← New Books Network
New Books Network
Molly Worthen, "Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump" (Random House, 2025)
01:05:57
Loading summary
Transcript63 lines
- [00:01]
Commercial Narrator
This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee@blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you. Your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. Because@blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you. Visit blinds.com now for up to 45% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [01:24]
Molly Wertham
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:28]
Lillian Barger
This is Lillian Barger, your host for another episode from New Books Network. I am talking with Molly Wertham, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina and the author of a new book, How Charisma Shaped American History, from the Puritans to Donald Trump. As she dives into how we think about charisma and its intersection with a public we're then profile some of the people in American history who are said to have charisma and their influence. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Molly Ortham, welcome to the show.
- [01:59]
Molly Wertham
Thanks for having me.
- [02:00]
Lillian Barger
Tell us about yourself and how you came to write Spellbound.
- [02:04]
Molly Wertham
I teach history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and I do some journalism on the side focused on religion and higher education and I suppose for the past, I don't know, however long I've been doing this, 15 years or something, I have focused on questions of authority in the world of ideas, religion and politics. And I think the origin of this project lies about a decade in the past in kind of the confluence of two major things. I was thinking about number one, in 2015, 2016, like a lot of people, I was looking around at our political landscape and trying to make sense of it. Particularly, I was struck by the very different reactions that different Americans had to Donald Trump and how the same individual, the same, you know, rhetorical performances and rallies and stories about him and told by him, could really attract and compel a huge swath of the country while simultaneously repulsing another swath of the country. And so I was grappling with this, you know, what's going on here? And then second, I think, like probably a lot of scholars and journalists who are interested in religion, I've been thinking about the tools that we use to try to make sense of what's happening in people's religious ideas and practices. For generations, I think those of us who study religion have depended a lot on poll data and used as a kind of, you know, shorthand, a useful benchmark. The numbers that Pew and Gallup and their colleagues churn out every year saying, you know, such and such a percentage of people go to church every weekend or say they pray or believe in God, these things. And we know. Well, of course, there have been some interesting blips in the trends of these numbers recently, and maybe we could talk about that. We know that broadly speaking, like, since, you know, the late 60s, early 1970s, those numbers have steadily declined. But it's been my conviction, I guess, as long as I have been a student of history, that humans are, in a pretty fundamental way, religious beings. And by that I mean, I think we have an instinct to try to connect our puny, human, mortal story to a big, transcendent story that lends it meaning. And we have an impulse to worship, to set something apart and above us and kind of orient toward that. And just because that impulse is not landing as often as it once did in traditional houses of worship on weekends, I think it's a mistake to conclude that it has just vanished from our human nature. But then the question is, well, how do we. How do we find it? And my hypothesis going into this project was that perhaps one place that impulse has landed is in the relationship between certain leaders and their followers.
- [05:32]
Lillian Barger
Well, how do you. How do you find charisma? I was intrigued by the title charisma. That's sort of a nebulous sort of thing we all kind of think we know. We say, oh, this person has charisma. So what? How do you define it in your book?
- [05:47]
Molly Wertham
Yeah, this is a great question, and this is part of why I was so interested in it to begin with, because it does seem like this word that is pretty. It's pretty common in our colloquial conversation, but it is. It's almost a word that we punt to when perhaps we're observing something playing out between a leader and followers. Or maybe we feel ourselves to be kind of in the grip of something, but we can't really articulate what it is, but it's something. And so we kind of gesture in the direction of this nebulous concept, charisma. I see now, in retrospect, that I was really confused about its meaning when I went into this project. I confused charisma with charm. I thought when I went into this project, I would be writing about a whole roster of people who were like, really good at working the room at a cocktail party. All really good looking and just interpersonally really compelling, you know, lots of sex appeal, just really, you know, wonderful oratorical skills. Skills. That was my expectation and I was totally wrong. I mean, that's true here and there in some of my characters, but for the most part, the people I found myself writing about are very polarizing individuals. Maybe some people had that reaction to them, but they provoked the opposite reaction in more people than liked them. And so I came to see that while charm and charisma can certainly be related, they're not the same at all. My definition of charisma in the. When we use it to describe this mysterious relationship between leaders and followers, because my book's also a history of it as a theological concept which I can describe in a minute. But in politics and colloquial speech, charisma is a particular kind of storytelling ability. It is a follower's ability, or, sorry, a leader's ability to invite followers into a new narrative, a new account of what their life means, how they connect to a bigger, transcendent story, what their role is in it. And it's a story and an invitation that is activating. And it invites you to not, you know, just sort of sit there and watch, but rather to see yourself as a. As an actor in history who finally has a little bit of a sense of agency. It's a story that gives us this kind of paradoxical blend of empowerment, a sense that, you know, finally I see what's happening. I'm on the right side of this important fight, and I know what my job is balanced with a sense of security. Okay? The responsibility is not entirely on me. This, I'm part of this bigger movement. I'm loyal to this leader who, who has the. Has kind of the master key, the master vision. I think we crave that kind of mix as humans. And this, this sense of Charisma is descended from and intertwined with what the word originally meant. You know, for 1900 years, until the sociologist Max Weber borrowed the term from the world of church history and the Bible and applied it to politics. Charisma was a term that, you know, you would only know if you were, like, really a church person or a kind of theology nerd. And it means in the New Testament, you know, a gift from God, a supernatural, unsolicited, perhaps unpredictable gift. It can mean either, you know, the broad gift of salvation for. For converted Christians. Paul also uses it in his first letter to the Corinthians to describe specific gifts, supernatural gifts of prophecy, speaking in tongues, healing, contact with divine power. That leaves a real mark on the human. And those two concepts, while, you know, they are different, I think in the history of American politics and culture, they're intertwined because in both the strictly religious sense and in this broader, more amorphous political sense, this is about the human need for connection to a transcendent story. So Spellbound tells the story of charisma in both senses of the term from the Puritans to the present.
- [10:31]
Lillian Barger
Now, you say in your book that it's not celebrity, but I couldn't help to think of Taylor Swift because based on what you're saying, she sounds to me like she, with the massive fan base that she has, that she is projecting some vision for young women particularly. And it's sort of like we are powerful enough and we can talk back. Would you even begin to think of her in that way?
- [11:02]
Molly Wertham
Yeah. This is something I struggled with as I was working on this book. Whenever I would tell someone the topic, they would. They would say, oh, you know, surely you're writing about X, Y and Z person. Right? And usually I would have to say, no, I. I'm not. And there. There are just, I suppose, limits. I mean, as you know, right, when you're. When you're trying to figure out how to execute a book that won't take, you know, the rest of your life to write and spin out into 20 volumes, you can't write about everyone. So there were practical reasons for limiting my. My lens a bit to the. The realms of kind of official religion and politics. And this is not to diminish the. The role that musicians and other artists can have. I do think, though, that it's very important to distinguish between celebrity and charisma. And while you can point to instances in history where individuals who have primarily had their professional identity in the music industry have also had very activating important roles in Political movements, you know, the civil rights movement, of course, course, is full of artists and musicians. I think often it's useful to distinguish the more passive experience of, especially in our own time, being a follower, having this false sense of intimacy with this celebrity because we follow her Instagram feed or what have you, perhaps punctuated by these live encounters. You know, if one goes to a Taylor Swift concert of something that is a kind of spiritual experience. And you know, I think it's useful to apply some of the language of the great religious theorists. I'm thinking of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim and his great concept collective effervescence, you know, to describe the, the feeling that one gets in a mass religious event. You know, effervescence like the bubbling of, of seltzer water. This energy that springs out of this mass of people who are sharing an experience and the experience is, is bigger than the sum of its parts. Right. There's like a chemical reaction that happens. And you're right, I mean, it can certainly affirm a certain, you know, a vision that the celebrity is presenting that, that can have political implications. But I think in general it's a more, it's a more passive experience and in fact it can, it can suck energy out of politics. If people are having this experience of periodic empowerment, they're identifying with a figure who's not really summoning them into a world changing movement, they can feel more comfortable maybe sitting out where the real political action is. So I think it was telling that even though Taylor Swift did Wade, you know, kind of, kind of part way, in a very careful way into the last presidential election, and there was some chatter about whether, you know, her seeming to strongly prefer Kamala Harris would have an effect. And there was, you know, some outrage in conservative social media about this. Ultimately it doesn't seem to have had any effect at all. Like, I don't think there's any evidence that she, she swayed any, any swifties of any significant numbers. So I think the distinction between celebrity and charisma is an important one.
- [14:47]
Lillian Barger
Yeah, I think you had to, I do think you had to limit who you're addressing because otherwise you'd be writing it for the next 20 years. But what you're saying so far is charisma is fundamentally at some level a religious phenomenon, right?
- [15:04]
Molly Wertham
Yes, yeah, I think so. And I think it's, I mean, it may manifest in spheres where, that we don't consider strictly religious. But I mean, and I think because I'm using religious in this more general sense that I think applies to humans, regardless of their metaphysics.
- [15:23]
Lillian Barger
Right? So a swiffy can go to a concert and have kind of a pseudo or semi religious experience because they're part of this crowd and they've got this figure that is appealing and they can come out of there just thinking the world has changed for them. Okay, so. Okay, I'm not going to push you on that, but I do think what, what the things that you're pointing out in your book could be applied in so many different ways. And I know you were limited with what you could use it for, but anyway, let's bring that up. Do you think the charismatic figures are born or are they made? Are they made by the moment? Are they made by their followers? Or do they. Or do they create their followers and they create the moment? Or is it a interaction that's constantly changing?
- [16:16]
Molly Wertham
This is a question that I think historians have wrestled with perennially. And in the history of the ways scholars have studied influential individuals, great men, right, and how they've written about charisma, I think we've seen a kind of pendulum swing in the 19th century. There is maybe most embodied by the great historian Thomas Carlyle, this elevation of the genius individual, you know, who strides onto the world stage and, you know, seems predestined, you know, from his mother's womb to take the reins of this historical moment and, you know, closer to our own time, I think we've seen a marked backlash against that and perhaps an overcorrection, a tendency, you know, among, in the worlds of some social and cultural history to really understate the importance of the individual and suggest that, well, you know, the world events being what they were, you know, France and the European powers in the early 19th century would have gone to war and things would have been similar even if there had been no Napoleon. Right? So to me, the best approach is probably a moderate one. And so I do think that these charismatic figures, and this is something I try to argue in the book, they give us a way to understand the underlying desires and anxieties of their era better, and they succeed, or at least they foment a following. We can talk about how we should define success because they diagnose and speak to that, you know, those broader currents, and they, they, they are in a relationship you can't have. You can't be charismatic by yourself in a mirror. And, and so there is something ephemeral about charisma. As soon as followers are no longer persuaded that the, the story this leader is telling is, is persuasive, that charisma if it's not already kind of baked into institutions or drawing its authority from other sources, it will evaporate. On the other hand, I think it's important to appreciate the singularity of human individuals. So when I think about some of the people I write about, whether it's the Puritan heretic Anne Hutchinson or Joseph Smith or the Louisiana populist Huey Long, the sort of child guru in the 1970s, Guru Maharaj. I mean, these are. These are very. These are very unusual individuals who have. Who are, you know, who have eccentricities that I think are really important in telling their stories. So, you know, I think that the most accurate approach to history is to try to both appreciate the individual and the sheer weirdness of humans while also putting them in their context and paying attention to the broader, deeper historical forces that create the opportunity that individual seizes.
- [19:32]
Lillian Barger
Right. So these are people who have some talent of some sort, inborn talent that gets triggered by a particular historical moment where there's an opportunity for that talent to emerge. Would you say that is that.
- [19:51]
Molly Wertham
That's interesting. I'm thinking about the word talent, and it's hard to articulate this, but I think about someone like Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church. And he is someone who. I think he's one of the great religious geniuses of the modern age. Someone who really had no formal education, but, you know, he came from a family of spiritual seekers. Right. You know, his parents were very interested in the supernatural and questions of ultimate meaning, but couldn't find a home in any organized traditional church. They were interested in interpreting dreams and believed in. For the possibility of prophecy. And he, as a young man was in the, you know, kind of spiritual hot house of New England, upstate New York in the early 19th century, where there's just this mix of different styles of traveling evangelists and belief in various sort of pagan forest spirits and the ability to the possibility of using divining rods to find buried treasure and, you know, guardian spirits who might prevent you from getting at the treasure. And just this amalgam of spiritual influences and opportunities that I think nurtured his remarkable instinct for the kind of spiritual hunger that people like him had that was not effectively sated by the traditional churches on offer. And I think he sensed this kind of exhaustion, this post Puritan exhaustion with the Calvinistically flavored Protestantism, you know, that so many of the settlers of upstate New York had inherited from their, you know, their family history, mostly in New England, and that this kind of American pioneer frustration with the paradoxes and abstract ideas of traditional Christian orthodoxy. You know, the paradox of free will and divine sovereignty, the very mysterious formulation of God as a trinity, somehow three in one. And there's something about the Mormon theology that emerges from his revelations that really resolves a lot of these paradoxes in a satisfying kind of very American way, in the context of this exciting new story that recenters, the biblical story in this kind of second chapter, right. That he reveals in the new world and puts America at the center. And I think also it's easy to forget how focused the first generation of Mormons were on the evangelism of indigenous Americans, much more so even than other Protestant groups who were, who were also very inclined toward missions. But for the Latter Day Saints, the indigenous Americans who they viewed as descendants of this ancient Semitic people, the Lamanites, they have a primary role in the divine, the kind of providential intention of the American continent. And that too, you know, it taps into this kind of manifest destiny spirit, but it's a much more. It's like a cosmic, Christian, cosmic version of manifest destiny. So, you know, what's the right way to understand that as purely the, you know, the fruit of one genius? Well, no, but I do think that it's important not to understate the role of Joseph Smith in formulating that story, even if, I mean, one of my big insights came in my study of the spread of the early Mormon Church and grappling with the fact that very early on in the church's history, thousands of British people convert to Mormonism, shut down their lives in the British Isles and move across the Atlantic, you know, thousands of miles, sight unseen, to this tiny town, Nauvoo, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi, to join, you know, the building of New Zion with their prophet, whom they've never laid eyes on. Right. So if, if Joseph Smith is the center of the charisma here, that doesn't make any sense. But if we, if we instead see that the center of the charisma is the story, and Joseph Smith is an important part of that, but he, he doesn't have to be present, right? It's, it's the missionaries, it's the Book of Mormon, it's the story that magnetizes these people and persuades them to drop everything and adopt this totally new existence that really helped me understand where the charisma lies.
- [25:05]
Commercial Narrator
Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a 4 liter jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.
- [25:16]
Molly Wertham
Oh, come on.
- [25:17]
Commercial Narrator
They called for their holiday and used Expedia trip planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.
- [25:27]
Lillian Barger
Whatever.
- [25:28]
Commercial Narrator
You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.
- [25:35]
Lillian Barger
So his talent actually, I think is his religious imagination. And other people would call it his revelation. But I'm thinking about William James and how William James talked about in Varieties of Religious Experiences, he talked about certain people who were very. Had religious gift. What did he call them? I can't remember exactly the term that he called them, but he, he acknowledged there are some people, mystics, you know, people who have this rich religious imagination can't. That have different sensibility. And seems like Joseph Smith was one of those that maybe William James would identify with, identify as talented, particularly religiously talented, which you agree with.
- [26:25]
Molly Wertham
I think that's right. I think putting it in terms of imagination is really helpful. I was struck in looking at these different cases of charismatic leaders. Joseph Smith is a perfect example that it's important for the leader to be creative insofar as, you know, if he or she just offers a message that echoes those available in the dominant culture, there's no reason for people to listen. On the other hand, it's important not to be too strange, not to offer a message that is so radically alien that there's just no contact point between, you know, the kind of prophetic, dissident message the charismatic leader is offering and the traditions and institutions that he's alongside. Because in most cases, charismatic leaders, they, you know, they're defining themselves in reference to these dominant institutions and traditions and their legitimacy and resonance comes from their ability to diagnose gaps and problems and, you know, audiences, constituencies who are not hearing a compelling story there, but that it only makes sense if they kind of stand close enough to the institution for their, you know, critiques to land. So it's important that the Book of Mormon is written in this English, that. That has the resonance of King James English. You know, it has the. It has this gravitas that I think was important in the, in the time. It's important that Joseph Smith, you know, early on went out into the woods with, you know, groups of, of his friends and family who later signed affidavits avowing that the angel Moroni had appeared to them and shown them the golden plates and allowed them to handle them and so forth. He had a. He had a sense of early 19th century expectations for evidence and proof and the kinds of experiences and claims and demonstrations that would give a potential follower, an investigator, to use the Mormon term, a sense of kind of agency in this process of joining up in this movement, making a decision. I think as humans, we. We like to feel that we've really. We've used our minds and our hearts and we've made a choice.
- [29:00]
Lillian Barger
Just does, does it require. Does the rise of a charismatic leader require a particular political or religious crisis in the culture? If that's true, America's always bidding crisis of some sort or another. So you talk. You have a pantheon of charismatic people throughout. You start with the colonial America, and you go all the way to Donald Trump. So were you able to identify the particular crisis that was going on, whether it was political or religious, that gave rise to some of these people? I'm thinking of Kathryn Coleman, which I thought was kind of an odd choice. Why would you pick her? What is her? What is she? What crisis do you think she was addressing?
- [29:47]
Molly Wertham
Well, I think. I think you're. You're right that there's always that the charismatic leaders often respond to crises. And I think, you know, part of being a historian is realizing that whatever society you're studying, it always has something, you know, going on that. That at least some. Some observers are calling a crisis. Right. So, you know, the book, the book is a history of charisma in the New Testament sense also. Right. So that's woven in with the stories of leaders who are perhaps more obviously responding to political crises. Kathryn Kuhlman, I suppose. I mean, you can't extricate, you can't separate the story of the history of charismatic and Pentecostal religion from the political story. So I do think that her ministry and the success of this kind of explosion of interest in highly physical experience of divine contact and the promise of healing, the sense that you could go to a Kathryn Kuhlman revival and have a reasonable hope that God would touch you and whatever your ailment is in a physical way. And the widening appeal of evangelists like her, well beyond the bounds of kind of the traditional lanes of Pentecostal churches. Right. So, you know, a generation prior, there certainly was a lively circuit of Pentecostal healing evangelists. I mean, Amy Simple McPherson, of course, is the great example in the 1930s. But there is still a lot of flinching suspicion, deep discomfort, even among, especially among quite conservative Christians, if they're not persuaded of the kind of the Pentecostal argument for the presence of the Holy Spirit and work of the Holy Spirit in our current time. That's changed by the 1970s. And so Cullman's very mainstream presence and popularity on television and best selling books, I think is a testament to the erosion of some of those barriers and a period in American history when, and this is part of the broader story of the 60s and 70s, you know, when there's a kind of reaction against the elevation of technocracy and secular expertise and some sort of pure idealized version of reason that characterizes the preceding decades. In the late 60s and 70s, I think there's a pronounced hunger in the culture for authentic experience. Right. I mean, that word that becomes this catchphrase and one way some Americans interpret that is in this particular kind of worship and seeking of healing experience that Kathryn Coleman represents.
- [33:14]
Lillian Barger
How often do charismatic leaders like Coleman present spectacle?
- [33:21]
Molly Wertham
There's a lot of spectacle, yes.
- [33:25]
Lillian Barger
And how much of that is part of this whole thing?
- [33:29]
Molly Wertham
Yeah, that's a great question. I think spectacle is tremendously important, but there's different ways of having a relationship with a charismatic leader. This is one of the lessons that my research drove home to me. And it, it is, it, it can happen in person. And then certainly the history of charisma is totally tied up with the history of, of media and, and so many of the ways in which people who, you know, were inspired by and persuaded by Kathryn Coleman's account of the universe didn't encounter her in person. Right. They, you know, only a fraction of her followers could actually make the pilgrimage to her church in Pittsburgh area or to see her when she was kind of on tour in California. Far more of them saw her on television or read her books. So then that changes, I think, how we can think of the spectacle. And this came home to me early on in my research when I was kind of retreading ground I thought I knew, which was the career of the great celebrity evangelist of the first Great Awakening, George Whitfield. And typically when his story is told in books and in, you know, when I teach it in my classes at unc, I emphasize spectacle. I emphasize, you know, the way in which he, you know, carefully choreographed the movements of some of his friends and colleagues early on when he was going to preach in a particular area to, you know, spread the word and begin to gather a crowd with, with songs and prayers. And the way he, you know, he very carefully kind of stage managed his own appearance when the moment seemed right and his ability right. And the age before. There are any professional theater companies in the United States to give these incredibly compelling sermons in which he's taking on the Persona of different biblical characters. And he's, you know, he's pretending to be a woman. One minute he's weeping on command. He's pretending to be, you know, a sinner at the gallows. Right. And that absolutely sounds like Jimmy Swaggart. Well, yes, actually. Yes. And, you know, I'm always reminding my students that, like, this is the age before, you know, amplification. Right. So he's addressing crowds of thousands with no mic. And it's very hard to imagine. So spectacle is important. But then I came upon sources of kind of diaries written by totally ordinary farmers, tradesmen, kind of in the general vicinity of where his ministry was kind of sweeping the seaboard, but who hadn't necessarily heard him in person, but rather purchased his transcripts of his sermons by subscription because, you know, Whitfield was a pioneer in the print industry of the circulation of Christian literature across the Atlantic. And I remember reading especially this account of a farmer who talked about getting the latest edition of Whitefield's sermons, just reading them aloud first to people in his household, and then his neighbors would come over just to listen. And, you know, who knows what this guy was like? Maybe. Maybe he was a great, very theatrical, gifted orator. It's hard to know, but probably not. Probably this is just some. Some average farmer who's literate, but he's, you know, he's just reading the sermon. So, okay, what is so compelling? Why are. Why are all these people, not thousands, but lots of people gathering in his home to hear this. Hear this message? There is something else that is distinct from the spectacle that resides in the. In the actual message that Whitefield was preaching that we have to attend to.
- [37:37]
Lillian Barger
Is it. Do you think that all these charismatic people that you talk about, the message was there, was sort of about overthrowing the status quo? Overthrowing either the religious status quo, the. The political status quo, calling people to sort of revolt in a very subtle way? Yes.
- [38:01]
Molly Wertham
I think that is. That's often the pattern. There is a sort of pendulum swing in the story I tell between eras when the dominant charismatic message, the kinds of stories that seem to be most resonant are highly destructive, focused on tearing down the status quo, really blowing up the foundations of dominant institutions. And then there is a swing toward a preference for building, although often that can still be in contradistinction to whatever is currently the source of authority in the culture. The glaring exception, and this is kind of this anomalous period in American history, are the two decades after World War II, in which I think. I mean, Western culture is in ptsd. After Hitler. And there is this sense that is very explicit both in the reflections of scholars across all disciplines who are reflecting on politics and culture across the west and as well as at more popular levels in journalism, that, okay, if Hitler is what charismatic leadership is, if that's how easy it is for a demagogue to manipulate apparently rational people into supporting, you know, this. This horror that results in the deaths of millions and upon millions of people, well, then charismatic leadership has no place in modern democracy. And we're. We're done with that as a culture. And they. They see it, they continue to write about what they identify as charismatic leadership in the global south, in newly independent countries in Africa, for example, in this kind of condescending way, like, okay, this is. This is a stage that more primitive societies are still in. They haven't totally shot. Shed their need for a supernatural, you know, an anointed strongman, but in the west, we're done with this. And so I call this the era of the experts, because it's kind of the one era in American history when experts have charisma in the sense that I'm defining it in the sense that the story they are telling the American people, their way of defining progress. You know, your task as an American citizen to trust the technocrats to see the frontier, that we are offering you space especially. But this vision of what modernity can look like under the care of expertise produced by universities and the government think tanks, that is, for a time, persuasive, but they sort of cannibalize their own authority in a sense, and it does not last forever.
- [40:56]
Lillian Barger
But it's kind of like those expert charismatic figures were trying to bind people more closely to the status quo. Like we. Because it was about reason and about the modern, modern reason, and that we can solve our problems through modern reason, which is sort of been going on for centuries already.
- [41:20]
Molly Wertham
So, yeah, I don't know that they were. I don't think they saw themselves as defending the state status quo, but rather defending the authority of institutions and a moderate vision of change. But I mean, I would say certainly the. You know, I can't think of an expert who didn't have a desire for reform in some way. But, yes, if you're defining the status quo as continue to respect these authorities, but without implying a static. Right then. Then I see what you mean.
- [42:00]
Lillian Barger
Okay. The other thing I wanted to ask you is what.
- [42:03]
Molly Wertham
How.
- [42:05]
Lillian Barger
What binds people to care? I'm looking at the followers now. Why are so much people attracted to these kind of leaders and other people are put off by them because you said they're either hated or beloved. Right. Is there any way to identify what are the psychological or spiritual or whatever mechanisms that get people to seek out these people?
- [42:30]
Molly Wertham
It's certainly true, I think, about the movements I write about that are more separatists that really call people into a totally new way of life, you know, to the extent that we get lucky in the primary sources and we have enough evidence to construct the biographies of, say, some of the individuals who became followers of Jemima Wilkinson, you know, the public universal friend, the kind of radical former Quaker, you know, genderless prophet in the early Republic, or followers who joined the Divine Light Mission, the Guru Maharaj's movement in the early 1970s, and leave their comfortable lives and, you know, upper middle class suburbia, move into these ashrams and work at an organic food store and, you know, send all their proceeds to the, to the mission. Right. To pay for their. Their guru's fancy green Rolls Royce. Certainly they do like, they're seekers. They're. They're people who have been let down in one way or another by the institutions and authorities and traditions and communities that they trusted, or they're just. They have. Maybe they didn't have any particular trauma or upheaval, but they're just, you know, some of us are wired for, you know, a real. A sense of like, we, we need a palpable sense of mission and we, we want to be plugged into the, the. The transcendent. I think, I think, you know, there are people with that temperament, I will say, more broadly, you know, because most of the people I write about in the book are not founding cults of one kind or another. They're sort of more mainstream figures. That our reaction to a charismatic leader, whether we find him or her magnetic or repulsive, I think it has more to do with the role that the leader is offering us or not offering us in his story. So I think about what people say about Bill Clinton, right, You know, famously charismatic, would make you feel like you're the only person in the room when he's talking to you, right? That's the cliche. Well, I would posit that you're only in that room to begin with because you're probably already a Democrat, right, who paid your money to buy the ticket to the fundraiser. So you are already in a relationship to his story, his account of America and who you are and who he is and how you are going to work together. So I think that's really the, the phenomenon that is upstream of Any encounter we may actually have in person or in writing or via media with the leader, it's that encounter with the story.
- [45:16]
Lillian Barger
That again reminds me of William James when he talks about the once born and the twice born. Okay. There are people who are once born and they're just, they're very happy the way they are.
- [45:26]
Molly Wertham
The world's great, they don't need anything.
- [45:29]
Lillian Barger
And the twice born are restless. You know, they, they're looking for something. It would seem that those people would be the ones who are going to look for, get caught up in some sort of movement leader thing.
- [45:42]
Molly Wertham
Yeah, that's right. And I don't want to suggest, I mean, I think we, we can easily, we end up having a conversation which we focus on charismatic leadership as a, a kind of manipulation, as, you know, selling people a false account of the world. And I don't want to suggest that at all. I think charisma in and of itself is morally neutral. That, you know, we are, as humans, we're, we're storytelling, story seeking creatures. Stories are how we organize information about the world. And to call something a story, it's not to say it's necessarily false. There are, there, there are storytellers who can point out to us, you know, dimensions of reality that we've missed simply by organizing the information we thought we knew in a different way and pointing out a new role for us we never saw before. Certainly think this is true of someone like Martin Luther King Jr. But I think the difference between a charismatic leader, who can be a kind of dangerous cult leader or lead people into a false reality, and charismatic leader who generally we could put on the side of the, you know, the arc toward justice is whether or not that leader connects individuals who join his or her movement to other sources of authority and is willing himself to submit to some accountability system, some sort of checks and balances. So if that leader presents himself as a gateway for you to say a whole church, a whole religious tradition, or a network of, of a kind of hell of healthy political institutions, that that can be a great thing. That can be a very legitimate form of empowerment and enlightenment.
- [47:33]
Lillian Barger
You, you go, you start off your book talking about charisma as largely a religious, spiritual sort of thing. And then you talk about it becoming secularized. You know that there's a movement towards the secularization of charisma. And you talk about people like Andrew Jackson, for instance. He was definitely not a religious leader, but he was charismatic in some way. So can you talk about how that happened a little bit in the early.
- [48:08]
Molly Wertham
Period I cover the 1600s. I think it is true. And this, you know, I really highlight this by focusing on Puritan. Massachusetts. Massachusetts. That the two kinds of charisma. I write about charisma in the New Testament sense, theological sense and charisma and more of the Max Weber sense. They're really collapsed. They're inextricable in societies kind of in the immediate aftermath of the Reformation and the kind of potency of the assumptions and structures of European Christendom. It is very hard, if not impossible, you know, in the 17th century to make a authority claim that is totally without any. Any religious appeal to God. Yeah. So they. And so while I think the religious charisma absolutely continues and has a vibrant, you know, powerful effect, you know, up to into our own time, it's true that they. They do become a little bit more like two separate narratives now. What is. What's happening there? I mean, gosh, you're, like. You're asking the, you know, one of the giant questions of Western history, right? Like. Like. Like the story of secularization. I mean, I think in the. In the context of a. Go ahead.
- [49:29]
Lillian Barger
Martin Luther King did it very well. He took religious charisma. He was a preacher, a theologian, and took it and created this movement that was more than just a religious movement. It was a political movement. He did it very well. A lot of people who were not religious could grab onto his vision.
- [49:55]
Molly Wertham
Well, he's a figure I focus on as one of a. There's a pattern that I noticed as I was trying to suss out these figures in my narrative who seem to me to be the most successful, if by success we mean instantiating in a lasting way their goals for social and cultural change in institutions and communities that will last long beyond their own lives. Martin Luther King is an example of this, and I think it's because he doesn't hew too narrowly to one type of charisma, but rather, he. Rather he very, with great agility, combines, I think, the kind of charisma you're talking about, the sort of prophetic charisma drawing on the black church tradition with what is the dominant charismatic story of the age. The expert. If you watch footage of him, especially kind of tracking his television appearances over. Over the course of his career, he gets better and better as the years go on at leaning into this Persona of the cool, reasonable, intellectual. And, you know, he was really attractive to his congregation. Right. I mean, they call him in part because he's, you know, he's almost done with his PhD at that point. He has this. These very obvious trappings of learning, and this becomes so important in how he negotiates the kind of delicate diplomacy with especially white elites at the time. Right. And his ability to present himself as the face of reasonable nonviolent change, in contrast to the increasingly militant Black power movement. This has everything to do with his ability to play the expert when he needs to. But you're right that there's this other deeply resonant side of him, which is the prophetic side.
- [52:02]
Lillian Barger
Right.
- [52:02]
Molly Wertham
So he.
- [52:02]
Lillian Barger
He appeals to Scripture, and he appeals to the Declaration of Independence. You know, he appeals to the documents of the nation, the founding documents, and he appeals to Scripture. So a lot of people were attracted, even if they weren't religious, they were attracted to his insistence that the founding documents needed to be fulfilled.
- [52:24]
Molly Wertham
Absolutely.
- [52:24]
Lillian Barger
I think he's fascinating person. But you also talk about. In the last section, you talk about gurus of the 20th century, and you mentioned Tom Peters and Oprah. What would you say? Would you say that Elon Musk is now the charismatic guru of the technological age?
- [52:46]
Molly Wertham
Yeah, he's a very interesting case study, and maybe, if we have to think about it more. But if we say he's charismatic, I mean, he would be a great example of the dissonance between charisma and charm. I mean, he's famously lacking in charm and famously. Right. Awkward and not a compelling public speaker. The whole point about this age of the gurus and what makes this period different from periods that have come before is that I think we live in an age of unprecedented institutional weakness. And, you know, this is borne out by so much poll data. American trust in institutions ranging from mainstream media to universities to, you know, every branch of government keeps going down every year and shows no sign of evening out. And, you know, as I'm thinking about it, Elon Musk's cultural prominence, his ability to have the political role that he's had in the Trump administration, I mean, has everything to do with the way the Republican Party as an institution has been kind of hollowed out and delegitimized and allowing Trump's narrative of, you know, outsiders who come in and break things, and the doge narrative that, you know, Elon Musk has promoted to. To persuade a critical mass of people. I think that's only possible at a time when institutions don't have very much legitimacy. So. So, yes, in. In that sense. And he very much represents the spirit of the age of the gurus.
- [54:24]
Lillian Barger
And, I mean, I'm thinking in terms of Peter Thiel, who is another Technologist who is now doing a series of lectures on the Apocalypse and the Antichrist.
- [54:34]
Molly Wertham
Yeah, I saw that.
- [54:36]
Lillian Barger
And I'm going, whoa, what does he have to do with this? But, you know, based on your paradigm that you set out, you know, technologists really are, attract a lot of people who just love them. They think they're going to save the world.
- [54:53]
Molly Wertham
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I think that Peter, Peter Thiel's growing audience for, you know, people who will. These lectures he's giving, I mean, they're sold out, right? They were just sort of like instantly found their audience. I mean, it's a kind of phenomenon parallel to the popularity of Jordan Peterson. And I think it reflects incredible hunger for meaning and meaning beyond the sense of where will I have a job for the next year? But this sort of desire for it all to make sense in some transcendent way. And so I think Peter Thiel is, senses that and has, that, has that curiosity himself. I think he's long had this sort of fascinating kind of eclectic interest in, in theologizing and because of his, his wealth and, you know, his, his status in the Silicon Valley world, he can do it in public.
- [55:45]
Lillian Barger
So how do these, do these movements die? You know, once a charismatic leader dies, do they just fade away or do other people come in and take their place with the same crowd? Can you replicate it? Can you do another Kathryn Kuhlman performance and get a crowd?
- [56:07]
Molly Wertham
This is a great question. In some ways, charismatic authority is the last gasp of a would be leader who is in a position of weakness. You know, if you're making a play for charismatic authority, it's probably because you don't have an easier way to get authority, a more reliable way. You don't have, you know, an army at your command. You don't have a position of great institutional power. And for this reason it's often, at least in an immediate sense, quite ephemeral. And these movements are prone to fizzling out. And they often do not in an explicit way last beyond the career of their leader. However, I think that can be a misleading way to gauge their success or failure. I'm thinking of Marcus Garvey, the founder of the University Improvement association, whose movement has this brief massive efflorescence at its height, circa 1920, 21, it's the largest mass movement of people of African descent that the world has ever seen. But you know, he's quickly on the radar of the federal government. He's arrested on these account these rather trumped up charges of mail fraud in prison that he's deported. He dies in a, you know, fairly impoverished circumstances in 1940. And it could seem, I think, to, you know, the kind of casual observer that his organization is really petering out. You know, it has chap. Small chapters, you know, continuing to meet and so forth, especially in the South. But gone are the days of, like, the massive parades in Harlem and so forth. However, you know, if we. If we zoom out and we think about his role in the broader history of civil rights and black nationalism, we think about, you know, two husband and wife who were devoted Garveyites in Nebraska and were the parents of a young man named Malcolm Little, who goes on to, of course, become Malcolm X. We can maybe begin to take a different view of the success or failure of Marcus Garvey's movements and the legacy of his charisma. And we can see a long tale that is pretty significant and how it shapes the black nationalist movement that comes to make such an imprint on American culture in the 60s and 70s.
- [58:39]
Lillian Barger
You end with Donald Trump, and I need to know what are the features that he demonstrates of a charismatic leader or not, and why now?
- [58:55]
Molly Wertham
I think Donald Trump is a perfect example of the intersection of a particular individual with particular instincts and gifts, with. With a moment that rewards those instincts and gifts. Since the beginning of Trump's public career, you know, long before he was explicitly interested in politics, when he was simply a real estate tycoon sounding off to the New York tabloids, he has shown a genius for crafting a story about himself. And initially it was a story about himself about, you know, being a kind of, you know, he had this sort of rags to riches, self made man story, which, you know, we know is out of sync with. With the facts of what he inherited from his father, but that didn't really affect his ability to tell that story. Combined with a theme of crusading against a rigged system in which bad actors were constantly trying to rip him off, and if they tried to rip him off, he would get revenge. And that narrative about himself transferred and kind of expanded in a pretty natural way really into the story that he began to tell during his political career about the country and about the way the entire national system is rigged and full of bad, you know, elite actors ripping off the little guy for whom he would be the crusader. And I think that story in Trump intersects with his place in the religious history of this country. It's no secret that he is not, you know, an orthodox Christian by any stretch of the imagination, but he grew up going to Marble Collegiate Church. In New York City, hearing the preaching of the, you know, the great, one of the founding fathers of modern Christian prosperity gospel, Norman Vincent Peale, which is, I think you could argue, among the, if not the primary American spiritual tradition. And it's not just Christian. I mean, it's a, it's a sort of family of styles of magical thinking and, you know, belief that you can, you can pray and imagine the future you want and that the divine powers will reward you if you, you know, if you are virtuous and if you have good things. It's, it's proof of your virtue. I mean, this is, this is a, an enormously important stream in American spiritual culture. And his relationship with those Christian allies who have now become so important, you know, predominantly these kind of Pentecostal independent charismatic evangelists and pastors. Those relationships in many cases predate his explicit interest in politics. You know, he was on the phone with Paula white cane in 2002 after seeing her TV show. Right. And kind of resonating with her message also probably, you know, liking the fact that she definitely slots into a certain kind of type of blonde, you know, woman with big eyelashes that Trump has a preference for. But my point is that he, this is his native spiritual water, and I think it's given him an instinct for how to tell stories that speak to kind of a deeper, a deeper set of desires than, you know, a mere set of kind of material grievances. So his appeal is complicated, and I think his success has been possible because of the erosion of institutions and the total failure on the left of Democrats and liberals to, to tell Americans a compelling story. So I think Democrats have plenty of very, very good orators, but they've sort of lost the plot. They don't really know what they're about. And this is part of a broader crisis of liberalism across the West, I think. I don't think it's a story limited to America. And of course, the rise of Trump is something that's got to be understood in tandem with the rise of a certain kind of would be authoritarian strongman type in other countries as well.
- [63:40]
Lillian Barger
Well, thank you, Molly Wertham, for a very fascinating conversation.
- [63:44]
Molly Wertham
Thanks so much, Lillian. This has been fun.
- [63:46]
Lillian Barger
Thank you to our listeners for tuning in to another episode from New Books Network, this is your host, Lillian Bar.
- [64:00]
Molly Wertham
Sam.