By Dominic Green
In his epistles to early Christian communities, St. Paul referred to charisma (from the Greek charis, "grace") as a gift of divine favor. That sense persisted until the early 20th century, when the German sociologist Max Weber applied the term to modern politics.
In a 1919 lecture, "Politics as a Vocation," Weber divided authority into three types. Traditional authority, he argued, is the hereditary rule of kings and fathers, sustained by appeals to precedent. Legal authority installs a new set of sources and precedents, the law and reason, and maintains power through rules and institutions. Charismatic authority is inspiring and heroic, and inheres in a single individual. It is multivalent, both the revolutionary disrupter and the buttress of power.
In her ambitious if uneven "Spellbound," Molly Worthen attributes charisma's "peculiarly interesting" history in America to social diversity and an "exaggerated, messy version of the Reformation, a saga of supercharged individualism and meaning-making that is unique to the United States." More than anywhere else in the West, she writes, American society fostered "the democratization of access to the divine, and the personal hunger for assurance of salvation, untethered from the institutions of the church." American charisma, in her telling, is a ghost of the Reformation, born again in the postwar media age and as easily counterfeited as Barack Obama's Ray-Bans.
Ms. Worthen, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pursues her theme from colonial America to the second election of Donald Trump. She discerns a historical cycle of charismatic leadership in America: an outburst of affirmation for magnetic individuals followed by a "fury of new regulations and restraints" meant to ensure that these figures are the last of their kind; the "iron cage, " Weber called it. The book traces five archetypes that supposedly exemplified the ethos of their respective ages and used the politics of charisma accordingly: prophets, conquerors, agitators, experts and gurus.
The prophets include Anne Hutchinson, whose spiritual message disturbed the patriarchal peace of Boston in the 1630s; Dona Beatriz, who blended Christian and African animist traditions in the Kingdom of Kongo in West-Central Africa but who, fascinating as she may be, had no proven connection to colonial America; George Fox, under whose leadership the Quakers emerged after the English Civil War; and George Whitefield, who became one of the most popular evangelical speakers in British North America.
The American colonies, Ms. Worthen writes, might have seemed "poised to transform under the shock of the prophetic strain in the Christian tradition," but the revolution would not be evangelized. A "retrenchment of white Christianity" in the face of African slaves' enthusiastic response to Christian preaching, Ms. Worthen argues, led religious figures such as Ann Lee of the Shakers to adopt prophetic "enthusiasm" as "a particular style, not an ideology." The same impulses turned George Washington into an "anti-prophet in chief, committed to God by way of order and good government." Or perhaps Washington already had an ideology and wanted the new republic to avoid the fate of the Roman one.
The conquerors' charisma is the heroic mode defined by Thomas Carlyle: "What he says, all men were not far from saying, were longing to say." The unspeakable, Ms. Worthen argues, was white mastery and aggressive action. A mania for self-rule overthrew Puritan restraint and sought to "divide the world between conquered peoples and the vanguard of civilization." Its exemplars are Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; Andrew Jackson, the man of passions and populism; and the fraudulent Fox sisters, early celebrities among the Spiritualists of the Northeast.
Jackson was "not a particularly metaphysical man," Ms. Worthen argues, but his public saw a metaphysical fire in his performance. He "addressed an audience according to instinct," not oratory. Jackson's intuitive feel for the new democratic public, his kissing of babies and flirting with women, and his anecdotal aura of "duels, shouting matches, and shooting to kill" placed him closer to European contemporaries such as Lord Byron and Napoleon Bonaparte, who pioneered the lesser forms of charisma -- the debasements of charm and celebrity.
The agitators of the early 20th century rejected the machine age through religious revivals (Pentecostals), Jacksonian hooliganism (Sen. Huey Long of Louisiana) and the "surrogate religion" of Marcus Garvey's racial politics. Efforts to explain the rise of Adolf Hitler, the consummate agitator, led postwar American intellectuals such as Daniel Bell to Weber's theory of charismatic authority.
The experts took over and explained totalitarianism, Ms. Worthen writes, as "a kind of secularized religion, a spiritual crisis." John F. Kennedy's adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. declared that Western-style charisma politics had expired in Hitler's bunker. Schlesinger was wrong. Kennedy showed why. Bureaucratic routines and scientific expertise were no defense against the power of television, which carried Kennedy's confected charisma into the White House. Television became the stage of Kennedy's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s martyrdoms.
The first generation raised with television launched the most radical experiment in American self-rule yet. The culture of images fed a credulous culture of self-image: charisma for all. It was a gold mine for gurus like Prem Rawat, who took over his father's Divine Light Mission, which would prove wildly popular in America; Tom Peters, who preached a gospel of charismatic business practices; and the spiritual psychologists of the Human Potential Movement. All of this culminated in an unholy trinity: the "New Age exhortations" of Oprah Winfrey, the "daily conservative liturgy" of Rush Limbaugh and the rise of Donald Trump from real-estate mogul to reality-television host to two-term president.
Mr. Trump's success, Ms. Worthen writes, shows that the "heart of charisma is the act of unveiling a hidden narrative," in his case a narrative of betrayal by elites. Yet Ms. Worthen keeps the heart of Mr. Trump's narrative hidden. The current president is more than a Jacksonian plain speaker, more than a mere charmer or celebrity. He lacks grace, but he has the intuitive charis of a natural performer.
The 2024 election result was sealed when Mr. Trump rebounded from being clipped by a would-be assassin's bullet at a rally in Butler, Pa. Ear bloodied and fist raised, Mr. Trump shouted "Fight! Fight! Fight!" as he struggled with his bodyguards to reunite with his followers in the crowd. Ms. Worthen fails to mention this most significant eruption of charisma in American politics since King's murder in 1968. This omission is almost as incomprehensible as charisma's random appearance amid the peculiarities of personality, and the implications of its current revival through the proliferation of images.
--Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 18, 2025 10:50 ET (14:50 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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