How Charisma Shapes Faith and Politics with Historian Molly Worthen

In an era where political figures command crowds with cult-like devotion, what role does charisma truly play in shaping public life? Historian and journalist Molly Worthen joins Faithful Politics to explore the deep history of charisma—from the revivals of Anne Hutchinson and Joseph Smith to the populism of Donald Trump. Worthen, author of Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, unpacks how this powerful force straddles the sacred and secular.

She also shares her own remarkable journey from secularism to Christianity, explains why younger generations may be rethinking faith, and reflects on the prophetic burden Christians carry in a polarized democracy. From MAGA rallies to megachurches to TikTok gurus, we explore how belief, authority, and identity are being redefined in the 21st century.

👤 Guest Bio:
Molly Worthen is a historian, journalist, and associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She specializes in American religious and intellectual history. Her latest book is Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump. Worthen is also a contributing writer for outlets like The New York Times and The New Yorker.

🔗 Resources & Links:
Spellbound by Molly Worthen: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9780593729007
Molly Worthen’s Website: mollyworthen.com

Transcript

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Hey, welcome back, faithful politics listeners and watchers. If you're watching us on our YouTube channel, I'm your political host, Will Wright, and I'm joined by your faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram. How's it going, Josh? Doing great, thanks Will. And today joining us we have with us Molly Worthen who is a historian, journalist, and associate professor at the University of South, oops sorry, North Carolina at Chappahill, that's south of us, specializing in the intersection of religion, politics, and culture in American history and has a new book out called Spellbound, How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump where she exploits Exploits, explorers, I'm getting used to this English language, explores how charismatic leaders have wielded influence across centuries from religious revivalist to modern political figures. And it is just a joy to have you with us today, Molly. So welcome to the show. Yeah, so I want to I want to just start first maybe by setting a little bit of. foundation, background, kind of of you uh and your journey of faith. So I want to start first by talking a little bit about evangelical Christianity. uh Maybe if you can define the term uh for us and then talk to us about like your journey towards evangelical Christianity, because I think there's uh a real testimony there that our audience would really benefit from hearing. Yeah, and I have told the internet my story in a few long form interviews. So if people want the long version, they can they can certainly find it with a Google search. Evangelicalism, I think, is best understood as in history and as a historical tradition as really a revival movement that emerged from the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation in this complicated cultural and intellectual stew of the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the rise of modern Western commercial society, and has at its core, I think, a set of questions around which all the Protestant subcultures that I would lump together as evangelical are invested in, even if they often disagree profoundly. about the answers to those questions. So I think there's a pretty profound individualism at the heart of evangelical Christianity that is more pronounced than perhaps in any other expression of Christianity. And that question of one's personal relationship to Jesus and how you relate as an individual in your identity as a Christian. to a broader pluralistic society, I think is really core to uh who evangelicals are, although they disagree very much about uh how to really work out that relationship. And then I think that the tension between different sources of authority in modern pluralistic society, the authority of scientific expertise, uh multicultural, secular norms regarding when we... can or cannot express exclusive truth claims. How you navigate this in the context uh of a faith that is very much about proclaiming one way to salvation, I think is really quite central. So I like defining evangelicalism as a historical tradition in terms of questions, because that gives me a little bit of flexibility while still uh retaining meaning and a way of thinking in, I guess, broad historical terms about the central role of scripture as one of those, uh the primary, but one source of authority that evangelicals have always been negotiating among others. And that's very much the subject of my last book, which is kind of a study of American evangelical intellectual history, kind of the backstory to the rise of the Christian right. I wrote that as a non-believer. As you alluded to, I grew up in a totally secular context. I think that my career as a student and journalist, historian of American Christianity has always been uh partly an effort to kind of sidle up alongside a faith that I very much envied. Like how great to have answers to the pressing questions about existence and kind of what the point of human life is. But I made a couple of... incompetent attempts to become a Christian over the course of the past couple of decades, but didn't manage it until very recently, about three years ago, when I was writing a magazine article about a local Southern Baptist megachurch and the pastor there evangelized me. And so that we can talk more about that if you want, but that's the short version. So I've been a Christian for three years. That is amazing. I absolutely love that story. And I really would like to hear more about how that evangelization conversation went. And I'm trying to kind of, I'm wrestling with this because I'm not sure where to talk about it. Like you're welcome to talk about it now. And yet I also have this like question that's kind of tugging at me. That's like, how has this all started in terms of like, I know your book Traces. and goes back a few centuries, but like it seems to me even from listening to your course, which went back, if I recall, all the way to the Reformation, even before then, and you covered the Reformation in your course, and then trying to like, I'm talking about the Great Course, and then like thinking about how Christianity has gone back and forth and been like defined by progressive and conservative and these forces that would go back and forth. And I found you like, like even in these lectures, bringing me into this idea that like, wow, what's happening in like 14th century Munster is very similar to what's happening in 21st century America. And I don't know if there's like any threads or something that you could pull on to help connect us to like maybe how what we're seeing has been played out and how maybe it's different. I don't know if that question makes sense. I'm happy to clarify. Yeah, so you're talking about the video audio course I did for the great courses, which covers kind of the growth expansion development of uh world Christianity from the Reformation to the present. And I'm glad that you were struck by the continuities because that has really been a major lesson for me, I think, in a lot of my projects, but certainly in this most recent book where I set out trying to figure out the relationship between powerful connections, relationships between leaders and followers in our own 21st century American context. And, you know, the early decades of European contact uh in the colonies and that kind of post-Reformation aftermath. I think often the history of charisma is told as a very, very modern story. um Many of the scholars who have written about it have defined it as really a mass media phenomenon, something that is particularly connected to the modern expressions of celebrity, but has always seemed to me that that walls off really interesting questions and that there is a story to be told by going much further back. And in fact, one of the big lessons I took from my research is that there is this persistent set of religious impulses. that uh humans have always had in some way. And as the authority of organized religion has declined in the West, as fewer people have affiliated with churches and temples, you know, they're not spending time on the weekend in those communities as much. They may have much looser relationships to the doctrinal claims of their, you know, their family's religion. Those religious impulses don't vanish. They will land somewhere. So if they're not landing in church, they will find another place to land. And the story of charisma is very much about one place they do land, which is in this relationship between leaders and followers. So in the book, I try to explore in tandem both the history of charisma in the New Testament sense. the sense of the tongues of fire falling on the apostles and all of the... manifestations that have come with that, right? Both in the biblical accounts and since then, so the history of revivals and trances and people being slain in the spirit and making animal noises and prophesying and healing and you name it. And that evolving history, which has really not gotten tamer as secularization has progressed, but rather weirder, if anything. And how that story is actually intertwined. with the history of charisma in the sense that we use it to talk about politics and everyday speech. When we're looking at a political rally, a campaign ad on television, and we are left really scratching our heads saying, what do people see in this candidate? There is something going on between this candidate, this politician, and his or her followers. I can't explain it in terms of an attractive policy. proposal that materially benefits voters. can't explain it by unpacking a particular argument. It seems there's something going on there that's ineffable. And I think when we have that feeling, we punt to this idea of charisma without really knowing what it is. And so I can tell you my definition of it if you want to dig into that. Yes, yes, please do. Yeah, well, so I think we make a mistake. I made this mistake, the beginning of my work on this topic. I thought I would be writing about charm and celebrity. I thought a lot of the figures I would be writing about would be amazing public speakers, masters at working the room in a cocktail party, just drawing other people into conversation. I thought they'd all be really good looking and have great sex appeal. I didn't find this to be the case. So it's true of maybe some of my characters, uh but many of them were really not particularly amazing public speakers, not that good looking to the extent that we have uh evidence that tells us something about what they were like and are personally, either we know they were pretty mediocre or they were deeply polarizing. Like this is the big pattern actually, that these leaders are uh people who provoke a strong reaction that can easily be negative as well as positive. So what I found was that charisma, the heart of it, is a certain kind of storytelling. The ability of a leader to invite potential followers into a new narrative of the world and of their place in it. An invitation to take on a role and a new understanding of the universe. Here I am kind of pulling back the veil. I'm showing you a vision of reality that... you hadn't seen before that most other people aren't clued into. And it gives you a sense of a bit more control over the chaos and suffering that is the average human existence. Yet also that sense of agency is balanced with the security of being able to turn over some of that responsibility to a force bigger than yourself. And I think speaking to that kind of paradoxical human need with a compelling narrative, is the thing that unites the Puritan heretic Anne Hutchinson with Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, Andrew Jackson, and some of the successful politicians of the 19th century and forward on into the populist agitators of the early 20th century and to our own time. To me, that particular storytelling ability is the through line. I'm curious if the charisma element is as important as uh what that person does with that charisma. as you're talking and describing charisma, I'm thinking Donald Trump is a much different figure than Obama, but both had charisma, in my opinion, I think. uh But you're saying you were providing a different definition. for charisma, think then, then probably what I'm used to, just, you know, somebody popular, easy to get along with, like the great Gatsby kind of figure. like, love for you to, if the question makes sense, like to talk about, you know, the people with charisma in your book and like what they are doing or what they have done with charisma, you know, that they were born with or gained. yeah, this is a great question. uh Because in some ways, charisma as a source of authority is often most appealing or it we see it manifested in figures who who are making an end run around hierarchies, traditions, uh more conventional sources of political or military authority. It's almost the authority of last resort, right? Like You don't need it if you have an army at your command or you're elected to high office in a stable regime. You don't need it as much. So like across American history, we see so many cases of charismatic movements that flame out, especially when they're led by people who are cultural dissenters in some way, right? Whether they are women or racial minorities or politically, know, kind of extreme in a way that prevents them from making inroads into the institutions. And those charismatic leaders that have left kind of lasting uh impact, mean, many of them have been very good at crafting a bridge between their personal power in a movement and an institution. one example who really helped form my thinking about charisma generally early in my project is Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church. And certainly a major reason why we remember him today and tend not to remember the names of various other, in some cases quite similar, uh prophets running around early 19th century, know, burned over district in upstate New York is because he and some key people around him had this ability to uh build an institution, you know, kind of alongside and around his personal authority. And I do think that it wasn't just a matter of kind of creating an institution or even primarily a matter of creating an institution that had this special relationship to him as an individual, but rather an institution that carried on the story. I I was so struck reading about the early history of the Mormon church. On the one hand, people would have these amazing personal encounters with this guy, Joseph Smith. He was tall for the time, he had these electric blue eyes. I remember coming across a letter by an early Mormon convert who said, I shook his hand and I just felt the Holy Ghost thrill my whole system. But then I found just as many accounts of people coming up to him and just viewing him as this totally uncharming. kind of snake oil salesman charlatan with fat hands and a, you know, untrustworthy countenance, right? So what's going on? On top of this, uh significant proportion of the early converts are, you know, they're converting uh in the United Kingdom and Canada after hearing the story of uh the Mormon kind of founding cosmology, the golden plates. what Joseph Smith claimed to find in this new story about the role of America in really the stories of the lost tribes of Israel and Jesus appearing in Mesoamerica in between his crucifixion and final ascension, This kind of amazing addendum to the traditional Christian narrative that Smith provides. And they've never met Smith, they've never laid eyes on this guy. And they uproot their lives. and move thousands of miles overseas to this tiny town, know, Nauvoo, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi, not because of Smith's personal attraction, but because of the power of the story. But I think that movement would have fizzled out if Smith and also his successor, Brigham Young, didn't have a genius for quickly building out formalized roles, a structure, you know, uh elaborate rules and roles from different people with different kinds of gifts to play and a kind of organized approach to missions. I'll say though that I think we often need quite a lot of time and retrospect to really judge the impact of charismatic leaders. So I think about someone like the black nationalist leader, Marcus Garvey, who I write about at length in the book. And if we just kind of zoom close in on his career, from the time He kind of emerges from his exploration of Black nationalism and kind of learning the printer's trade in Jamaica. And he spends some time in the United Kingdom and doing some traveling, developing his ideas. He lands in New York City in 1916 and quite rapidly builds his organization, uh the United Negro Improvement Association. And it has this. very brief period of just a few years where it is an international phenomenon. These glorious parades with all of his followers dressed up in an elaborate regalia. He is in his plumed helmet and brocades really presenting this fiery vision for unified pan-African identity centered on a vision of reclaiming Africa in a way that's rather condescending to people living in Africa at the time, but this is his vision. But pretty rapidly, he is on the radar of uh federal authorities. He's really gotten under the skin of more moderate African-American uh journalists and activists who see him as this demagogue, this false messiah. They collaborate with uh Washington to kind of... figure out a way to rein Garvey in and he is convicted of mail fraud and he's in prison and his movement seems to have sort of fizzled out. But if we zoom out and kind of look at that story and his legacy from a longer distance, we can follow the really interesting legacy of the local chapters of the UNIA that continue to persist and that inform the kind of developing approach to politics and spirituality and really creates a kind of idiom for talking uh about pan-African kind of international black liberation that shows up, I mean, quite famously in people like Malcolm X, whose parents were disciples of Garvey, right? Like there's a very direct, you know, genealogical relationship there. but also in kind of the more general ferment of the 60s and 70s and the range of ways that um Black Americans and people of African heritage elsewhere have at their disposal to talk about what liberation means, right? So what does that mean for the legacy of Garvey's charismatic leadership? I think actually there's a way in which the story he was committed to telling people of African descent about themselves and their kind of divine destiny. It had a real power and momentum that carried on long after the apparent failure of his immediate political goals. That is absolutely fascinating and I apologize for interrupting you because I could have just let you keep going because that was so awesome. ah But I am curious about one thing that I think our audience would definitely appreciate hearing you ah talk about and that's when you combine charisma. with like religion, because like just now you gave two examples, which I thought were great. uh Joseph Smith and then the Garvey example. So talk to us about like, how does the charisma, ah you know, either get amplified, work in conjunction with uh things like a strong faith belief and, you know, feel free to kind of go wherever that takes you to include like, you know, any major charismatic movements that you addressed in your book. I think when we develop uh a real attraction to a charismatic leader, what that leader is providing is a sense of connection to something that transcends our puny mortal existence. When I affiliate with this leader, I feel that my life means something. I'm part of a bigger story. I have the bigger picture in a way that I didn't before. I don't feel so helpless. And if we think of it that way, It is fundamentally a religious longing and it is not well while it is sort of different in important ways from what we see transpiring you know in a Pentecostal revival where people you know have their hands up and are are open to the unpredictable unpredictable interference you know by the Holy Spirit. It is it's not quite as different as perhaps. We are inclined to think in our secular age. so one of the things I'm trying to suggest in this book is that those religious movements that we, and when I say we, I mean the kind of broadly secular, respectable mainstream, consider outliers, really weird, know, expressions of the supernatural that just, you know, seem out of place. especially as the march of Western modernity continues, they are actually mirrors of very mainstream desires and impulses. So one case study that I got very deep into where this came home to me is the story of a figure who went by the name of the Guru Maharaji. So imagine 1972, California, this 13 year old Indian boy lands uh already with a sizable international following because he has inherited the international ministry of his father who uh shortly before his death kind of anoints this young boy, the Guru Maharaji, as his successor. And so he lands in California and pretty rapidly begins to build up this following of uh in a range of people, majority sort of middle class white, like a lot of them are disillusioned former left-wing activists who spent the 1960s protesting in the civil rights movement, protesting against Vietnam. They're kind of at their wits end with the promise of the political system or even resistance to the political system, uh producing change, really bringing about the vision of of justice and world peace that they want. And this 13-year-old boy who, I mean, if you go back and look at footage, which you can find on YouTube, I urge your listeners to do so, he's not someone where you see footage of him and you instantly think, yes, I would completely buy this young man's proposals for the universe. But this kind of uh adorable sort of nerdy kid. is presenting himself as the perfect master. This era's incarnation of the guide to all enlightenment, just as the Buddha and Jesus and Muhammad were the incarnation of the perfect master for their era, the Guru Maharaji is here to usher in the millennium. And those who follow him and demonstrate their submission to him. will eventually be ready to learn an esoteric series of meditation techniques, which are taught not by the Maharaji himself, but by his fleet of orange-robed mahatmas who travel the country, visiting his followers who have gathered in ashrams, have kind of left their former lives. And they will, once they prove their worth, they will get to learn various techniques, which include things like plugging your ears and pressing on your eyes. and the pressure on your eyes helps you see the music of the spheres. Now you might wonder, that just the pressure on your closed eyelids does produce strange colors and things just because of the pressure on those nerve endings. anyway, so this is the picture. uh And uh these folks are earning whatever extra money they have. They send to the Guru Maharaj's organization called the Divine Light Mission. He has a pretty luxurious lifestyle. He drives around in a green Rolls Royce. He wears like nice, narrow suits. He and his followers are putting on a giant sort of revival uh in 1973 at the Houston Astro Dome, which costs at that time $25,000 a day to rent. So this isn't cheap. So this is a big sacrifice for people. I interviewed former followers who spent all their savings, like traveling the country to see the Guru Maharaji and kind of exchange one glance with him, right? And certainly families who saw their young people fall under the sway of this guru often got very worried. And I got deep into the history of what was known as the cult deprogramming movement, where families would hire, like, essentially professional kidnappers, often people who had themselves recently left a religious, a cult and so wanted to kind of help liberate other people. And they would accost the person they were trying to remove from this cult and put them in a safe house for several weeks sometimes until they seemed like they'd been talked out of it. So my point here is that this is a This is a phenomenon. This is a movement that seems to many people at the time, and I think can seem to us in retrospect, to be really strange and marginal and hard to understand. But if you dig into the message that the Guru Maharaj was preaching, it is actually quite in line with the gospel of self-actualization that is really the marrow of kind of pop psychology of the 1970s and really into our own time. So the message that people are reading in bestselling self-help books from that point forward about finding the kind of inner light uh inside you and learning to become attuned with this sort of inner flame of authenticity. This is really the pitch that this guru is making. You know, you will, if my truth resonates with you, if the perfect knowledge I am promising you just feels right, then you will know it's true. So there's this odd way in which he sets himself up as a guru, but as a guru who is enabling the story of self-salvation and uh unlocking this primal, authentic, uh you know, perfect truth inside you. that is actually totally in tune with the culture. And of course, this is a moment when so many Americans are really questioning the authority of traditional institutions and doubting the power of traditional churches or the government. They're beginning to question media, right, in the context of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. And so the Guru Maharaj also represents that impulse, that sense that your options that your home culture has been giving you so far are just tired and inadequate, and I am something new. And so I think when we see these uh supposedly religious outliers in the light of the big themes and questions and anxieties of the culture, we learn a great deal about the culture as a whole and not just about the dynamics of that movement. So, I mean, there are so many questions that are in my mind at the moment, and I'm just trying to narrow them down. So if I'm thinking about like, so we have someone like Donald Trump who clearly has this thing, charisma, right? Well, there's two things I've actually thinking about even more, right? But one is the idea, it just made me think about the idea of Dignitas. in the Roman world and the idea of like, Charis, which I know you discuss in the book and even that kind of... like cousin word honor or team a in that kind of like honor shame culture like how like charisma like what's the what's the connection or parallels between charisma and something like Dignitas or honor in the ancient world just like how we even see it in the New Testament self so we could kind of get like a sense of how that might apply today and I'm also thinking about how did Trump Like how is it that uh we have not Trump. Sorry, I shouldn't have said that. How do you like what what's the connection between secular leaders and religious leaders? Like is there a secular charisma and then a religious charisma or is it all basically staying in this religious charisma like place? Like what do do with secular leaders like Stalin or Hitler or you know, Mussolini? I mean, we don't think about them as religious, but maybe they were, and it's just not what we want to say. I don't know. Let me know if you need clarification. I know I was going on there. uh I lost you for part of that. My internet connection got a little bit unstable. um I heard your question about the connection between ancient Roman ideas of Dignitas and Charis and whether that has implications for how we understand the concept of charisma in the era of Trump. Should I take that? Yes, yes, take it and roll with it. Yeah. Well, I so certainly this is a you know, this is an American story, but you have to know something about the the origins of that term. And Charis is this idea that, you know, is is is Greek, right? It comes from the Greek and it is adopted into the kind of Hellenistic context that informs the New Testament. But but in that in that Hellenistic context, it is part of this. It's an idea that has different meanings in this kind of ecosystem of honor and exchange. you know, originally it is this idea of a kind of divine anointing by the gods, which can bring with it great benefit or it can bring unexpected tragedy, right? It has a sort of double edged quality, but you also read, you know, in the ancient literature about, you know, musicians. uh using their charists to honor dignitaries and a web uh of gift and grace extending from patrons to poorer people in the society. It is woven into this hierarchy of uh other forms of honor and status, including dignitas. Now, Paul in his writings in the New Testament takes that idea of Charis, and as far as I know, he's the one who adds the suffix ma to it, which in the Koine Greek places emphasis on the end state. That's what he wants to draw our attention to. And he uses it in a range of contexts, from kind of the general gift of salvation to specific gifts in the context of especially this is true also in Luke and Acts, as we're filling out the manifestations of the Holy Spirit in that context. Now, what can that tell us about our current moment and the ecosystem of power and authority that maybe uh orbits around and helps explain Donald Trump? I think we can come at it. both from the angle of New Testament charisma and from uh this broader understanding of charisma as a kind of storytelling. So I think that Donald Trump has demonstrated over the course of his whole career, and I mean long before he entered formal politics, he has shown a real gift for telling and weaving together uh very powerful stories. So if you go back and read his interviews with the New York tabloids, his appearances, on the Oprah Winfrey show in the late 1980s, you will hear him talking about seeing the country being ripped off and his own experience. And he kind of presented himself as this self-made entrepreneur, right? His own experience detecting shysters and people who were going to try to make a fool of him and take advantage of him. And he would always... put a stop to it and get revenge. He's a man who gets revenge and he doesn't let anyone pull anything over on him. And he was presenting, even when the context was simply the business world of New York in the 1980s, he was presenting the system as fundamentally corrupt, right? So only a fool would follow the rules of a corrupt system. And the real sign of heroism. and virtue is being clever enough and bold enough to break those rules in pursuit of a kind of ultimate reckoning. So you can see how that story that he was crafting about himself as a businessman in the 1980s, it feeds just very directly into the story that I think he's persuasively told uh many Americans in our own context. And I think it's useful to remember that that That story of him as a businessman was supercharged in its purchase on the public mind in the context of the wild success of The Apprentice, the reality television show. And it's hard to understate the importance of that, I think, in that kind 2015 moment and American's first impressions of Donald Trump. Now, he is... I think to understand him, we need to appreciate these specific things about his own biography while also seeing him against the backdrop of this broad swath of American history in which the authority of traditional institutions are at their absolute nadir, as far as I can tell. There was sort of a, I mean, in my sense of the broad narrative, there's kind of a peak of of Americans' faith in institutions in the post-war era. partly because coming out of World War II and the sort of first-hand traumatic knowledge of what happens when a uh demagogue gets too much power. There is a real backlash, a kind of anti-post-Hitler recovery moment in Western society where Americans who generally have deep in their DNA, suspicion of elites and suspicion of experts and institutions, they are willing for that period, 50s and 60s, to trust the story that the experts are telling. But that is really in an eroded state by the time we get to the end of the 20th and early 21st century. For Donald Trump to come in with his narrative, about the institutions and the system being corrupt. And in fact, you should want me all the more to be your champion since I've shown you that I can break these and I don't take them any more seriously than they deserve to be taken. And that's a story that has special purchase at this particular moment. Now, I think you need then to also break down your sort of mapping of Donald Trump's resonance with different Americans across different subcultures, right? And I also don't want to suggest that charisma is absolutely the master key that explains every single vote for Trump. Because I I talk, I know you guys do too. Like I talked to such a range of Americans who, you know, some of whom supported him very, very reluctantly, you know, some for really very single issue matters, particularly the matter of abortion. And then there are some for whom he does have this personal authority and this personal power. I think Trump's one strategically genius move he made early in his campaign was to see the power of independent, charismatic Christians who in 2015 were still fairly kind of marginal in terms of not attracting so much attention from the mainstream media, despite their large numbers. Now, his relationship with Paula White, right, who became his kind of official spiritual advisor, long predated his entry into politics. And he saw her television show in 2002 and called her up and sensed a real common bond. Now, what's going on there? Well, you we often we hear many critiques of Trump's Shall we say loose relationship with traditional Christian orthodoxy? But it's worth remembering that he grew up in Norman Vincent Peale's marble collegiate church, right, in New York City, hearing the godfather of positive thinking, preaching every Sunday on the power of the mind aligned with divine reality to effectively conjure into existence the world that you want. So, I mean, this is this is a potent, perhaps the potent stream in American spirituality. It's one with strong connections to the world of kind of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. And so I think it has given Trump and whatever he whatever he actually thinks in his heart of hearts of Jesus or like the various key points in the Nicene Creed. One thing the man clearly believes in is his his ability to to changed the world with the power of his imagination, right? And I think especially since the assassination attempt, he very much believes in his own divine anointing. So he saw, I think both for strategic reasons, the potential power of this subculture of American Christianity, and it also aligned with what I think it's fair to call his personal spirituality. When Trump leaves office in 2032, potentially, uh there's going to be, I think, a big desire for Democrats to respond. So I'm a Democrat. uh And I think that there's just going to be this urging. And my biggest fear is that they are going to fall under the spell of of a charismatic Democrat, because I always try to remind some of my Democrat friends, we almost got Michael Avenatti, because he did run for president when he's going through all the Stormy Daniels stuff, and that would have been terrible, in my opinion. So how can we discern between the next leaders say of the country, Republican or Democrat, doesn't really matter, uh you know, between just charismatic leadership and, you know, just somebody's potentially harmful influence on us. I'm so glad you asked this question because I think you pointed out that we've been or I've been talking about charisma so far in a way that can make it sound like it is always a negative thing. That it is a synonym for manipulation, an illegitimate usurpation of authority. And I don't mean to suggest that. think charisma in and of itself is morally neutral. I it's kind of like the law of gravity. It's just it's part of how we organize ourselves as humans. you know, it's moral valence has everything to do with the immediate context and also whether the story that the charismatic leader is telling is actually grounded in empirical reality. So I think that's the key. And I think, you know, American history does feature leaders. And I write about, you know, Martin Luther King in the book who use this charismatic relationship with followers to, I think, reveal a new picture of the world that is very much rooted in empirical facts and activates people to respond to those facts in a new way, right? So that is key to thinking about the answer to your question. How do we navigate the potential hazards? of charismatic leaders who present themselves and want our allegiance. And I think the key is to, well, one, recognize when you are having a reaction to this invitation you're getting from a leader, that that is what is happening, that you're being invited to take on a role in this drama that this person is presenting to you about the world. And to then remember that you have, as a... uh resident of 21st century American society, you have many resources by which to get information about your world and corroborate or disprove the claim that this leader is making. I think the mark of a leader who's using his or her charisma for good is that that person is initiating you into a movement but also a range of other resources and ways of getting information, a sense of being connected to institutions and traditions and experts when appropriate. And the warning sign is a kind of claim to a monopoly on truth, right? I am the fact checker. You don't go anywhere else, right? This was essentially Rush Limbaugh's line to his. his listeners and I really think that he set us up very much for our modern media moment that has made uh the politics of the Trump era possible. So I think that sense of a leader who then connects you to a broader ecosystem that has checks and balances is also really relevant to the church context. American evangelicalism has had its problems with charismatic mega church warlords who get a little bit carried away. But I think that looking for that sense of this person is part of a bigger ecosystem is really important. And I worry about the Democrats because I don't actually think they have charisma figured out yet. They have some amazingly charming and magnetic figures. Like, I could listen to Wes Moore in Maryland speak for five hours and not get tired of him. I love Gavin Newsom's podcast and I think he is, he does also have a personal presence that's really winning and a gift for engaging people who disagree with him. All of these things are very important. But what to me is missing from the Democrats is a broader story to the American people about what this country is about. I think, I mean, and this is true of kind of liberalism in the West generally. It's especially true of American Democrats. they've kind of lost the plot. They spent the last kind of generation going down this, what I think has proven to be a damaging path of subdividing Americans into different identity categories and pitching to each of those categories in a different way, rather than telling one big grand story, whether it's a story of kind of economic. a unity and a sort of class-based vision of alliance or a story about the recovery of America's mission in the international scene, something that is really a big grand narrative. think Democrats are really struggling for that. And the politician who figures that out is, I think, going to be the one with the most charismatic potential. I really appreciate that assessment. And this is my last question. And it's gonna have to do with helping us trace and understand the connection between uh church and state. And in particular, one aspect and concept that you talk about, this idea that wherever Christianity goes, it seems to try to get somewhere in the spotlight, somewhere it gathers attention. in some way, even, you know, yeah, it just is always like, it's going to start to make its way towards the public spaces to be able to make a difference in the culture. I would love for you to kind of talk about that in general and then specifically how you feel like that's being worked out in like the MAGA movement maybe right now or the religious right or the part of that that's connected to the MAGA movement. That's interesting. I suppose there's a few ways to come at your question. um But putting it in the context of politics right now makes me think that what you're what you're pointing to is the the gravitation of Christians to worldly power, which is is, you know, one of the great through lines of certainly Christian history, but but human history, generally, mean, I just don't think there's any ideology or theology you can get off the hook. know, name your group, right? Atheists, Buddhists, whoever, Marxists, they've all done horrific things when they've had power. And this is why I believed in the doctrine of original sin long before I was a theist, even though that is totally metaphysically incoherent. So, you know, in some sense, I think we are seeing in our current political moment, the unfortunate alignment of partisan political machinery and uh media ecosystem siloing with a kind of ideological sorting that's happened. So, you know, in the past, uh you know, I think it's important to recognize that you know, if you looked at the Democratic and Republican parties in, you know, the 60s and the 70s or before that, you would have found within their ranks much greater ideological and policy disagreement. You would find people who would kind of call themselves conservatives and those who would call themselves more liberal or progressive. And there is a there is a kind of sorting that's happened for various reasons. have to do with the responses to desegregation and kind of the complicated history of uh the Christian right and the regional sorting in this country that I think has created this alignment of uh institutional mechanisms of power with certain ideological patterns. And so that has supercharged the polarization and the polarization kind of seems to feed on itself. But I don't... I don't know, I oscillate between moments of like deep pessimism about the collapse of civilization and flickers of optimism that there's a sort of this growing sense that I think, and maybe this is me cherry picking, you know, the conversations with my students that I want to remember and be inspired by, but there's a sense in which, especially younger people, both on the right and on the left, are uh exhausted by and maybe skeptical of the narratives that they've inherited. uh In part, this is expressing itself as a kind of surprising religious mini revival, right? Like, new atheism is just passe now, and it's all about like, Jordan Peterson as the gateway drug to Christianity. And the surprising uptick in attendance numbers, even in the secular United Kingdom and among Gen Z men here. And I think uh there's also an exhaustion among uh younger conservative Christian students I talked to who, while they may, I mean, they're still very conservative on kind key culture war points in a sense. They're also, uh they don't wanna be seen as kind of their parents religious right. There's something, there's some sort of searching for a new way of relating to the culture that's going on. uh I think there's a kind of fight happening for the marrow of what it means to be an American Christian. And that brings with it a lot uh of damage and awfulness, but also maybe it's uh forcing. a kind of self-conscious reflection that for too long, too many American Christians have been able to avoid just because it's been kind of culturally easy in their subculture to be Christian. And now wherever you stand, you really have to think through the relationship between the gospel and politics. Man, I think that's really, really good. You know what, you kind of explained like what, or you alluded to like people in this generation and how they're kind of connecting, but even like some, like sometimes you feel like things aren't going well and other times you feel like things are going great, or maybe they're doing a little bit better. You get some inspiration from your students. What are you hopeful for in the future? If you could just say it like, you know, like, you know, as comprehensively, I know we're coming up on time, so I don't want to get put too much on you, but as comprehensively and concisely, just what you're hopeful for and what you're concerned about in either order. And then we'll just end with some practical questions about how people can look into your work. I guess I'm hopeful, I hope that, I don't know, the two spheres I spend most of my time in, Christianity, church world, and higher education, will both lean into their countercultural roles and not just do the thing that gets the most clicks, that drives immediate interest from, uh you know, students who want the latest technological fad. mean, in the context of higher ed, I'm really thinking about the advent of generative AI and the encroachment of technology and how I think that's created this existential crisis in higher ed. And the thing to do is not to lean into it with kind of complete unbridled enthusiasm, but to be very careful. and to preserve in higher ed some space for old fashioned analog critical thinking. if we have a prayer of surviving as a civilization, it's going to be by preserving the ability to read a book and think in a straight line on your own and not mistake kind of chat bot generic bureaucraties for human consciousness. And on the other hand, there is in Christianity so obviously this reservoir of radical subversion. In regard to whatever worldly pagan context we're talking about, whether it's the excesses of the right or the left or something else, in every cultural context over the past 2,000 years around the world, some major aspect of Christianity, rightly understood, has been an outrage. And a scandal and our constant temptation. I think in both both for people in the faith and those who maybe orbit around it and in our post Christian culture is to think they know what Christianity is and to too often kind of squeeze it into into a political box that truncates some essential part of the message. And so I guess my prayer is that is that Christians more Christians will will really recover the strangeness of the gospel and see that while of course, they're called on to be engaged political citizens and that always requires making choices between the better of often bad options, there remains a prophetic burden. Like whatever side you're on, you better be. criticizing that side from the posture of the gospel. And that doesn't mean arrogance, that's a radical kind of humility. I absolutely love that. I've actually thought that very thing, like even thought about a sub stack. Come on, Will, a sub stack that talks about the necessity of critics within organizations, within movements, whatever sphere of society and culture you're looking, whichever mountain of the seven mountain mandate that we're talking about. I'm assuming you're familiar with the seven mountain mandate. That's a yeah, of course And that's like we'll get into that maybe maybe we'll have to have you back on to talk about that because I I mean just sitting here listening to this I would love to hear your thoughts on the seven mountain mandate, but alas we need to wrap this episode up So how can people connect with? You or your work and getting the book is their preferred vendor. Just want to give you an opportunity to talk about any of that well, I think social media is one of the major acids of civilization, so I'm not on social media. But I'm easily Googled. I... Well, I hope it's growing into a movement. uh I have a website, mollyworthen.com's got all my articles on various topics. It's got my interviews both about my research and about my own personal evolution. from agnosticism to Christianity and ways to get in touch. And you know, my book is available wherever you buy books, local, local or global. I don't care. I just would love for people to engage with it. Very good, very good. Well, thank you so much, Molly, for coming on. It's been a real pleasure to pick your brain and connect with you. Absolutely. And to our viewers and listeners, guys, thanks for joining us for another episode of the Faithful Politics podcast. Please make sure you're liking, subscribing, hitting the notification bell, sharing this with people. that could really hear this, maybe your crazy uncle Larry, or maybe your super liberal cousin, send it to them so we can have these kind of conversations. And we appreciate you guys coming and being a part of this. We're going to put uh links to all of Professor Worthen's materials there in the show notes so that you guys can check that out easily. And until next time, guys, keep your conversations that right or left, but up. Thanks.