’s, she does fit into a certain type that he’s, you know, populated his administration with, right? And so he called her up, and he and they had a relationship, you know, from long before he was a kind of serious political contender, although you can go back and watch, you know, his appearances on Oprah Larry King Live in the 90s, and hear him speculating about running for president. So this has been on his mind for a long time, and I think on the other side, independent charismatic pastors, I think, felt that they were, they were on the outside, and here was, here was someone inviting them to the table in a way that was very attractive. But there is in I think, independent charismatic theology, there’s a way in which this, this very high view of Holy Spirit power, which is, it is biblical. It has gotten. It can be kind of untethered from the discipline of tradition and ecclesiological institutions in a and sometimes it gets kind of woven into a very vivid apocalyptic sense of expectation. And part of me listens to these independent charismatic preachers and thinks, you know, this is a, this is a, this is a useful correction and lesson for those Christians. And there are many of us who are inclined to kind of domesticate the radical things that you read about the Holy Spirit and what, what Jesus says we can ask for in the Gospel. On the other hand, there is this, there’s there’s this, this pressing danger of human hubris getting tied up in this. Confidence of, you know, Holy Spirit, expectation. And I think that’s one that when it gets kind of weaponized in a political context, can can really be quite dangerous.

Collin Hansen

Who wants to chew on there just in that answer. But more broadly, in this book, the book is spellbound how charisma shaped American history from the Puritans to Donald Trump. It’s new from forum books Molly, have one last question for you. This last slide for your book sounds familiar? Quote, The best way to understand people is to examine the idols they worship and the stories they tell themselves. End. Quote, last line in your book, why’d you want readers to end there.

Molly Worthen

I think our our inclination when when reading about charismatic leaders, when observing the phenomenon of charismatic relationships and in the culture around us, is to see it as a phenomenon that other people are involved in and susceptible to and and to avoid the obvious question, which is, what idols do I worship? You know, which figures perhaps have outsized, hazardous authority over over my life? What are my grounds for believing that the picture of reality presented by you, name it, my favorite podcaster, my pastor, this political figure, I’ve put a lot of hope into that that picture of reality presented by this person is based on something true. We are creatures prone to constant self justification and motivated reasoning and willful blindness, right? I mean, just seems like the social scientific studies that confirm that are only ratifying what the theologians and philosophers have known for millennia. And so I wanted to end the book with you know, not in a didactic way, but a call to just maybe turn the lens that you’re invited into in reading the book onto yourself.

Collin Hansen

What’s great way to end? Great way to end the interview. Molly, worth it has been my guest on gospel bound. The book is spell bound. How charisma shaped American history, from the Puritans to Donald Trump Molly, it’s great to have you back, and we’re gonna have to find another excuse. I can’t wait this long for another book, so we’ll have to find another excuse get get you back in short order. Thanks a lot.

Molly Worthen

Thanks so much.