Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture
Ep. 306 Molly Worthen - Spellbound: The Power and Peril of Charisma in America
Charisma is a word we hear all the time, but what does it really mean? Why are some leaders able to draw people in, while others push us away? I’ve been fascinated by this for years, wondering why we’re drawn to certain people, what makes us follow, and how charisma shapes our lives in ways we don’t always notice. In a culture where stories and leaders are constantly competing for our attention, understanding charisma feels more urgent than ever. That’s why I’m excited to talk with Molly Worthen. Molly is a historian and journalist whose new book, Spellbound, digs deep into the history of charisma in America. She traces how charisma has played out from the era of the Puritans and prophets, through conquerors, agitators, and experts, all the way to today’s age of gurus and influencers. Each era reveals something about what we long for—and what we risk—when we put our trust in charismatic leaders. In this episode, we explore what charisma actually is, how it both unites and divides, and how these waves of charismatic movements have shaped our culture and our faith. We’ll talk about the stories that draw us in, the identities we build, and how to stay grounded as followers of Jesus when everything around us feels like it’s shifting. If you’re trying to figure out who to trust, how to stay rooted, or just want to make sense of all the noise, this conversation is for you.
Molly Worthen is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a freelance journalist. She teaches courses on North American religion and politics, global Christianity, and the history of ideas. She writes on these themes for The New York Times and has contributed to The New Yorker, Slate, The American Prospect, Foreign Policy, and other publications. She has also created video and audio courses on the history of Christianity and the history of charismatic leadership for the Great Courses and Audible. Her previous books are Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism and The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill.
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We're storytelling and story seeking creatures, and we're always trying to plug our chaos into a narrative that makes sense. And that's that's really what, what I found to be the through line, all the way from, you know, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay to our modern you know, social media, tick tock culture, you Joshua,
Joshua Johnson:hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host, Joshua Johnson, charisma. It is a word we hear all the time, but what does it really mean? Why are some leaders able to draw people in while others push us away? I've been fascinated by this for years, wondering why we're drawn to certain people, what makes us follow and how charisma shapes our lives in ways we don't always notice in a culture where stories and leaders are constantly competing for our attention, understanding charisma feels more urgent than ever. That's why I'm excited to talk with Molly. Worthen Molly is a historian and journalist whose new book, spellbound digs deep into the history of charisma in America. She traces how charisma is played out from the era of the Puritans, the prophets, through conquerors, agitators and experts, all the way to today's age of gurus and influencers. Each era reveals something about what we long for and what we risk when we put our trust in charismatic leaders. In this episode, we explore what charisma actually is, how it both unites and divides, and how these waves of charismatic movements have shaped our culture and our faith. We'll talk about the stories that draw us in, the identities we build, and how to stay grounded as followers of Jesus when everything around us feels like it's shifting, if you're trying to figure out who to trust, how to stay rooted, or just want to make sense of all the noise this conversation is for you. So join us as we dive deep into the history of charisma. Here is my conversation with Molly. Worthen Molly, welcome to shifting culture. Excited to have you on thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. I have been fascinated with charisma for about 10 years, so I'm really excited to have you on to help me get my head around this whole topic where I really don't know what to think. So you have this book spellbound. You take the top of of charisma, you weave it in with politics, religion, really, through the history of America. Can you just give me why this project? Why have you opened this up for yourself and spent so long on diving into the history of charisma?
Molly Worthen:Right? I love that question. I suppose any any book project, because you've got to live with it for a while. My first question is, will this be a vehicle for me to just learn a lot of a lot of stuff? I don't know. And so really, it was that for me, the opportunity to take a kind of bird's eye view of the past 400 plus years of American history and think about the ways in which religion and politics are really never siloed off, but but are always intertwined. I think, too for me, as a someone who's been a student of religion my whole adult life, I've been noticing more and more, you know, with every poll that comes out and we see, you know, across at least most demographic categories, rates of church attendance declining. You know, rates of people saying that they they believe in God or identify with a traditional religion tend to be in the decline. It has seemed to me that most of the tools that scholars and journalists have used to track the religious impulse that humans have to try to understand human spirituality, those tools are just not very useful anymore. I don't think that just because fewer people answer yes to those typical survey questions, that means that more people are in a totally, you know, materialist, naturalistic frame of mind, and have no longer any desire for kind of transcendent meaning. I don't think that's the case at all. It's just that that impulse and that desire has gone somewhere else, and scholars are struggling to kind of catch up to that and figure out a method for for studying it. And so for me, the story of charisma is is one way into that. And I went into the project with this hypothesis that that that religious impulse, it to some degree, might be landing in the context of our relationship with a particular type of. Compelling leader, and that that story is actually entwined with the story of charisma in the New Testament sense, in the sense of that Paul describes it right, or that Luke describes it, and the human hunger for direct contact with the Divine and a sense of anointing. So
Joshua Johnson:then what is charisma? Take me back into into maybe the Greek definition of charisma, and then what we typically think of it now, maybe even in the political sphere in America, for
Molly Worthen:really centuries, up until about 100 years ago, the word charisma was a pretty specialized theological term. And as you say, originally, it comes from the ancient Greek Charis meant, you know, divine gift. And it had, in the context of ancient Greek and Roman culture and society, a kind of ambivalent meaning. It could mean, you know, a gift that brought with it strength and privilege and supernatural ability, but also it could come with a sort of curse. Now, Paul, in in in his letters, turns this into charisma. He adds the MA suffix, which, in, in the Koine Greek, puts emphasis on the kind of completed state and charisma in the New Testament. I mean, it has a range of meanings. Sometimes Paul uses it to describe the gift of grace that that is core to his explanation of the gospel, and then in other contexts, he uses it to describe quite quite specialized gifts, whether that's the gift of tongues or interpreting tongues prophecy, this descent of the Holy Spirit that manifests In the life of the believer in a way that is is beyond the believers control and and is this sort of unpredictable force in the life of the church that that is a gift, but a bit of a scary one. Now, the word remained kind of siloed in Biblical Studies and theology until the sociologist Max Weber around the turn of the 20th century, picks up the term from his colleagues in church history and finds it a really interesting way to begin to describe some of the dynamics that he is seeing in modern European and American politics and religion. And he does retain as he's using it and trying to kind of coax his secular colleagues in this new discipline of sociology into using this kind of weird theological term, he retains a religious dimension to it. I mean, he explicitly talks about charisma as this, this quality that a leader has in which followers are persuaded that He has a supernatural gift or set of powers, and he is able to prosper his followers in some way that convinces them that that he is, he is the chosen one. And, you know, Weber is a little ambiguous, but, but he, you know, does he mean this religious language as a metaphor, I don't think entirely. I think he is grasping for the word charisma to describe something that eludes standard materialist, rationalist explanations. And this is, I think, why it has become, you know, as it sort of filtered into, well, his works were translated into English from the German, and it kind of filtered into American academia and journalism. And now it, you know, it's become this popular term that I think we still throw around when we're not quite sure what we are seeing. There is some dynamic unfolding between a leader and followers. Usually we're on the outside. We don't quite get it, and it doesn't, it doesn't line up along the lines of, you know, a quid pro quo over over an attractive policy, or, you know, material wealth changing hands or or military force. There's something else going on, and we're grasping for it, and we punt essentially to that term charisma.
Joshua Johnson:What is then going on is charisma. Then, if we're throwing this term around, a lot of people would throw it around with, I think, hype, with with charm, maybe with, with somebody that is magnetic in some way. What do you think that we're trying to get at? When
Molly Worthen:I started this project, I really thought I would be writing a lot about interpersonal charm and celebrity. I thought that all the subjects I would gravitate to would be amazing orators and really good looking, and have sex appeal and be, you know, just the center of every party. And I didn't find that to be the case really at all. And indeed, one of the patterns that came with charisma, as I was beginning to kind of suss it out from the 1600s to the present. Is this flip side that is the total revulsion that people often feel if they are outside the thrall of the charismatic leader. And what accounts for that, right? What accounts for that quite polarizing quality? So what I found was that while Sure, some some of the people I write about in the book, you know usual suspects, people like you know John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr, that you know what you might expect me to deal with. Some of them certainly had these, these, these qualities of amazing rhetorical skills and interpersonal magnetism. But the real through line is the ability to invite potential followers into a story. I found that the heart of charisma is this invitation to listen to this new account of reality that totally changes your perception of your own situation, your own suffering, your own frustrations, and offers you a role in a narrative going forward that is more attractive, that gives you a greater sense of personal agency, but also the protection and sense of safety that comes with knowing you are part of now, a bigger force, a bigger story you're turning over some part of your responsibility to this, this individual, this movement and and what this charismatic leader is offering you is is more compelling than the other stories that are, that are available in the culture. And I really think that as as humans, we're we're storytelling and story seeking creatures, and we're always trying to plug our chaos into a narrative that makes sense. And that's that's really what, what I found to be the through line, all the way from, you know, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay to our our modern, you know, social media, tick tock culture. And I've
Joshua Johnson:always thought that, because we are story creatures, that's how we make meaning. That's where we find our identity. Is in the stories that we tell. And because I think that our age that we're living in, and the age for a long time in America, has been an identity less age where we're grasping for identities and these stories where they compel us to say, okay, I can find my place there. I find meaning there. It's okay. And it seems to me, as as you start out in your book, and you're you walk through the the Puritans and Europeans coming into America, and then you just go through each of these stages in America. It seems to be a thinking against the culture the charismatic leader is giving you a different story than what the predominant culture is at the time. How does the relationship between the the culture of what's happening and then saying you're outside of this? And I'm going to compel you into a different story that actually includes the person that is not included in the culture that is happening at the moment.
Molly Worthen:Yeah, this is a this is a really interesting dynamic. There's this sort of dialectical relationship between charismatic leaders and from the mainstream threads in the culture, and they can't be so distant and weird vis a vis the culture that they're in, that they are illegible. But on the other hand, they they do have to, they have to have some kind of innovation and kind of cut left when the culture is going right, and this kind of thing. And certainly, I found a kind of across the big span of American history. I found in different periods, a kind of rise of a particular type of charismatic leader who really a type of story you could say that that speaks to the particular anxieties of that era, and then, and then the kind of reactions to that, and then a pen the pendulum would swing again. Maybe one particularly interesting example is, is Joseph Smith, the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ, of Latter Day Saints, who, you know it, was born shortly after the turn of the 19th century in in New England, and in this context of sort of frustrated, down on their luck, post Puritan New England Protestantism, and I think a great deal of his his genius is, is this ability to combine and also sense the weaknesses of the kind of prevailing political and religious culture. So there's a there's a way in which the the revelation that he reveals, that becomes the foundation of the of the Mormon Church. It It answers these, these uneasy paradoxes in traditional kind of Orthodox Christianity, express, especially as expressed in the kind of Calvinistic strain. Machine that is so influential in New England. So, you know, in in traditional Christianity, there is this tension between human free will and divine sovereignty, you know, especially in the more predestinarian version. Well, you know, Joseph Smith's, you know, faith is one that is. It's the ultimate free will. Religion, it absolutely, you know, enables the believer to take the reins and and, you know, through declaring faith and going through the steps that he lays out to really achieve, you know, the heights of celestial exaltation in a way that I think is absolutely empowering and appealing to this kind of pioneer Class of, you know, sort of New Englanders who are looking for a new life, you know, many of whom are sort of frustrated with their situations, you know, as they've inherited them from their parents generation. And there also is this kind of dynamic that I think is often left out of our understandings of the foundation of the Mormon Church, which is the degree to which it's intertwined with this mission to evangelize and join with and sort of supersede the indigenous people of the North American continent. I mean, the the first edition of The Book of Mormon, you know, has on the title page, you know, this is a message to the Lamanites, which is, you know, the kind of ancestor people, and Joseph Smith's, Joseph Smith's kind of cosmology of modern day Native Americans. And is, you know, so there's a way in which all, you know, you kind of European extracted Americans are thinking about their relationship to the native people of the continent. And that's that's a broader story, but it is absolutely baked into this vision for kind of conquering the continent with, with divine authority, and indeed, the first Mormons. And this is where New Testament charisma kind of gets bound up with with political charisma. The first Mormons spoke in tongues all the time. So this is another thing that we forget about about Mormons, because later on in the church's history, they put the kibosh on that. And initially, a lot of this, these manifestations of tongues, are in the Mormon understanding something like indigenous languages meant for this, this vision of a of a new kind of American spirituality that I think speaks to the anxiety of European Americans who are sort of wrestling with this Calvinistic heritage, and also wrestling and feeling uncertain about their place, vis a vis the Native people of the continent. And Smith, you know, packages all of this in a way that, you know, as if you read the Book of Mormon, you know, it's, it sounds like the King James language, right? It sounds like the King James Bible. And so he's, he is, he is using the idiom of, of kind of Protestant, biblical, scripturally based Christianity. But he's he's innovating it. And, I mean, I will say, too, he was a great case study for me to get at the question of the role of the individual charismatic leader, and how important he is, as compared to the message. Smith is remembered as this incredibly magnetic presence, like, quite tall for the age, electric blue eyes. But I found other, you know, records from people who met him in person saying, Ah, he was an absolute charlatan and a creep, and he had these weird, fat hands and, like, Why? Why does anyone follow this guy? Right? And then the most striking kind of data point for me was thinking about the 1000s of new LDS converts, whom Mormon missionaries made in Britain and Canada, who moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, right? Which was then the Mormon sort of base of operations, without ever laying eyes on this, on this guy, Joseph Smith, right? So there is something about the story Smith is absolutely important. Don't get me wrong, but it's really the Mormon story that speaks to that early republic moment in a powerful way. Why
Joshua Johnson:do you think some people then with these charismatic leaders or these charismatic movements that happen? Why do you think that some people are often repelled by them, and some people are so attracted to them. What did you find in these things where those two dynamics are at play at the same time? I
Molly Worthen:think this is where, you know, as a as a historian, I always have to remember that, you know, there's this, there's this mandate right to make sense of history and look for these big patterns. But but the caution is always that history is a story of idiosyncratic individuals. And so I think to really get into the the anatomy of these movements, and why is it that they they divide families. I mean, whether you're talking about the 19th century spiritualist. Trance speakers who, you know, these, these women who, who come into an auditorium in a state of trance, supposedly, and and some people hear them and think, Wow. You know, the the spirit of Benjamin Franklin is really speaking through this 16 year old girl right now. And the person sitting next to them, you know, it thinks this is all absolute humbug, you know, all the way to the 1970s and I got really into the story of of the the following of the Guru Maharaji and the Divine Light mission, and these kind of former activists who are who gravitate to him, to the horror of their friends who have the same story. I mean, I think you, you have to, you have to dig into the biographies of of individuals, and perhaps the you know, one, one pattern that is important, whether we're talking about the 17th Century or we're talking about today, is an individual's relationship to institutions and sources of Traditional authority. And I suspect that those of us who have been let down, disillusioned, hurt in some way by those frameworks, you know that that we've we've built as humans to to give us a narrative to plug into that leaves us perhaps in a in a frame of mind where we are, we are more interested in in alternatives, whereas those of us who have found homes in those other forms of intellectual authority, perhaps look askance at challenges to them. It's so
Joshua Johnson:interesting how one person and family could say yes, the other person says no. That is just it divides people. And of course, we're seeing that today in with Trump, like you have families divided all the time. You have churches divided. You have, you know, communities, everybody's divided. Is this a new phenomenon where we say there's such polar opposites that we're so diametrically opposed. One is repulsed by it, the other is not. Is it new? Is it or is it something that we could actually learn from what has happened in the past?
Molly Worthen:I think, in broad terms, it's not, it's not new, and that this is a, this is a response that communities have to every single charismatic leader I write about in the book, from the Puritan heretic as she was deemed, Anne Hutchinson, who, you know, divides the community of Boston in the 1630s as you say, all the way up to Donald Trump. Seems to me that what has made the polarization feel more, more pungent, more more kind of all consuming in our own time, is the way in which our reaction to to these figures is embedded in a in a broader context of multiple kinds of polarization. So, you know, to take the opposite example, you know, a generation or a bit more ago, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party both were home to people who would call themselves conservatives and liberals of a certain type, right? So that mean they both parties had their more conservative wings. They had they had internal disagreement, and because of kind of the sorting that's happened since, really, the 1970s although you could trace it back to the 40s, if you like, we've seen a, you know, a much closer alignment in our own time between the sort of partisan identity and and these ideological categories in a way that that lends the ideological polarization more power. And this has happened at the very same time that we've seen the decline of Americans affiliation with traditional forms of organized religion. You know what people commonly refer to as secularization, although I would say that term secularization, it really just describes our eroding relationships with all institutions, not just, not just religion, but, you know, I think it absolutely is the case that humans seeking the thing that that a generation ago, more of us got in the context of of religion, a sense of transcendent meaning, of, you know, a tribal identity that was at least a bit attenuated by the Universalist claims of Christianity. You know, when, when Christians live them out, more and more people are bereft of that, and they find it in in politics, which has has lent this kind of religious, you know, fundamentalist fervor to some of these, some of these Thanksgiving table conversations, I would love
Joshua Johnson:for you to just walk us through in broad brush strokes this history of charismatic leaders and charismatic movements. And you know, in your book, you go through five different movements that you title, what happened and how was the the next era, a response to the. The the first era that they were responding to, and these charismatic leaders and movements were happening so as talking through prophets and conquerors and so on and so, yeah, great.
Molly Worthen:I Well, the book really, it begins in in the aftermath of the Reformation. And there's this way in which I see this story as a, as a, as a an outworking of the long tail of the Reformation in in the American context, which supercharged some of the kind of the democratic, you know, schismatic energy of the of the Reformation that the era of the prophets, which I begin in the early 1600s and that takes us up, really, to the Revolutionary period. Is a time when the categories and practices and identity of old world religious groups, they still have a fair amount of purchase on the European Americans who've begun to settle the eastern part of the United States and the prophets, are these figures who begin to challenge those categories. And sense, I think, perhaps ahead of, you know, the people who are kind of in charge of the culture, so to speak, they sense the the new situation that is the case in the colonies. This even, you know, even in Puritan Massachusetts, a degree of of institutional weakness and decentralization that is different from, you know, what, what these kind of hierarchies and institutions were set up to deal with in in the old world, and what I what I detected in that early moment, and this became a, really a category that I found myself carrying along, you know, into the later centuries, is what the Puritans would call the the quest For the desire for assurance, the desire for a personal, confirming, visceral sense that I am one of the elect, that I am one, you know, whom God has chosen to save, and that, you know, there's this tension, of course, in in Christianity And the Puritans are deep in this tension between the the conviction that you are saved by grace, and it is free grace, and it is not up to you on one hand, on the other hand, if you are, if you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit has has planned works for you to do right like this is what Paul says in Ephesians. And so it ought to show there ought to be some proof, but, but be careful not to let that become works righteousness and and the Puritan magistrates kind of live in that tension and and see correctly that you need that tension if you want to create a governable, peaceful society, really from scratch. And Hutchinson sees that in the context of the of the, you know, unex, unexpected, constant threat of of um, of mortality, especially for women, you know, facing this, and every time you know they're they are expecting a child, and just the the general kind of challenges of colonial life, I think she sees the desire for a direct line to the Holy Spirit, so to speak. And I think that that Americans in later periods hunger for some version of that. I mean, they may not, they may be wholly outside the categories of traditional Christianity, and not call it divine assurance, but but one, one way of describing what charismatic leaders offer is, is as that as a kind of assurance that you are on the you are on the right side of the cosmic story. But the the era of the prophets who are kind of throwing stones at Old World institutions, provokes a backlash, certainly a desire to, you know, set up laws and institutions that that corral these, these threats and and also we see, you know, in as we get into the Revolutionary period and the early 19th century, a desire to build, to to conquer. And so I call that second period the age of the of the conquerors. And I so, I mean it not just in the sense of someone like Andrew Jackson and you know Napoleon, who, although, of course, he's not operating in the American context, he he is the reference point for what a leader should be. I mean it also in the sense of metaphysical conquest. And so I got really interested in in the spiritualists and in this kind of optimistic vision of progress that starts in this world but doesn't end with death and and it is a kind of, you know, it got tied up with all kinds of progressive political ambitions as well, you know, so, so many spiritualists who were interested in in communication with. Spirits in the in the hereafter were also, you know, involved in the abolitionist movement and women's suffrage and so forth. So this, and this is kind of in the context, too, of the aftermath of the Civil War, when the country is literally rebuilding. But I then I carry, I carry the story to the third period of of the what the group I call the agitators, who are kind of kissing cousins to the prophets, and that they are, they are anti institutional. Their impulse is, is to to challenge, if not destroy, in the face of this kind of encroaching presence of institutions and federal government power in the lives of Americans. So I write, I write, and I write about the Pentecostals in this context, and the rise of of charisma as a term that begins to enter the discourse. I do think that Max Weber is thinking about charisma and what he's observing in the tension between sort of the encroaching what he calls iron cage of modernity, right, the bureaucracies of the 20th century and his kind of ambivalence about that, and the Pentecostals reactions against overly rationalistic, modernized Christianity, their desire for direct power. So the stories are intertwined. This takes us up to World War Two and the agitators kind of paving the way for the rise of fascist demagoguery that is, is, you know, one of the main plot points of World War Two, and I think that's what allows the the backlash that comes in the in the 50s and 60s, which I call the age of the experts, just Really the only period in American history when Americans have been inclined to grant to enter into a charismatic relationship with nerdy eggheads. It is the sort of apogee of, you know, technocrats. It's the brain trust of JFK. Even someone like Martin Luther King Jr is so effective because he's able, he's able to kind of blend the cool rationality, you know, the sort of Boston University PhD vibe he could give off when he wanted, with that prophetic black Christian tradition. And there's this sense, because the experts sell this story to the American people, that technology and scientific discovery and the the growth of higher education, this is all in service of of Americans writ large. This is a this is a juggernaut that's going to carry all of us forward as citizens. And it's a story that that Americans buy for a time, but I think, for reasons that have to do partly with broader social factors, and then also a degree of sort of self sabotage on the part of academics that really undermines the credibility of universities. They set themselves up for a fall and land us where we are now, which is what I call the age of the gurus, which is a period of really unprecedented institutional weakness and and power accruing to individuals who are in that tradition of the prophets and the agitators. They are generally destroyers, but they have far more influence than those earlier epochs because our institutions are so weak right
Joshua Johnson:now, it feels like, you know, if, if Trump is a guru and follower in the time of gurus, feels like it's a destroying type of thing, like where we're trying to destroy some of the governmental institutions at the moment and remake it something new, but it's also hearkening back to the 1950s of like, let's, let's go back to some of that. How does the how do you see that right now play into his rhetoric? Of like, let's go back into some of these things. But then let's actually tear down a lot of what's happening as well. Yeah,
Molly Worthen:that's, that's a really perceptive question, because there is this nostalgia in in in the in the rhetoric of Trump and his supporters. But the area they are harkening back to is is an era of, you know, unprecedented federal investment in higher education and and, you know, fairly secure cultural authority for a small number of mainstream media outlets that sought explicitly to, you know, give give justice to both sides and aim for something approaching scientific objectivity, right? And so it all. There's so many important features to that period that are quite at odds, I think, with the vision that that Trump is is advocating now. And I think there's a desire to to totally untether, you know, one piece of that era. From the really important, but perhaps less obvious, structural, structural dynamics. So, you know, I don't know that you can, you can do that right, that that what you know, what, what makes an era, what gives it its its overall cultural integrity, has to do with the interaction between between those two things, but I think I'm really worried about civilization. I mean, I, I think I, I'm, I'm, I'm struggling to, I don't want to sound like a complete pessimist, but I do think I mean, for some of the reasons that you identify that that have to do with the way we construct our identity as as as humans and and how atomized we are. We there. There in a healthy kind of cultural ecosystem you have. You have charismatic leaders who are, who are challenging institutions and other forms of authority. But you then also have robust institutions and forms of kind of family and local and and organizational connection. And so it's an ecosystem that has a certain balance, and I think that balance is completely broken right now. And so we're we're not, we're not really equipped to to learn and engage with these, these charismatic leaders in a way that I think can, can, in principle, be healthy if you also have these other sources of information and ways to judge you know whether the story you're being told resembles reality or not.
Joshua Johnson:So how do we know what reality is when we're in an age where reality is being questioned. But I do think that there is this, this, you know, spiritual age. And I think people are being wooed by God, that people are finding faith and spirituality and a lot of different things, but the reality is being shifted. We don't know what to stand on. Can we have a healthy relationship with charismatic leaders and movements. If it still is at an age where everything seems untethered, I just think that reality and everything is untethered at the moment. If I think we're untethered, that means that man, I the culture could shift very quickly which it has right, and it shifts quickly into following one charismatic leader. And if we're in the era of gurus, like we're going, Oh, this guru didn't actually give me everything I needed. So I'm going to go follow another guru really quickly, and I'm going to go over here. It feels like we're untethered. How do we tether ourselves? How do we ground ourselves so that we could have a healthy relationship with charisma and charismatic leaders and the ideologies and stories they're trying to sell us.
Molly Worthen:I hear in what you're saying two really important questions. One is, I think, how do we how do we maximize our chances of having an accurate picture of the world. And the second is, how do we have a an accurate, how do we accurately understand our own impulses and desires, right? Because part of the trouble is that, especially since the 1960s although I, you know, I think this is a strand in American thought that goes back at least to Ralph Waldo Emerson and the transcendentalists. And this, this, this sense of self reliance and kind of connection with with reality that is located just in your individual experiences. We we've made a kind of cult of of personal authenticity. And you know, the as if, as if there is in each of us like this, this little flame that we're born with. And the definition of a meaningful life is the is the cultivation of that flame into a kind of bounded conflagration. And that is, that is, you know, self expression. And we and we never pause to ask, you know, where, where have I gotten this idea of what, what authenticity is like, who, who taught me to, you know, for example, elevate, you know, sexual fulfillment and desire as like the mainframe of who I am as a person, right, that has a that has a history, and we, and we don't interrogate it enough, and then, And then there is this problem of the way charismatic gurus have maximized our very atomized media landscape, and we're all kind of at sea. We're in our we're in our own media silo. I think the key question to to pose, you know, when you find yourself lending more and more authority to a particular individual is to say, is this individual acting as a gateway for me into a broader tradition and a broader community with with structures and a sense of its own history and a system for accountability? Or is this leader saying, I am, I am the WAY and the TRUTH and the LIFE? Life and everything, everything stops with me, and I personally am pulling back the veil for you. And don't listen to those other you know, those other voices, right? So I think if it's the latter, that that is the sign of a poisonous relationship, I am encouraged by the beginnings of signs we see of the of the RE engagement, at least among college educated younger men with traditional religion. You know, Catholicism, with established Protestant churches, with orthodoxy. I mean, that movement is really interesting. And part of what's encouraging to me about that is that it's, you know, it's, it's putting these, you know, lonely, atomized individuals, especially young men, who've been told by the culture that they are toxic, right? That there's no, there's no healthy way to be a young man. It's putting them into contact with these, with these broader communities and institutions that have these long traditions of how to think about the classic human problems. So that's that that has the beginnings of a kind of a correction to the, you know, perhaps the attraction of of internet gurus, of, you know, Andrew Tate or, I mean, I think Jordan Peterson is a really interesting cultural figure who is proving, for many individuals, a kind of gateway to organized Christianity, traditional Christianity. I think it probably is a problem if one stays, you know, just listening to Peterson as an individual, as as your, as your, as your, you know, guide for all life questions.
Joshua Johnson:So I want to how did this affect your faith as you studied charisma and the history of charisma and charismatic leaders, and especially leaders within Christianity and spirituality as they're guiding in in different ways and being affected by the cultural aspects of what is happening in the world, and like, how did that affect your faith, and how does that intertwine between your faith and what you think of the broader culture?
Molly Worthen:It's something I'm still thinking about. I became a Christian in 2022 when I had written about two thirds of this book. So it really my own personal spiritual process really kind of interrupted my my my scholarly work. And you know, on the one hand, the book is about the religious impulses that we all have and and the the ways those impulses mutate and where they land, absent the normal landing places of organized religion. And I have always thought my whole career as a agnostic, you know, raised, raised totally secular, historian and journalist, I've always thought of religion in this way, as this like fundamental component of what it is to be human, so that that is not like an epiphany that I came to after, you know, coming to Christ myself. But, you know, there's a way in which, when I step back and look, look at my, my path, I think, well, why? Why did I think I would be exempt, in a sense, from this, this thing that I think is a fundamental to humans like I, I too, have had this tropism toward toward transcendent meaning, right? And so, you know, it's, it's, it's helped me, I think, see the way in which every historian, I mean, I'm not some like, you know, I don't go in for, like, the post modern nonsense about how there's there's there's, there's no truth, and like none of us can be, you know, of course, none of us can be perfectly objective. There's no view from nowhere. But I do. I I certainly think it's possible to and most historians, every every historian who studies religion, has some kind of personal relationship to it, right? It's just that there's a bit of a there's a bit of a double standard, I think we think about those scholars who are, you know, personally devout, as being incapable of, of disconnecting themselves enough from their own, you know, their own, their own location, vis a vis the religious community that they're studying, compared to atheist or agnostic scholars who, who also have, you know, have a set of convictions. And certainly, certainly I did, and I, you know, I probably was not pressed to interrogate those enough by the culture in a way that I now feel I am, I would say, you know, I followed in the book the conventions that professional historians follow, and that includes historians who are personally believers in the supernatural and those who are not, which is to say, a lot of the book is about crazy stuff, right? Like the Holy Spirit doing stuff, at least, that's what believers think. And I narrate it and I. Do my best to get into the heads of, you know what people lying on the carpet, you know, in Toronto in 1994 at the, you know, inception of the Toronto Blessing, this massive revival with global implications that we don't talk about enough. And I kind of stay out of the question in the book of you know what is happening? And I quote one, one guy who was there who said, listen, like our job at this revival was to just create a create a safe box for whatever God is or is not doing. And he says, you know, some of this is the Holy Spirit. Some of this is people working out their own emotional issues. Some of this might be demonic, not It's not up to us. We're just we're trying to make sure no one gets hurt. And I almost thought that that's like the right attitude for the historian to take. But as a as a scholar of religion, I would say becoming a Christian has has awakened me to the the obligation to take the supernatural seriously in a new way. And there it's the process by which you can do that in the secular space, you know, so I wrote about the problem of how to or whether one can prove miraculous contemporary claims of healing. Wrote about this for the New York Times. And you know, the process by which you can engage a subject like that in a secular newspaper is, is, of course, different from if I were writing for a Christian publication, but I have been, I don't know, awakened to it as a as an important scholarly lens, in a way that is, is different from how I thought about these things before.
Joshua Johnson:If you look at then Jesus, Jesus was a very charismatic figure, and drew lots of people to him, found a following, and it's a movement that is still going on today that he founded, and this Charismatic Movement, what is different in the story that Jesus is telling, than the ideologies and the stories that either political or religious charismatic leaders have been telling that were a little bit off and got people off on the wrong track.
Molly Worthen:I think that in some ways, Jesus Well, in every way Jesus breaks these, these categories. I mean, in a sense, in a sense, he's the, he's the True Guru, like he, you know, he's making every guru since then has sort of made claims, you know, messianic claims. But if you're a Christian, you believe, well, Jesus was making those claims because he was, he was the Messiah. But, you know, maybe it's interesting here, especially trying to, trying to make that that legible for, you know, non, non Christians who are trying to engage with the story of Jesus and are not convinced of those claims. Maybe it's interesting to engage with some Trinitarian theology here, and think about the way in which, yes, Jesus is making very bold claims for himself. And he is, he is saying, You need to see all reality through me. And if you do that, I'm going to turn it upside down, and then you will see the truth. But he is, he is, he is the gateway to to the Trinity, to something, you know, that we have to think of in in broader terms. And he already, you know, in in His earthly ministry is also setting up the beginnings, the foundation stones of of an institution and and, you know, roles for very flawed humans to play, and that, you know, I think that is where my, you know, I became a Christian, already very familiar with the, you know, the way in which, like the through line of the history of Christianity, is one of the through lines is absolutely human depravity and and, you know, frankly, I was convinced, convinced of the doctrine of original sin long before I even became a theist. And that maybe doesn't make any sense, but it's true. And so I think that that, that Christian theological claim, I mean, it's also, I think it's helpful for making sense of, you know, what has unfolded in the life of the community that that Jesus founded in the 2000 years since then? I
Joshua Johnson:have a few questions there, Molly at the end, because we this has been a fascinating conversation. I wish I could talk to you longer and go deeper, because this is I love it. It's so good me too. But what's one hope that you have for the readers of spellbound? What do you hope that this book provides and gives people?
Molly Worthen:I hope it you. It provides a sense that while there are certain features of our current moment that are unprecedented and weird and new to the human experience, those features do not override the continuities that I think do connect us, certainly with the past four centuries of history, but but also with deeper patterns that just characterize the way humans are as we struggle to live together in in community and fight over what it means to flourish. Sometimes we make too much of you know, the rise of the Internet and social media, and it makes us think that we are more special in our current age than we are, and that, I suppose, can be both comforting and depressing, right? Because in some ways it means that the dynamics we're seeing are deeply ingrained in in, you know, who we are as a species. But there's also a sense of kinship across the across the eras. And I think with that can come a kind of self awareness that allows, I hope, you know readers who are themselves religious to see some of the dynamics that can go awry in their own communities. And readers who are secular can see that there is not a firewall between them and people who identify as religious, and that actually in so many cases we are, we are living through expressions of very similar, if not the same, dynamics and tendencies. And so, you know, maybe that that chasm that we can sometimes feel in our secular culture between people who are religious and people who are not is not, is not as much of a chasm as we make it out to be. Yeah,
Joshua Johnson:yeah, that's good. If you go back to your 21 year old self, Molly, what advice would you give
Molly Worthen:make it a life habit to read long books? I'm so worried about about that. I think, I think I've done okay at that myself, but I, I happen to, I chose a line of work where where it's privileged. And that's not true for most people, I suppose too, I would say, don't think that you can learn about a tradition without submitting to it. I think when I was 21 i And for most of my life, till recently, I was, I was susceptible to the message we get from our culture that spirituality is kind of a smorgasbord, and you can either, you know, sort of make up your own or you can get a sense of what Buddhism is like, or, You know, Anglicanism or Eastern Orthodoxy by sort of dipping into it. And I don't think that's how it works. And I I still, I, my tendency is still to put too much emphasis on kind of head learning. And I wish I had begun to think earlier about the need to recognize the limits of your own understanding, and take the time to just submit to a community before you think you understand
Joshua Johnson:it. That's really good. Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend.
Molly Worthen:I recently discovered a pair of novels that were written in the 1990s that have just blew my mind. These are two, and I'm not a science fiction person. Ordinarily, these are two science fiction novels by an author named Mary Doria Russell. The first is called the sparrow. The second is called children of God, and it's about a Jesuit mission to another planet and the species that that the the team of missionaries and lay people meet there, and it is an amazing transportation into another world that grapples with the big questions of the problem of evil and what makes us human and the moral compromises that we make as a society and don't even think about until we have A mirror of something very different held up against us. It's also awesome. As a series of audio books, I can't recommend it highly, highly enough.
Joshua Johnson:Awesome. You're the, you're the second person to recommend that on the podcast here. And so that's fascinating. It is fascinating. I'm like, that's that's interesting. That's really interesting. I'm I haven't checked it out yet, so I really have to go and and read them. Now, if you're the second one, like, it's got to be something. Yeah, I think the Holy Spirit.
Molly Worthen:I think the Holy Spirit wants you to at least listen to the books on your next road trip or something. Yes,
Joshua Johnson:yes. Molly, how can people go out and get spellbound? And is. Or anywhere else you'd like to point people
Molly Worthen:to. I, you know the usual places, Amazon and Barnes and Noble or your local bookstore, and I'm in the process of getting a proper website up, probably be up by the time listeners hear this. My name is, luckily, not that common, so if people Google Molly were them, they will find me immediately Perfect.
Joshua Johnson:Well, Molly, thank you for this conversation. Thank you for diving into the history of charisma in America and our both our political and religious systems, and how we are meaning making creatures story, creatures that really want to follow some ideologies and what people have found as a story that is actually a contrast to the era that they were living in, saying, We want to make some meaning for people that maybe have been on the margins, have been somewhere that have not been included. I really find this fascinating, and then our role in how do we live faithfully as followers of Jesus in the midst of charismatic leaders and charisma and ideologies and the shifting waves of the pendulum swings of culture and stories and where we find our meaning and how we actually stay rooted and faithful to Jesus as identity and having him as an identity maker for us instead Of all the stories that we're trying to be told. So it was fascinating for me, and I loved it. I think this, this whole book would make an incredible podcast series of stories. It would be amazing. Oh, I love that idea. That's that sounds like fun. It was good. So thank you. It was a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much. You
