Charisma: The Hidden Dynamic That Shapes Our World with Molly Worthen

Welcome to all of you joining us for today’s online conversation with Molly Worthen on Charisma, the hidden dynamic that shapes the world. We’re delighted that so many of you have registered today, and if you haven’t already done so, let us know where you’re joining us from in the chat box. It’s always fun to see people tuning in from all over the world. I’d like to send a special welcome to our first time guests who are joining us today, as well as to our nearly 100 international guests joining us from around 20 different countries that we know of, ranging from Mexico to Malaysia and beyond. So if you haven’t already done so, let us know where you’re from. And welcome. It’s just really, it’s good to see so many people here today. If you are one of those first-time attendees or are otherwise new to the work of the Trinity Forum, we seek to provide space for leaders to wrestle with the big questions of life in the context of faith and offer an invitation to ultimately come to better know the author of the answers. Our programs and publications are designed to be hospitable spaces where we can wrestle with those great truths together. And we’re glad you’re here. Our guest today is a scholar who has analyzed the strangeness and volatility of our contemporary life through what might be a surprising conceptual lens, a word first coined by the Apostle Paul.

Charisma. After Paul used the term in his letters to the Romans and Corinthians to describe the gifts of the spirit that reveal themselves in her followers as well as the gift of salvation itself. Others from outside the faith saw that he was onto something, and sought to adapt and apply the idea to their corners of the world. And while the meaning and manifestations of the idea of charisma has continued to evolve, our guest today argues that understanding charisma is vital to understanding history, particularly American history, where this hidden dynamic helps explain the forces that create leaders, enthrall followers, and shape our world. Molly Worthen is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as a freelance journalist. She has lectured widely as well as taught courses on North American religious and intellectual history, global Christianity, and the history of ideas, and has written widely on religion, politics, and higher education for The New York Times, as well as contributing to The New Yorker, Slate, The American Prospect, Foreign Policy Magazine, and many other publications. She’s also the author of several book-length works, including Apostles of Reason and The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost, as well as her latest work, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History From the Puritans to Donald Trump, which we’ve invited her here today to discuss. Molly, welcome.

Thanks so much for having me.

It’s great to have you here. So as we start out, um, many of us nowadays think of charisma as perhaps an engaging magnetic personality type, someone perhaps like, unusually charming or larger than life. But you have used the term very differently. And in fact, in the many examples of charismatic leadership that you describe in your book, and there are many, many of them are far from charming, I would say. So as we start out, it would be helpful just to kind of get a sense of, what is charisma as you’re defining it, and why do you believe that it is so vital to understanding American religious, cultural, and political life?

This is a great place to start. When I began this project, I was interested in writing about charisma, both in that New Testament sense and the various manifestations of the Holy Spirit, how American Christians and people adjacent to Christian culture have interpreted supernatural action in the world, but then also charisma in this much fuzzier sense. It’s a word that over the past 2 or 3 generations, Americans have used with increasing frequency to talk about politics, religion, and other other spheres where a leader has some kind of ineffable hold over followers. But I think it’s often a term that we punt to when we are witnessing a dynamic between a leader and followers that we don’t quite understand. We can’t interpret it. We can’t figure out, you know, kind of what is what is the deal? Why why are these people attracted to this, to this individual? And certainly when I began this project, I confused charisma with charm. I thought I would be writing about loads of really good-looking people who knew how to work the room at a cocktail party and, you know, make you feel like the center of attention. And they would probably all be amazing public speakers. And that turned out to be true here and there. But really, it was more the exception than the rule. The the pattern that emerged was that charismatic leaders are deeply polarizing. There is some broad swath of people who find them really compelling, but just as many, probably more people who find them revolting and not too many who are lukewarm.

Where I ended up landing on this, this, uh, sort of political sense of charisma, what this means, is that the heart of charisma is not charm. It’s a kind of storytelling. It’s a relationship between the leader and followers, premised on the leader’s ability to invite followers into a new, transcendent narrative that connects their individual, puny, private chaos and suffering and frustration to a much bigger story with a meaning well beyond themselves and and gives them simultaneously a sense of some agency, some idea where it’s all headed, but not too much control; also provides a sense of security, having turned over the reins to a person to forces bigger than yourself. And I think the reason it’s polarizing has everything to do with the fact that the charisma resides in the story. So if a leader is inviting you into a narrative that makes better sense of your life than the other narratives on offer in the culture, And you like the role he’s offering you, then you’re probably going to be attracted. But if instead he or she has written you out of the story or cast you as a villain, you are going to find that individual pretty repulsive, regardless of of their public speaking skills.

Or you know, how how winning their smile is. And understanding charisma as a story helped me, I think, see it as a lens through which to understand the particular anxieties and desires that pervade American culture in different periods of this country’s history. And it helped me kind of begin to answer a big question that I guess I’ve been wrestling with for years as a historian who’s focused on religion. And that is, where exactly do human religious impulses go as a society is secularizing, if by that we mean we’re seeing a decline in participation in organized religion. You know, the the places that scholars and journalists normally go to to get some sort of shorthand for religious belief and practice in a country. Those those usual, you know, sources of poll data, statements from, you know, the elite pulpits. That’s no longer really giving us kind of the pulse of American spirituality, I think, in the way it once did. But I’ve always believed that humans are, in a pretty fundamental sense, religious beings and that we crave a way to connect ourselves to a transcendent story. We crave an object of worship. Just because that impulse is not landing as frequently as it once did in churches doesn’t mean it’s evaporating. We just have to look elsewhere. And maybe the relationship between some leaders and followers is a place to look.

That’s so interesting. And boy, is there a lot to unpack there. But one of the first things that sort of occurred to me is that, you know, so many of the explanations for our current civic challenges, political and cultural dysfunctions and so on are at least somewhat materialist. You know, certainly secular. And in some ways, it sounds like what you’re saying, what your book is saying is that, where we are is almost the inevitable outcome of unmet spiritual hungers. I mean, the call to be part of a transcendent story that is larger than yourself is in many ways a religious appeal. Do I have that right? Or would you would you modulate that?

I think that’s right. I think there there have been, uh, sort of shifts over time in how historians have made sense of the mix of human of motivations, and I think for a long time, and perhaps this is still true among kind of the mainstream of secular historians of American history, there is a tendency to emphasize material motives and hypothesize that people who are attracted to a mass movement of one kind or another, and certainly people who are attracted to highly supernaturally inflected forms of religion. Oh, well, they must be people who are really have-nots in the economic sense. The old phrase, you know, for thinking about millenarian movements or Pentecostals was, well, those are examples of the religion of the dispossessed. But there’s been a more recent wave of scholarship that’s really challenged that and gone back and looked at some of some particular moments, for example, done some more granular socioeconomic analysis of the 1906 Azusa Street Revival and the explosion of modern Pentecostalism that followed that, and these scholars have revised the initial conclusion of earlier historians who said that that movement was really just, you know, impoverished and lower working class people. And they’ve said, in fact, there’s evidence to suggest that it’s a much more socioeconomically diverse group of people who are attracted to this, to this message and this invitation to encounter the divine and step outside their, you know, their sort of usual lanes of living. In my kind of survey of these four centuries of history and a pretty wide range of movements that we might classify as religious and others that we would classify as more political, i find that, yes, there’s always there’s always some desire, some want, something that for the follower is is not being satisfied, a question that needs answering. But people feel alienated from the universe for all kinds of reasons. And, you know, sometimes people who are very comfortably, materially, are existentially miserable. And just as you know, wanting of a of a charismatic relationship that explains that as someone who is materially struggling.

Yeah. You know, you mentioned just a minute or two ago the invitation into a broader story, which also, it seems like is essentially implied and involves an act of surrender. And there seems to be kind of a paradox going on. Like in some cases, the leader essentially offers, you know, a larger story, empowerment, new meaning, new significance. But in at least some cases, in actuality, what they’re doing is, they’re grabbing more power for themselves but but not for others. They’re not spreading the empowerment. So I’d be curious to hear your thoughts about how it actually plays out. And on top of that, perhaps you can reflect a little bit about the appeal of the charismatic leader to someone who seems like they might be outside the story, even excluded by the story. And part of what I’m thinking about here is, you know, on one side of the family, like, well, my late grandmother was a member of a very legalistic, very fundamentalist church with a pastor who was very charismatic. There was very little role for women at all in the story that he offered besides service and self erasure. And yet there was an appeal to his, uh, particular strand of, of charismatic leadership that seemed undeniable. What do followers get in an instance like that and why are there so many of us who seem to want to surrender to a larger story in a society that seems to, or at least claims to so value autonomy?

Boy, that is a really rich question. And there’s there’s so much variety across the, I think, different, different examples that I have circled circulating in my mind now. I mean, this, this question of, of gender is particularly interesting because I found actually myself writing about more instances of women who are making claims to charismatic authority in the earlier period of American history, before they had more reliable access to other forms of authority. You know, I riff very much in my way of defining charisma on on Max Weber, the German sociologist who set charismatic authority in contrast with authority premised on institutional position or tradition, or having access to a lot of military power. And in many ways, charismatic authority is the option of the weak. It’s the move you make if you if you want power your you’re called you have a vocation and you have no more reliable worldly means of acting on it and you need to do a kind of end run around hierarchical authority. And I think the way this, this, this plays out in the kind of power charisma ultimately gives the leader depends a lot on whether the whether the leader is able to kind of instantiate that charismatic authority in an institution, in a set of practices and procedures that do provide a way of kind of corralling and controlling followers. And often that’s not that’s not present. And so there is, there is a simultaneously like a real fiery power to charisma, but also an ephemeral dimension to it.

It can, if it’s not kind of embedded in structures relatively quickly, it can, it can, you know, sort of evaporate if followers change their minds. I mean, I begin the book at a point in American history when there’s really not much daylight between charisma in the New Testament sense and charisma in that more political sense. And that is in Puritan Massachusetts in the 1630s. And I start with the story of the famous Puritan heretic, Anne Hutchinson, who is this, uh, kind of self-taught – I almost think of her as a theologian in the trenches, because she was kind of part doing part time work as a midwife, so she was helping families, you know, deal with the regular rhythm of infant and maternal suffering and death that just was, you know, a huge part of the human experience until relatively recently in our history. And I think as a consequence, frankly, of that experience, she saw the way in which the version of, of reformed Protestant discipleship that she and her fellow colonists were hearing from the Puritan pulpit was not was not really answering their questions. The Puritan ministers were trying to sort of do the, you know, balance that tension that is always present in the Christian tradition between emphasizing God’s, uh, free and capricious grace and the need for Christians to, yeah, you know, live like Jesus and walk with Jesus.

Right. And so they they preached a message of preparation, that you you can do certain things, you can’t control whether or not you are among the elect, but you can do certain things to guarantee you are ready if that call from God comes. And Anne Hutchinson began holding meetings in her, in her house that initially were just a few women gathered once a week to discuss the sermon from the previous weekend. They quickly expanded. Women began bringing their husbands. They started meeting twice a week, having to, you know, bring extra chairs into the into the parlor to make room for people. And word got out that she was criticizing her, these ministers, most of them, and saying that they were effectively preaching works righteousness, earned salvation. And in fact, her message was, you can, you know, through studying the Bible and and just discerning, listening for the Holy Spirit, you can expect you can expect God to tap you on the shoulder. You can expect to hear directly that you are among the elect. And I think that this, this invitation, this, it speaks directly to the kind of paradoxical need that you’re I think you’re articulating, that people want simultaneously freedom and security. Because it is a message, especially if you think about the lived experience of these families, you know, who’s, you know, maybe scratching their heads and just devastated in the wake of a stillbirth and trying to make sense of, you know, what is God’s intention here? How do we think about the ultimate fate of that infant? And a message that is more that allows for a sort of more direct line to the to the Holy Spirit is is really compelling.

And at a certain point, she had half the congregation of Boston on her side supporting her criticisms of of the elite magistrates and ministers. But fairly soon the disciplinary machinery of the colony gets sort of into action, and she’s put on trial and and banished. But in many ways she has, I think, kind of the last word, because when I think about the the marrow of her message, this emphasis on the personal relationship with the divine, that seems to me to really be the the abiding through line in so much of American spirituality – Christian or not. So I think in communities like the one you’re describing, you know, there is this there there’s often this, this balance between a, a lived, you know, weekly routine that is fairly circumscribed, that often involves deference to, you know, the person claiming authority. But usually there is this, there are mechanisms and ideas and practices that allow for the experience of a kind of, you know, red phone hotline to the divine that give you a sense of that, that balance of, of security and yet freedom, yet being sort of part of this active vanguard of the work God’s doing in the world.

Yeah. You know, it’s it’s interesting because, as you say in many ways, Anne Hutchinson, what she preached remains very in fact, I think there’s many who may not consider her a heretic at all. And, you know, even in the ways that you have described or even defined, charisma, like the unveiling of a hidden narrative. One of the things that sort of strikes me is like there’s a sense in which charisma is not too far from perhaps, related to Gnosticism. Um, you know, in basically divining or intuiting hidden or secret knowledge that helps make sense of the world and our place in it. Uh, which and just a little bit further out, perhaps our, our conspiracies, uh, which also seem not at all unrelated. I’m curious, do you see a link between these or, um, is that just the perversion of of charisma?

I think there absolutely is a link. And that is a pattern I noticed in the relationships many of these leaders cultivated with followers. They had a gift for sensing, what is a compelling, picture of a hidden reality to invite followers into? And what does that follower need in the way of evidence to have the experience of being an autonomous thinking decision maker who is truly weighing the evidence and making the choice, making the choice to step to join this movement and kind of claim a sense of identity as one who really sees the whole picture while most people are bumbling around half blind to what’s really going on in the world. I was really struck by this dimension of the story of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church, really studying his story in more detail than I had before brought together a lot of the broader patterns I ended up seeing across American history. But one was his knack for understanding the kind of mix of credulity and skepticism as it manifested in, you know, the early American republic, and the desire, you know, investigators into the Mormon claims had to, to want to, to want to really have the sense of themselves as, as, as making a discerning decision. So, you know, he his presentation of this new revelation, the Book of Mormon, in King James Bible english. Just having the the sound, the resonance of authority that people in that culture, you know, kind of post-Puritan New England, you know, expected God to speak in. He, early, early on, he takes two groups of, friends and family into the woods, and they then claim that the angel Moroni appeared to them as well, and presented the golden plates, allowed them to handle the plates, and they sign affidavits, swearing to this. And you know that also, it kind of comports with, you know, what people at the time are wanting in the way of evidence, you know, to have this, to have this sense that they are doing due diligence. And yet from the beginning, there’s this other dimension of the Mormon case, which is, pray on it. Ask, Ask for the Holy Spirit to speak to you directly. You know, is this true? And it fairly early in, in in the formation of the church, these first Mormons begin speaking in tongues, you know, the New Testament sense of charisma. And this is not something we associate with Mormons today, because in fact, uh, you know, in the in the more modern period, the church, uh, effectively banned glossolalia – speaking in tongues is not not the done thing. But the first Mormons spoke in tongues all the time. And Joseph Smith, my sense is that he didn’t necessarily instigate this, but he, he welcomed it and he channeled it.

And the early Mormons really understood their mission as totally entwined with the divine destiny of the American continent. The first editions of the Book of Mormon were dedicated, in a sense, specifically to Indigenous Americans. The subtitle was A Second Testament to the Lamanites, which is, of course, in Mormon mythology, it’s the name for the, you know, Semitic people who end up as the original settlers of much of the Americas. And there is this there’s this sort of fusion of manifest destiny in that kind of familiar 19th century sense and this divine version of it that is inviting these first Mormons into this really exciting story of God’s intention for America. But it’s one that is premised on coming and seeing this hidden story that other people have been, have been blind to. I think we love, as humans, we love the feeling of being in on a secret, and we are constantly looking for ways to make the chaos make sense. So there is I mean, throughout American history, there is this – Americans particularly, but I think all humans have a sort of taste for this – and I think it ebbs and flows in its broad appeal in times of crisis and times when, you know, people are searching for alternatives to the traditional narratives.

You know, that all makes sense. But I want to ask you about something that has, you know, kind of baffled and unsettled me, which is, you know, we mentioned conspiracies as well as narcissism just a little bit earlier. You know, as Christians, we have already been invited into a transcendent narrative. You know, we have been offered a story unlike any other, you know, to participate, you know, to know and worship God, to participate in, the recreation and redemption of the world. It really doesn’t get much better than that. And yet, it is unsettling, that for certain conspiracies, it’s actually self-reported evangelical Christians who are the most susceptible to them. I’m thinking in particular about the Q conspiracy theory, but there’s others as well. Why, in your mind, having been a scholar of this, would, would those of us who affirm, you know, the divinity of Christ, who call ourselves Christians, who’ve already been invited into the ultimate story, still have need for gnostic intuition or insight or a different kind of story?

Yeah. I mean, the the short answer is, is original sin, right? Uh, but I think there’s a sort of like a –

Doesn’t it?

Yeah it does. That’s my answer to everything. That was my answer, you know, before I became a Christian, like before I became a theist, the doctrine of original sin was self-evidently true, right? I think there’s a broad theological point here to make, and then maybe a point more specific to our current time. The Christian story requires radical submission and we don’t – our depraved, concupiscent selves – we don’t like submission, and we are constantly trying to reshape Jesus and his claims on us to meet our needs. But that’s not how it works. So we, I think we seek charismatic relationships where we can get away with projecting our needs and desires onto the leader, where we get a story that casts us as heroes without the work involved. I mean, I think of the rich young ruler in Matthew 19, right, who asks Jesus what what must he do to have eternal life? And Jesus says, well, you have to sell all you have and give to the poor, and he does not want to hear that. And I think we are all like him to some extent, and we resist total submission. So we are tempted by human leaders who promise a kind of worldly salvation that does not involve that kind of sacrifice. But then I think there are some factors specific to our moment. I think many conservative Christians are feeling insecure about their status in the culture right now. They used to have a certain kind of influence on American culture, or at least perceive themselves to have that influence, and now feel marginalized in all kinds of ways. You know, feel marginalized from, um, institutions of sort of prestigious, elite authority, as the country changes demographically, you know, the sea change in really just a few years on sexual ethics in particular.

And so, you know, there’s a way in which, the kind of de facto cultural Protestant consensus that that, you know, abided for, uh, many generations Allowed conservative Christians to forget that this is Babylon. This is not our city. And so now they miss having control or the appearance of control over the city. And so maybe that has contributed to a kind of susceptibility to leaders and to stories that promise to restore that control, even if and maybe especially if it means kind of running roughshod over, you know, institutional checks and balances to, to do so because we’re also in a time – and this is this affects all Americans, not just conservative Christians – of deep disillusionment with institutions. And I know this has been a, you know, kind of an ongoing theme in Trinity Forum conversations, but it’s hugely important for understanding the importance of charismatic leaders in our own time, because in every in every era of history, charismatic leaders are in a kind of dialectical relationship with, with institutions. And they derive their, uh, their purchase on, cultural discourse from their kind of critical distance from institutions offering alternative narratives to whatever the institutions are offering. But often they they make the leap and they, they enter a kind of productive, sometimes an insider relationship with those institutions. So it’s complicated, but they are they’re sort of two sides of the same coin.

Mhm. You know there’s so many more questions to ask you but we’re rapidly running out of time. I want to ask you just real quickly about institutions and then one more and then we’ll go to our questions from our audience. But you know, with institutions, so much that could potentially be asked, one of the things that sort of struck me in the process of just reading and digesting your book, you mentioned Max Faber earlier and largely, I mean, not entirely, you nuanced it just then, but kind of largely, he sort of saw the work of charisma as being, certainly in tension, maybe even at times in opposition, to institutions and to what you’ve called, like the bureaucratic impulse to basically systematize, provide processes and the like. But, you know, of course, in a liberal democracy, rule of law is premised on procedural justice. You know, we have systems and processes, and it’s not like any of us are under the illusion that, you know, perfect justice is always served. But we try to come up with systems and processes that get us as close as we can in a fallen world. In your sense or just in your reading, is charismatic leadership at odds with liberal democracy or can they coexist well?

Yeah, this is a great question. And it’s even more important because I see charisma, charismatic relationships as is just part of how we organize ourselves as as humans. I don’t think it’s possible to escape them or extinguish them. I’m not sure we should want to. I think they, you know, there are plenty of charismatic movements that have, I think, led to moral progress. But I think the answer to your question is that, yes, there is a sense in which charisma is kind of inherently illiberal. If if the core meaning of liberal is that the unit of ultimate value is the autonomous individual, an individual who deserves protection if he’s in the minority against the masses, and that priority on the individual then is the foundation of all the procedures and institutions that ground liberal democratic practice in the West. And this is then a set of guardrails that are supposed to bind leaders and prevent, you know, keep a limit on what leaders can do simply by activating popular support. So there is a there’s a fundamental tension there that cannot be resolved.

But this is not to say that charismatic leaders can’t operate inside the bounds of democratic processes. I mean, I think it’s it’s quite rare to see a leader whose authority is purely charismatic. And, I mean, this was something that Weber highlighted, too. While he found it helpful, and I agree that it’s helpful to think in, in the abstract in terms of kind of a typology of types of authority in practice, usually you encounter a kind of hybrid. But when a charismatic leader, you know, moves from being a sort of outsider at the head of a movement, to being someone who’s operating inside an institution, it does, I think, require a certain tamping down of that charisma, because the charisma is most inherently anti-procedural. And there’s a corollary to this, you know, in the context of New Testament charisma. I mean even the wildest Pentecostal church, right, if it lasts beyond one revival, it has to have procedures. It has to have church offices. It has to have a culture of transmitting ideas over time. So you’ve absolutely identified a key tension that does not go away.

Yeah. Before we turn to audience questions, one thing you mentioned earlier was your your own faith. And I understand that you were, or you are, an adult convert to Christianity, that, um, if I may have it right, that Tim Keller and JD Greer played a role in that as you’d actually been a scholar of religion before becoming a Christian yourself. And I’m curious how your, your research and your scholarship on religion affected your coming to faith, if at all? And then, conversely, how your understanding of your faith has affected and influenced this most recent work.

I became a Christian a little more than three years ago when, I suppose I was about two thirds done with this book. And I mean, my own desire for ultimate metaphysical answers was always a part of my professional work. I really think I became a historian of Christianity as a way of sidling up alongside Christianity, because I, I couldn’t really get there myself. I mean, I made a couple of very incompetent efforts early, early in my life, in a college and in graduate school to try to get myself churched. And it just didn’t work out. And I, I was in a place of it’s like, discontented but fairly apathetic agnosticism when, JD evangelized me with a strong assist from Tim Keller. And, you know, it’s a it’s a long story which people can look up some of the interviews I’ve done online if they want, like the full version. But I will say, I found myself pondering, okay, you know, in my own story, here I am writing a book about charisma and these two Christian leaders that a lot of people would call fairly charismatic, like, played this significant role in helping me see the Christian story in a new way and see my own way into it in a way I could investigate it as a historian, really focused on historical evidence for the resurrection in a way that I hadn’t before.

But I had this nagging voice in my head like, you know, what have I just gotten, have I fallen for, you know, a guru, right? Like the very people I’m writing about. And it prompted me to think about some of the differences between a healthy charismatic dynamic and an unhealthy one. And I think in both the case of of Tim and JD, they, they were absolutely inviting me into a story, inviting me into the, the ultimate, the ultimate story, but not presenting themselves as, you know, the absolute arbiter of what’s true, you know, not trying in any way to limit, you know, what I read, you know who I worshiped with any of this, but instead saying, actually, can I come alongside you while we explore this amazing 2000 year old global tradition and avail ourselves of of everything it has to offer and all of these people who, you know, whatever question I would come up with, you know, problem of evil, you know, other faiths like you name it, right? I mean, there are loads of super smart people in the Christian tradition who have wrestled with it.

And I think both both Tim and JD saw themselves as more like Virgil in Dante’s Inferno, right. Like, more like a guide, you know, coming alongside. And I think that is the right kind of leadership that, you know, the leader is a kind of gateway to to an institution, to traditions. It doesn’t, the buck doesn’t stop, in a sense, with that individual. But I also, you know, to go from being a functional, like materialist in my metaphysics to suddenly deciding that the balance of evidence pushed me to believing in an open universe in which God intervenes, I mean, of course, it changed how I was thinking about the the crazy supernatural stuff that I was writing about. And toward the end of my research, as I was beginning to research, modern, you know, more recent events where people are still alive. And I was able to do interviews and do kind of more ethnography, I was, you know, attending some Pentecostal, charismatic worship services and revivals and certainly experiencing them in a new way and trying to interrogate my own assumptions and reactions in a new way. But I am a spiritual infant. I’m still learning how it should work.

That’s great. Well, we’re going to turn to questions from our viewers today. And just as a reminder, if you’re joining us for the first time, you can not only ask a question in the Q&A feature, but you can also like questions. That helps give us a sense of what some of the most popular questions are. So our first question comes from Peter Sherman, who asks, he says, Vincent Lloyd has written a defense of charisma in which he talks about good and bad charisma, depending on whether it reveals itself and empowers people, or if it perpetuates the spell and keeps people bound to the leader’s own interests. Can you apply this to the American history of charisma that you’ve laid out?

Charisma in itself is is morally neutral. And I think the way we tell good charisma from bad, charisma that is ultimately an agent of moral progress and that which really serves to simply accrue power self-serving power to the leader, has everything to do with whether the story that the charismatic leader is offering is tethered to reality. And I think this is, this means that it is incumbent as much as possible – and this is harder than ever in our own era – on the followers or people considering joining a movement to interrogate that story. I think when I use the term storytelling, it can sound like I’m saying that charismatic leaders just make stuff up, and I’m not saying that at all. I mean, I think we are storytelling, story-craving creatures. That’s simply how we organize information about the world. Uh, so, you know, I think about someone like Martin Luther King Jr, who I absolutely see as a as a charismatic leader who, I think, did a combination of things in drawing people’s attention, especially with a major assist from the new technology, from the way in which, you know, many of his movements clashes with authorities in the South were televised, drawing Americans attention to information that they simply didn’t know before.

But also, I mean, especially for African Americans, simply giving them a way to kind of reorganize the information they already had and see a new kind of more active role for themselves in that. I also see in King a pattern that I noticed among the more successful leaders, if by success we mean the ability to instantiate a set of policy goals into an institutional framework that outlasts the career of the individual. And that is that King did not hew narrowly to the dominant, charismatic type of his era, but he showed a kind of agility. So I tell his story in the context of an era I call the era of the experts. And it’s this anomalous period in American history because for the most part, Americans have a habit of being suspicious of experts and elite institutions, at least ambivalent about them. But there is in the wake of World War two, this sense that, okay, if charismatic leadership means Hitler, if it means fascist, murderous, demagoguery, than it has no place in a liberal democracy. And we should trust the technocrats and trust the experts. And there is this period between about 1945 and 1965 in which the story that experts tell has charisma, and King plugs into that.

So if you watch his interviews on, you know, some of the television news networks, he really leans into his background, as, you know, an academic with a PhD, you know, speaking in cool, rational tones, assuring, you know, majority white viewers that he is the moderate, reasonable option, you know, in this increasingly dicey spectrum of activists calling for change. But in other contexts, he leans very much into what I’d call a more prophetic charisma. Drawing on that, that deep relationship he had and his vocation as a Baptist pastor, his connection to the Christian prophetic tradition. He shows a kind of agility. And then fundamentally in what what really characterizes good charisma, I think, is that he’s he submits his own charismatic authority and its goals to the liberal democratic process. So he’s not, you know, calling for you know, a secessionist movement, a kind of political independence or mass violence, but rather, you know, a groundswell of support for legislative changes that go hand in hand with cultural changes, but in, in the lanes of those procedural guardrails we spoke about before.

Yeah. So I’m going to combine two, somewhat related questions. An anonymous attendee asked, do you think that the project of forming People to wield power is an inherently competitive project with the vision in the New Testament, i.e. forming those in the image of the suffering servant who poured himself out for the sake of the other? Somewhat related is a question by Rob, who asked, is there also among many of us an intuitive opposition to charismatic leaders? So two challenges, I guess, to the idea of charismatic leadership there.

Yeah, this is fascinating. Uh, both questions put me in mind of the research I did on the 60s, 70s 80s and the kind of convergence of trends in popular psychology with trends in the business world and the burgeoning area of leadership studies. So in the field of psychology, this is the era when the humanist psychologists, the positive psychologists Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers really come to the fore, propounding this idea of self-actualization as the core of the path to human flourishing. You know, in reaction to earlier psychological schools – Freud, you know, Skinner and the behaviorists – who had a fairly negative, pathologized view of the human person, you know, focused on particular neuroses, these humanist psychologists say, you know, every, every human has the has the potential to reach the most flourishing version of him or herself. And the job of the expert psychologist is to not stand in judgment, but to come alongside and help the patient self-actualize. And that way of thinking, I mean, well, it comes to pervade American culture in so many ways, but it but it really comes to inform, how people in the business world begin thinking about and theorizing about leadership and boss-employee relations. And so you start to see this shift in the kind of the world pop business leadership books and business school programs to talking about how your boss ought to be your coach and a good boss helps his employees be their best selves and seek a kind, find a kind of spiritual sustenance and satisfaction by aligning their personal sense of mission with the mission of the company.

And so, you know, you have breakout books like Tom Peters book In Search of Excellence. I think he publishes in 1982 or something like this. Um, that is all about it’s sort of a turn away from the obsession with quantitative ways of measuring companies and a focus on how companies need to meet employees’ and consumers’ spiritual needs. And I mean, absolutely, it’s in tension with, I think, the New Testament understanding of of human flourishing and what charisma really is. But it’s part of this broader turn in American society in which the story that the culture is telling us is that we can be our own messiahs in one way or another. We can save ourselves. And so when when we try that and it doesn’t work, you know, the self-help books let us down, I think we are more vulnerable than ever when a when a charismatic leader comes along with a story that invites us in.

Yeah that’s great. So David Kreuger writes, Doctor Stephen Covey wrote on the shifting of American culture from a character quality focus to one based on charisma and personality. How do you see this shift being reversed or revealed in our culture today?

I do think that that that shift that he described is a kind of a different, and very useful set of terms for much of what I’ve been, I’ve been describing, and this sense that if we talk about ourselves as having a personality that needs, simply, encouragement and freedom from any possible, fetter or duty to become the most authentic expression of what it’s meant to be, right. That that key word in our culture: authenticity. It’s a way of talking about human flourishing that diminishes our relationship to institutions, and gives us this, this false picture of, of ourselves as totally atomized, you know, beings who can just sit contentedly on our couches, scrolling our glowing rectangles, catering to our personality, right, because that’s what the algorithms do. And it’s combined in this especially poisonous sense, with the illusion that we can learn whatever we want to about whatever topic, you know, we want to do our own research about, because the internet is at our fingertips. When, of course, there are major blinkers imposed on whatever information we’re gathering about the world, you know, through the kind of selection process that happens via algorithms. I think, you know, if the question is, are we at a sort of turning point? And I mean, I detected in your conversation a couple of weeks ago with Will Inboden, this came up, and I’m seeing some of the same things that he is seeing. I’m seeing among younger people – my own students, and this is only anecdotal, but it’s meaningful – a kind of exhaustion and a sense that this story that they’ve grown up with, that all of these digital tools and the, you know, the total breakdown of all confinements on who they are, free to define themselves as, that this will bring freedom and happiness. They’re beginning to suspect it’s a lie. And I mean, I’m a bit pessimistic, so I, you know, I shrink back from confidence that we’re seeing some radical turn. But certainly, I mean, I interpret the modest but meaningful uptick in religious involvement among younger people, especially young men, as a sign of a desire for a new source of identity and structure that, you know, is maybe a bit of a course correction against, you know, what we’ve seen play out over the past couple of generations and a desire to move from, you know, following a YouTube guru to, to having the structure of a tradition.

Yeah. We’re gonna try to squeeze in one more question. So Benson Haynes says, in an organization with a charismatic leader, are there systems or practices that can keep the potential problems of charisma and or the leader’s own weaknesses in check for the good of both the organization and the leader? So I’ll pose Benson’s questions, but I’ll also kind of invite you to kind of like dilate much more broadly about just what all this research has kind of led you to do, just in terms of your own habits or practices of attention, of prayer, of discernment, in terms of just better discerning the movement of the spirit from a charisma which can, uh, distort and deform.

I think, you know, one of the great geniuses of American evangelicalism is it’s, the way as a culture, it has nurtured spiritual entrepreneurship. And, you know, in general, the kind of weak ecclesiology, the relatively weak, weakness of church institutions that I think is, is a fair generalization, although still a generalization of American evangelicalism. I mean, it has nurtured this incredibly fractious and energetic culture in which it’s very easy to, you know, hang up your own shingle and start your own church and, you know, become a, you know, a megachurch warlord or have a media ministry of global scale. Um, and that’s part of what has really contributed to the flourishing of American Christianity and the way in which the United States has maintained a level of vibrant religiosity compared to its Western counterpart countries. At the same time, that has contributed to a weakness in the kinds of checks and balances and guardrails that I think more hierarchical churches have on the, what happens when you have kind of human depravity combined with power. So it’s not to say that more hierarchical churches don’t have their own problems. They absolutely do.

You know, they do. Yes.

But um, but I think there’s a particular type of, there are a set of temptations that come with evangelical culture. So I think it’s important to do, you know, a clear-eyed assessment of the structure in which a leader is operating and that assessment has to focus on, you know, the accountability structures, you know, in a church setting, you know, is the pastor, does he have a kind of veto power or is he on par with and under the discipline of, you know, his board of elders? You know, is there some other set of bodies, whether denominational or otherwise, that are kind of keeping an eye on things? And I think this is connected to the practices that are demanded of us as individuals. In prior eras of American history I think in many ways it was easier for individuals to evaluate, make sense of the story presented to them by a charismatic leader because most of us were embedded in institutions and traditions, communities that, you know, probably weren’t premised on, you know, a systematic scientific evaluation of sociological facts, but still offered counter-narratives offered other stories, you know, about how the world works, that you had to kind of put the charismatic leader’s story alongside and say, okay, does this make sense? I’m hearing these other things.

I have these other authorities in mind, and that ecosystem has gotten out of whack. You know, in our current moment, as we’ve seen Americans trust and institutions erode to really a nadir, uh, I think, uh, there there are fewer counterweights. And so now I think the onus is on us as kind of ordinary people to, to be mindful of this dynamic and to say, okay, as I’m beginning to find myself compelled by this leader, let me ask myself, what is the story he or she is inviting me into and how might I begin to evaluate whether that story is premised on facts or if I’m seeing, you know, other people in my life begin to fall under the influence of a leader. And I have a lot of questions and I’m really concerned. Let me ask, am I revolted by this dynamic because I am being written out of this story? And, you know, what do I make of that? Is that is that is that legitimate, or is it premised on a false set of claims? So it’s a constant, you know, habit of self-interrogation that I think we’re called to.

Yeah. Well, Molly thank you. This has been fascinating. And in just a moment I’m going to give you the last word. But before that a few things just to share with all of you joining us first. Immediately after we conclude we will be sending out an online feedback form. We would love to get your feedback. We, read each and every one of these. It really does help us in terms of trying to make this, this program ever more valuable. And as a small token of our appreciation, if you fill out that feedback form, we will send you a coupon code for a free Trinity Forum reading download of your choice. There are several that we would recommend that are germane to some of the ideas that we’ve discussed today, including William Wilberforce, A Man Who Changed His Times, This Child Will Be Great, the story of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Who Stands Fast by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Politics, Morality and Civility by Vaclav Havel. In addition, we will be sending around an email tomorrow, probably right around noon or so, with a lightly edited link to today’s online conversation, as well as a list of other readings and resources. If you want to go deeper into exploring some of the questions that we’ve discussed today. In addition, I want to invite all of you joining us to join the Trinity Forum Society, which is the community of people who help advance the Trinity Forum mission of cultivating, curating, and disseminating the best of Christian thought for the common good. In addition to being part of this community and advancing this mission, there’s a number of benefits, including a subscription to our quarterly readings, a subscription to our daily what we’re reading list of curated reading recommendations, and as a special incentive for anyone joining or with your contribution of $150 or more, we will send you a signed copy of Molly Worthen’s fascinating and really provocative book, Spellbound.

So we hope that you will avail yourself of that opportunity, and we would love to welcome you in to the Trinity Forum Society. A few events to share coming up. For those of you who are in or near Nashville on Monday, we will be there live and in person, and hosting poet and senior fellow Malcolm Guite to discuss his new Arthurian epic, and the role of Arthur and poetry. It’ll be a lovely evening. We really hope that you can join us if you’re anywhere near the area. And then next month, uh, for those of you who are in or near DC on November 19th, uh, we will be having the inaugural event of the Michael Gerson Memorial Prize. Awarding that at a conversation around the moral duty of the writer in an age of confusion, will be held at the National Cathedral and would love to see you there as well. We’ll also be posting new online conversations coming soon, so stay tuned on our website and be on the lookout for that. As we wrap up, I want to thank my incredible colleagues at the Trinity Forum, my teammates Tom Walsh, Campbell Vogel, Marie-Anne Maurice, Macrae Hanke, and Francis Owen, who put the Mission of the Trinity Forum into action. And again, special thanks to you, Molly. It’s been great to talk with you. And the last word is yours.

My bottom line, I guess, is that the 21st century is radically new in some ways, but fundamentally we are not that different from humans four centuries ago. The advance of democracy, the rise of the internet, scientific literacy, all of this has not really severed us from the deep past and from this, this fundamental desire to connect with a transcendent story about the universe.

Molly, thanks so much, and thank you to all of you for joining us. Have a great weekend.