We all have an opinion about charismatic leaders — but do we really know what “charisma” means? Molly Worthen, in her new book Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, points out that charismatic leaders historically haven’t always been distinguished for their charm or compelling oratory. Rather, charismatic leaders are those who enter into a mutual exchange with their followers, in which the leader “draws back the veil on an alternative world in which followers find that they have secret knowledge, supernatural promise, and special status as heroes.” Worthen, who is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is also a renowned writer on religion for the New York Times and other media outlets, further observes that charismatic leaders and their followers blur the line between politics and religion: “Even in contexts that seem to have nothing to do with religion, charisma describes something like a liturgical act, a drama performed together, in which the parties join to consecrate a new reality that all, for their own reasons, prefer to the old one.”
Worthen distinguishes between five types of charismatic leaders who have appeared across the centuries of American history: Prophets, Conquerors, Agitators, Experts, and Gurus. Some were builders, who created new institutions and left enduring legacies; others were destroyers, who dismantled structures that stood in the way of the path they promised their followers would lead to salvation. Donald Trump, in Worthen’s typology, is a Guru, one who channels the deeply rooted myth of the hero-entrepreneur, and who offers his followers the opportunity to take part in a story of America’s return to greatness. “Trump was not, personally, a paragon of conventional religious devotion,” Worthen notes. “Yet his political career depended on a hunger among his most dedicated supporters that can only be called spiritual.”
In this podcast discussion, Worthen discusses not only her studies of charismatic leaders but also her previous work on religious belief, the Grand Strategy program at Yale, and her own conversion to evangelical Christianity.
Transcript
Molly Worthen: Humans are in a fundamental way religious creatures, and if that impulse is not landing in the context of organized religion, one place that can land is in this relationship between charismatic leaders and followers.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted to be joined today by Molly Worthen. She is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where her research focuses on North American and global religious and intellectual history. She’s also a distinguished journalist who contributes regularly to the New York Times and other publications. And she is the author of three books, including most recently Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, which is being published in late May by Forum Books. Welcome, Molly!
Molly Worthen: Thanks for having me.
Geoff Kabaservice: Full disclosure here… We have been friends for a significant fraction of your adult life, Molly, dating back to when you were a bright young undergraduate and then a graduate student at Yale University. And I do want to talk today about not just your most recent book but also the entire span of your evolving professional, intellectual, historical, and spiritual interests since the 1990s.
Molly Worthen: Oh, wow. This is going to be more fun than I realized!
Geoff Kabaservice: You might have to talk a little more quickly than usual. But first let us talk about your new book. Spellbound is… I’m sure you will be able to divide the interviews between those who say it’s a spellbinder versus those who desist from making that obvious pun. But it is a really great book. Congratulations!
Molly Worthen: Thank you.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s thoroughly entertaining, it’s wonderfully written, and it’s also an imaginatively conceived run through history, particularly American history going back to the colonial days and right up to the present, with the unifying thread being the saga of American charisma as it has manifested in the extremely colorful array of leaders whom you describe. But let’s clarify something at the outset… Most people think they have an idea of what charisma means, but that may not align with the precise meaning to which you assign it. How would you define charisma and the way that it has manifested in American charismatic leaders?
Molly Worthen: Yes, this is a great place to start. The book is about charisma in both important senses of the term. Originally the word is a theological term. It comes out of the ancient Greek, originally charis, divine anointing, and gets turned into charisma in the New Testament. It means divine gifts of salvation or speaking in tongues and prophesying, all the things that happen in the Book of Acts. And that’s what the term meant for most of the last 2,000 years, until Max Weber around the turn of the twentieth century pulled it out of the world of biblical studies and church history and reshaped it into something like its colloquial meaning today to describe this ineffable magnetism between certain leaders and their followers. And I think that is the meaning that has sort of wended its way into popular speech, journalistic coverage, and so forth.
But I think that a lot of people use it — and I certainly did this before I got into my research — as a synonym for the important but much lesser quality of charm. They confuse it with a particular interpersonal dynamic and ability to captivate the other conversation partner at a cocktail party or something like this. When I went into my research, I thought I would be writing about a lot of charming people: people who are really compelling in person, great orators, probably very good-looking, have sex appeal, this kind of thing. And while that might be true of some of the figures I ended up writing about, in fact it’s not true of most of them. And while charm and celebrity are part of the picture, I found that the real through-line, the nub of charisma spanning the four centuries that I cover, is a leader’s ability to invite followers into a compelling story, a story that offers them some transcendent account of how their puny mortal suffering and struggles connects with a larger sense of meaning and gives them a kind of paradoxical mix: on the one hand, a sense of agency and empowerment, that they’re feeling like they’re in the driver’s seat finally — combined with a sense of security that a larger force, a leader whom they trust, is really in charge.
I think that’s what we crave as humans. And I start the story in Puritan Massachusetts, in which the key players are describing that paradoxical hunger in very theological terms. But I really think it is this through-line that helps us make sense of the relationships between leaders and followers up until the present, especially because one of the key marks of charisma is that if you are not included in that story that the leader is offering, you are baffled if not repelled by what you see going on in this burgeoning political or religious movement.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. You’d mentioned that charm can be a feature of charismatic leaders — one thinks of Napoleon or John F. Kennedy, perhaps — but it’s not essential. How would you distinguish charismatic leadership, as you’re defining it, from celebrity?
Molly Worthen: I think celebrity is a phenomenon that has a particular relationship to modern mass media, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, and the rise of new kinds of journalistic magazine coverage of famous people, people who had some degree of renown. This is the period when journalists first begin doing interviews with famous people that provide what I think is really the core of celebrity, which is a false sense of intimate knowledge on the part of the fan with the famous person, a sense that you have some inside line on the person’s private life. You have an interest in them as a whole person, and that’s only possible with certain changes in media and culture. It’s also, I think, a phenomenon that does not imply much activity on the part of the fan. I think the word “fan” is important here, and even though that has become in our social media age replaced by “follower,” I think “follower” as we use it to talk about social media and who you follow on Instagram suggests an agency that doesn’t really exist. So I’m interested in the kind of activating power of relationships between leaders and followers, where you’re not just sort of motivated to casually keep track of this person in the media but you’re motivated to do something as a result of your relationship with this leader. And I think that’s an older and frankly more important phenomenon than celebrity.
Geoff Kabaservice: Part of what makes your book so absorbing is that you’re sort of a wizard of being able to mix up storytelling and pen portraiture and then broader structural explanations. I really enjoyed the part of your book where you’re talking about Max Weber, the German sociologist, traveling around the United States, which frankly I didn’t know he had done. And then also there’s the fact that he died relatively young in around 1920, and some of his ideas like charisma weren’t actually known in America at that time; they kind of became disseminated posthumously. But he defined charismatic leadership as a type of authority that relies neither on tradition nor institutions, but on some almost superhuman trait or reputation, a quality of individual personality by which the charismatic leader is set apart from ordinary people. And I believe he also wrote that charisma propels revivals and revolutions, and is constantly at odds with bureaucracy.
Molly Worthen: Yes, I love that. I love Weber. He’s one of my heroes, because on the one hand he was a man of the modern research university. He was a liberal, cosmopolitan in many ways, and so in that sense he was on the side of many of the things that I think are wonderful about what we call modernity. But he was also clear-eyed about all the sacrifices and the dehumanization that was beginning to develop, especially in the growing bureaucracies that he saw; his famous phrase “the iron cage of modernity.”
And in his writing about charisma, which as you say — I mean, a lot of it was left scattered on his desk at his death as a result of the influenza epidemic, and it was pieced together later by his widow and some of his colleagues — you can sense a kind of ambivalence. He’s concerned about these charismatic leaders, but he’s sort of rooting for them at the same time. They are these disturbing forces that break into the accretion of what he fears may become sclerotic and anti-human institutions, and in that sense they’re a kind of necessary part of the historical churn. But I think he left us with really useful tools. And he is suggesting… Like all typologies, his typology of charismatic leadership, institutional leadership, leadership that’s premised more on tradition — these are truer in the abstract than in reality. I think in practice often these categories are mixed and combined in interesting ways. Often a charismatic leader’s ability to make a lasting impression on society has to do with finding a way to translate their authority.
I do think that Weber was missing this narrative piece, although he did recognize the persistent religious/supernatural dimension of charisma. I mean, it’s really remarkable to me that he says that he is kind of redefining charisma in what he called a value-neutral sense. He was very deliberately trying to make it possible for his respectable, secular social scientific colleagues to use this theological term. But his definition is shot through with supernatural language. And maybe he’s being metaphorical, but I don’t think really. I think he recognized that there’s a sense in which the emerging vocabulary of the secular social sciences was not up to the task of making sense of the pantheon of leaders he saw in his own time and in history.
Geoff Kabaservice: I don’t want to force you into any kind of definition that you don’t fully back, but it does seem to me that almost all of the leaders you’re describing in this book are either religious or political leaders. And there’s at least the implication that maybe religion and politics are not as far apart as we sometimes think they are.
Molly Worthen: I agree entirely. We need, because language works the way it does and we need to be able to put things in categories, we need both terms. But one of the major points of book is the inextricability of the two. And one of my persistent assumptions that I have operated on my whole career is that regardless of what the statistics on church attendance may say, humans are in a fundamental way religious creatures. We have an impulse to connect our stories to some source of transcendent meaning. We have an impulse to worship. And if that impulse is not landing in the context of organized religion, it will land somewhere else. And one of my working hypotheses, going into this research, was that perhaps one place it can land is in this relationship between charismatic leaders and followers.
Geoff Kabaservice: You begin the book, as you said, with a vignette from Boston in 1636 when Anne Hutchinson and her fellow Antinomians are causing problems for the Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But pretty shortly thereafter, you jump to Melbourne, Florida in 2016 — which happens to be my hometown — where Donald Trump is addressing a crowd of his followers in the airplane hangar. So a pretty neat comparison there. And I must say I have been to a few Trump rallies and I found myself feeling that where all around me were almost metaphorically going into raptures, with flames appearing on their heads and speaking in tongues, I was left pretty cold. So it seems to me that the way you’ve redefined charismatic leadership is very interesting because it doesn’t just depend on the leader. It depends equally as much on the followers. And presumably this relationship only happens when the conditions are right, whether those be historical, structural, or even technological.
Molly Worthen: I think that we have to find a balance in how we make sense of these dynamics between giving credit and spending plenty of analytical energy making sense of the individual. And I think there are certain ways in which… I mean, Trump for example, the particularities of his biography, certain political instincts he has, are very special and are things that are not a matter of broad historical forces that would have manifested in any individual. But on the other hand, every charismatic leader, to the extent that he or she foments a movement, does so because of an ability to respond to the historical context. So it’s the intersection of those two things, and it’s the intersection of the personal stories of potential followers or people like yourself who find themselves completely left cold with the story on offer, right? I mean, why does Trump’s message resonate with some people and not others? I think yes, we can point to big-picture features of our moment. But to really be precise about it would require granular attention to the ways in which every individual at that rally has been perhaps in some important sense let down by the other narratives, the other proposals offered to them by political leaders, for how you should make sense of what’s going wrong in your life.
Geoff Kabaservice: To what extent did the inspiration for this book stem from the rise of Trump and his particular brand of charismatic leadership?
Molly Worthen: Trump was enormously important in the formation of this project in 2015, 2016. Like many of us, I was just trying to make sense of the political landscape, particularly the acute polarization of responses that Trump elicited, and trying to think through the question of why is it that for some people his performances at political rallies are heroic demonstrations of truth-telling and wit and pulling back the veil in a way that no one has before, and for others they are sort of ridiculous, clownish, stream-of-consciousness rants, and it’s baffling why anyone could take these seriously? How is it that the same man and the same message elicits those two responses? So that was question number one.
Question number two was a question I’ve long brooded over as someone who pays attention to religion. I think scholars and journalists who study religion have for generations relied a lot on some standard metrics deriving from poll data. So it’s almost a ritual, if you’re making an argument about the state of religion in America, you quote rates of church attendance and religious affiliation and so forth. And we know that the poll numbers in those categories have been steadily declining. And yet I don’t think that it’s correct to draw the conclusion that that means that the religious impulse is eroding or vanishing. I think it has just gone elsewhere, and we need new tools to try to understand it.
And so part of the impetus for this project was exploring a new way of getting at that religious impulse over the course of a period of American history that is sometimes described as secularization. I think that secularization, while we tend to use the term in this narrow application to the fate of organized religion, it’s really a story about the declining authority of institutions in general. And the resonance and the power of charismatic leaders is totally tied to institutions, and the status and authority of institutions in their era.
Geoff Kabaservice: We will return to the subject of Donald Trump. But as promised, let me pull back the metaphorical camera here for a moment. I always ask people who come on this podcast to tell me something about themselves. So can you tell me where you grew up and also whether you grew up with any kind of religious tradition?
Molly Worthen: I grew up in a town about twenty miles west of Chicago called Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and I grew up in a totally secular family. I did not even become interested in religion until college. And at that point I got sucked into, just through some classes on Russian history, a love initially for Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Russian language. And I developed a growing sense that for a huge swath of humans, religion is a very important frame through which they understand the world. And so if I wanted to be a student of humans, I had to learn something about religion.
And I think also I was, even when I was an undergraduate, I was developing a bit of a sense of envy for people I was meeting who came out of a religious community and had a sense of rootedness and answers to all of the scary giant questions about ultimate beginnings and ultimate ends. And so I have been my whole career, with a couple of detours, a student of religion as kind of a way of sidling up alongside this thing that I couldn’t really participate in. Until, well, three years ago, I sort of unexpectedly, accidentally became an evangelical Christian when I got evangelized by a pastor I was writing a magazine article about. So I’m kind of now a scientist who’s entered my own experiment a little bit.
Geoff Kabaservice: You cut a striking figure on campus as an undergraduate. I remember seeing you at some point dressed up in Russian garb, and that was interesting to me because I was singing with the Yale Russian Chorus at that point. But I guess you actually did a serious study of the Old Believers, who were that group of religious dissenters who refused to accept the reforms to liturgical and ritual practices that were imposed upon the Russian Orthodox Church by some patriarch whose name I now forget in the mid-seventeenth century.
Molly Worthen: Patriarch Nikon.
Geoff Kabaservice: Nikon, that’s right, the Nikonite reforms. And to be honest, I didn’t understand why it would be worth dying to cross yourself with two fingers instead of the Nikonite three fingers, but these things were very important. And you were even at that point, I think, a spiritual seeker trying to understand such issues.
Molly Worthen: That’s right, it was that summer. I got some grant money from Yale to spend the summer after my sophomore year in a diasporic community of Old Believers in the middle of nowhere in rural north-central Alberta. Well, first of all, I think it’s important to — and I stress this to my students when I teach about the Old Believers — think about the rhythm of an Orthodox Christian day, and the frequency with which you cross yourself, and the way in which the gesture of the cross, if you really think about it, summarizes your sense of who Jesus is. So I can understand the outrage that the Old Believers’ ancestors felt in the seventeenth century. But they are… It’s wrong to think of it as a Russian Reformation, because these are sort of the conservatives holding on to old liturgical forms.
That summer was my first effort at very amateur ethnography, the core humanist enterprise of trying to get as close as you can to understanding what the world looks like from the perspective of someone very different from yourself. I had never really done that in a sustained way before: going to a place, having learned at least a little bit of the language, being able to charm the old people — who of course were all frustrated that the younger generation was losing their Russian; — befriending the girls my age who then gave me all those cast-off dresses which you saw me wearing on campus — I can’t believe you remember that; and eventually winning enough trust that I could go to church services and get invited to the houses of some of the elders, although they would, because of purity rules, serve me on disposable plates and with special utensils and this sort of thing. But that summer was where I fell in love with this. I just wanted to continue this project of trying to get inside other people’s heads, even though of course our efforts at that are always going to be imperfect and limited.
Geoff Kabaservice: We have an unhappy kind of connection in that we were both mutual friends with the late Sarah Hammond, who was an undergraduate a few years ahead of you at Yale and then went on to grad school studying religious history, as a matter of fact. And she died in 2011?
Molly Worthen: That’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: 2011, yes. And her dissertation was subsequently published by the University of Chicago Press, thanks to Darren Dochuk, who edited it and pushed that forward — God’s Businessmen: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War. I remember that Sarah was very interested in these issues, and I also helped her with her senior essay, which was actually on a subject you have just described: the seeming secularization of places like Yale University, but beneath that an actual, real spiritual hunger even on the part of people who described themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” And I kind of almost heard Sarah’s cadences in a passage you have at the end of your introduction, which is that “If we define the religious impulse as a hunger for transcendent meaning and a reflex to worship, then it is a human instinct only slightly less basic than the need for food and shelter, and Americans are no less religious than they have ever been. They will always find a way to satisfy these desires, even if charisma carries them down strange and costly paths.”
Molly Worthen: I’m so flattered that you would associate that with Sarah Hammond. She was so brilliant. And as I recall, wasn’t her senior essay on the obscure intramural athletic pastime associated with my Yale residential college: bladderball?
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. Yes, that was another thing, too. Bladderball was a ritual that Sarah completely recovered from the vanished past.
Molly Worthen: I think Sarah embodied what to me is a core value of any humanistic endeavor, which is the conviction that everything that humans do is interesting and rich and deserves to be taken seriously.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, indeed. Now, you were quite unusual among graduate students at Yale in that you entered having already published an extremely well-received book, which was your 2005 work The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill. Charles Hill, who died I think in 2021…
Molly Worthen: 2021, that’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: …was a career diplomat who came late in life to academia, and together with history professors Paul Kennedy and John Lewis Gaddis created the Grand Strategy seminar at Yale. And the quote from that book that you wrote describes it as: “This course is intended to train generalists who can grasp the broad picture without glossing over details and who are brave enough to tackle uncomfortable questions of power, war, and human life. The syllabus is predicated upon the belief that there are foundational ideas by which the world’s great leaders have governed states and led armies to battle, and that these ideas remain relevant today.” How do you now look back on that book, and maybe on the Grand Strategy program more generally?
Molly Worthen: Well, I’m so grateful to Charlie for being willing to be my guinea pig. I mean, I think he sensed that I was trying to become a writer, and he also had this amazing archive that no one had really used, partly because most of it was classified, and he just made all these illegal photocopies of his contemporaneous notes from his time at the highest levels of the State Department during the Reagan years and the Iran-Contra scandal. I guess he decided enough time had passed that he would trust me. So it’s thanks to him and his unbelievable degree of self-disclosure that I was able to take my first halting steps as a historian, and find my voice as a writer, and learn not just the gritty details of how you work through archives and assemble a story out of the mess of primary sources, but he also gave me a lot of access to his personal life.
I became actually quite good friends with his ex-wife. I had idolized Charlie as an undergraduate, but nothing forces you to adjust your assessment of a man like becoming good friends with his ex-wife. And so my relationship with Martha — and her trust in me too — really forced me to reckon with a more, I suppose, realistic view of this guy who was my mentor. And then through him, it was an occasion to reflect on my time as an undergraduate in the early 2000s, in the wake of 9/11, and what I see now as a real hunger among my cohort for a clearer sense of what we were doing in the world.
And maybe looking back — I hadn’t had this thought until you posed this question — I have recently come to the realization that I came to the I think erroneous view of the university as my church. For the first several years until very recently in my academic career, I really looked to the university for a sense of transcendent purpose and world historical direction — things that perhaps the university aspires to, but it’s really not set up to deliver. And maybe the roots of that ambitious set of hopes for what it means to devote your career to the life of the mind has its origins in writing that book about Charlie.
Charlie was not himself religious, but he was someone who had a deep nostalgia for religion and thought religion was really important, and so many of the people he admired were deeply religious in one way or another. He had a particular love of the Puritans. His bond with the Israelis had something to do with the practice of Judaism, and how it’s lived out, and the sort of cosmic unity it offers. And so I think maybe I imbibe from him this sense that that’s a way of being in the world that is attractive and important. And for me, for a long time, it landed on the kind of post-Enlightenment secularized life of the mind, because that’s what Charlie embodied.
And I also… Every year I try to be more and more like him as a teacher. And he was a very polarizing teacher, partly because he was one of a tiny handful of openly conservative members of the Yale faculty. But I think the root of his polarizing, provocative presence in the classroom was not ideological but was pedagogical. He had this magical ability to reduce very complicated historical periods or texts into enigmatic and brief chalkboard diagrams. He had this famous six-part ring-cycle chalkboard diagram of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. And so he would say to you, the quavering first year student, “Here I have just reduced this incredibly complicated thing to this schematic. Now react to it.” I think some students found that didactic and felt it closed off lanes of inquiry and critique, but I thought it was a masterful example of what I think the job of a good teacher is, which is to provoke and to offer tools for making sense of chaos, to both invite open discussion but also give your students an argument to chew on.
The other thing that Charlie did that was controversial, but which I try to emulate… Most students, when they would go into office hours and seek career advice from their professor, the professor would engage in a kind of tame Socratic dialogue: “Tell me about yourself. What are your interests? Let’s keep as many doors open as possible. Oh, you’re interested in the usual things like law school or McKinsey? That sounds great.” Just affirmation, affirmation. You come in to talk to Charlie and he would give you an extremely opinionated evaluation of whatever your half-baked plans were, which usually involved totally ripping to shreds your adoption of the trendy ambitions like law school.
I mean, he had gone to law school himself. He was very down on law school. And he was a big fan of the kinds of employment gigs that you see showing up in the early columns of the alumni magazine’s class notes, right, like people who spent their entire career at PepsiCo or ARCO or just worked in business and learned something about the world and maybe traveled. And he wasn’t afraid to tell you that, and to tell you that you’d made idols of your classmates’ half-baked ideas about what counts as success: “Maybe you should rethink those.” And I think students are today, more than ever, really hungry for an adult who will take them seriously, who will not condescend to them and play around but will just talk to them in a way that assumes they’re up to it. I think students respond really well to that, and we don’t give them enough credit.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s the bildungsroman quality of that first book that makes it so delightful and I think makes it very valuable. I would have said personally that the university for me, for a long stretch of my life, was the god that failed — which is not a healthy way to look at it. But I do think that one of the important aspects of Charles Hill and his pedagogical approach, which you described in your book, is that he took seriously the idea that there are a handful of universities which are in the business of training students to be part of the elite — and yet very few of the faculty actually take that responsibility seriously or even think about it. He was one of the few who did.
Molly Worthen: Yes, that’s right. I think universities have a real discomfort with elitism in this country and their own role as arbiters of the prestige hierarchy. Elitism, in America, it’s this dirty word, and yet it is deeply important for understanding the academic ecosystem. We’re required to engage in all of this sort of mendacious doublespeak to avoid staring it in the face, I suppose. I think that this also touches on part of the very complex crisis of higher education that we’re in the middle of right now, which is a real kind of confusion of mission and also simply the reality that there are several missions and goals that exist simultaneously.
Especially for institutions like my own University of North Carolina, there remains a commitment to excellence and being able to really mentor and educate students who come in who are prepared to operate at the highest levels. But we’ve also greatly expanded access to higher education, which I think is a great thing, but that has had this result of putting a lot of blame on universities for upstream problems in the preparation of students in most K-through-12 systems in this country. So I’m seeing more students than ever before come to UNC — and UNC has low acceptance rates; it’s a quote-unquote elite school — who really struggle with the most elemental tasks of reading a book more than 150 pages or writing a paragraph of idiomatic English.
And so how do you take on both of those tasks at once, on top of the research mandate that universities have? It’s this jumble, right, this sort of jumbled heritage that is the result of us being this Frankenstein institution mix of the German research university model combined with the classic Protestant character-formation liberal arts college of the American early nineteenth century. It’s part of the explanation for what is wonderful about American higher education, but it also creates so many challenges.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. We’re talking a few weeks after Trump’s Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, sent Harvard a very nasty letter, where she mentioned that Harvard now offers a remedial math course and criticized them for that. And it’s, on the one hand, this anger against an elite university, and on the other hand an anger at it for not to be elite enough that it needs a remedial math class. It’s the confusion of the moment.
I want to just say one more thing about the Grand Strategy program, though… I’ve had ambivalent feelings about that ever since, about a dozen years ago, I was invited up to adjudicate a policy briefing, I think it’s called. And the policy briefing was on: How can the Republican Party revive its fortunes in California? And I guess, because of Charles pushing, they took a very definite position — but it was a very definitely wrong position. It was wrong as prediction, but it was also just wrong methodologically. And I tried my best to point this out, and the students just spun like tops. They were, in a sort of proto-Trumpian way, absolutely incapable of admitting error.
And I came away from that actually thinking of a passage in David Halberstam’s book The Best and the Brightest, where he’s writing about McGeorge Bundy, who went from being Harvard’s much-loved dean of faculty to being Kennedy’s national security advisor. And, paraphrasing here, a faculty member said something like, “I grieved when Bundy left Harvard. I grieved for Harvard and the nation — for Harvard because he was the perfect dean, for the nation because I thought that very same arrogance and hubris might be dangerous.” And, I have to admit, I came away thinking that way about the Grand Strategy program.
And then the other criticism I had of it was that it was clear that at least Charlie was searching for something to plug into the hole at the middle of the Grand Strategy matrix to replace the Cold War that was now over. And he decided it was going to be radical Islam, and that turned out not to be the right answer. So anyway, I have just wondered about that over the years as I continue to wonder about the role of places like Yale and a program like Grand Strategy in producing an elite.
Molly Worthen: Yes, that’s interesting. Grand Strategy needs this sense of mission and a certain frankly kind of theological frame for understanding world affairs to retain its energy. And I know what you mean about the attitude of students. The one thing that I noticed is that as the program became famous at Yale, and attracted many applications from students seeking to be admitted, and developed to the reputation for being a kind of direct line to very prestigious jobs in Washington, there was this sense in which the students who were selected, although they were very excellent, they would get to the classroom and expect the magic, expect the scintillating intellectual conversations to just happen. And they would not bring the the kind of curiosity and the commitment to doing the work that is actually necessary to create the things that made that so famous in its early years.
Geoff Kabaservice: I was back at Yale in the 2007-08 academic year as a visiting assistant professor in the History Department, and I think it was at that time that I remember your meticulous survey of different flavors of tea for a literary club of which we were both members. And I think you finally settled on a particular lapsang souchong…
Molly Worthen: That’s my great legacy. I view that as my most important legacy, the great tea-volution of the Elizabethan Club.
Geoff Kabaservice: It was an important contribution. But I also seem to remember, and this could be one of my many false memories, that you were also in the process of being received into the Episcopal faith at… was it Christ Church on Broadway?
Molly Worthen: Yes, that was my false start as a Christian.
Geoff Kabaservice: So you did not stay long an Episcopalian, is that correct?
Molly Worthen: And if you need to be a theist at least to be an Episcopalian, I don’t know that I was ever really one — although my Anglican friends will tell me that it isn’t that my first baptism didn’t take; it took, but it just took a while for me to realize it is what they would say. I had been seeking, and I was a high church snob who loved the smells and bells and Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer. And I decided I was tired of being a voyeur, and I wanted to be able to receive the eucharist. I had a meeting with a wonderful rector there who, I think because this is the Anglican parish closest to Yale, was used to people in my category. And we had a nice conversation about how the Nicene Creed can be a matter of aspiration. I don’t blame him for his approach, exactly, but I do think I needed my feet held to the fire a little bit more.
I felt pushed to continue on with getting baptized, sprinkled at the Easter Vigil. But it was a very traumatic experience, frankly. I mean, I didn’t really understand for myself why I was doing it. I was not convinced of the existence of God, let alone all the Jesus stuff. But I thought: “The sacraments are bearers of grace, and maybe they’ll work on me.” And after that, I continued to go to church for some months, but then sort of drifted away from it and continued in a mode of vaguely dissatisfied but ultimately pretty apathetic agnosticism until more recently.
Geoff Kabaservice: So I remember at one point during your grad school years I was back in my home state of Florida, and I went to what was then the theme park on the outskirts of Orlando called the Holy Land Experience, which was a kind of recreation of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus. And I was on the phone with our late friend Sarah Hammond, and she was describing to me the intricacies of Seventh-Seal Dispensationalism and other things I’ve now forgotten. But what I was really struck by was that in the gift shop there was a virtual shrine built to the Narnia books by C. S. Lewis. And I think I had remembered that we had both agreed, you and I, that actually a far better Christian apologetics for people who want to be entertained as well as enlightened was the Space Trilogy that he had written.
Molly Worthen: Well, yes. I mean, I didn’t read the Space Trilogy until very recently, but it I think is his greatest work of apologetics. It had that effect on me, I suppose, because it caught me off guard. I picked it up as a work of science fiction thinking, “Well, I’m supposedly a scholar of American evangelicalism. American evangelicals are obsessed with C. S. Lewis. I ought to know what’s in this trilogy.” And I found it to be… I mean, the first volume is this arresting depiction of a world without original sin, this depiction of Mars essentially…
Geoff Kabaservice: This is the novel Out of the Silent Planet.
Molly Worthen: Yes, Out of the Silent Planet — as well as a kind of ecosystem of angelic beings that I found actually quite thought-provoking. And there’s a way in which the very premise of an interplanetary Christian story challenges what I think for a lot of people is a real stumbling block with Christianity, which is the apparent parochialism of it. We know that the universe is vast. Why should we buy into a story that seems so narrowly centered on our existence on this one little blue marble? And Lewis’ point is, “Listen, what if we assume that God is far beyond our comprehension, and maybe He has simply revealed to us what we need to know to rectify our situation on our little planet? And perhaps there’s a lot we don’t know.” And I will say in the second volume, Perelandra, I encountered what I think is the most disturbing portrait of Satan written in the English language…
Geoff Kabaservice: Extremely disturbing, yes.
Molly Worthen: Yes, in its mundane bullying stupidity. I mean, Milton’s Satan is grand and sympathetic and…
Geoff Kabaservice: And tragic, in a way.
Molly Worthen: Yes. And C. S. Lewis’ Satan is the opposite. And then the final installment in that trilogy, That Hideous Strength, is essentially a takedown of academia based on Lewis’ experience in mid-century Oxford and Cambridge, but it’s not out of date in the least. I think many of his barbs still go home. And for me, the combined effect was really to soften me up for the Gospel.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’ve never quite known how evangelicals receive C. S. Lewis, but I do think they on some level vibe with his depiction of Hell as a place of science and bureaucracy. But he also gives them a sense of Christianity as a way to re-enchant the world, I think.
Molly Worthen: I interviewed for my second book — which is a history of the intellectual backstory and infighting among American evangelicals that is kind of the backdrop to the better known rise of the political Christian — I interviewed a lot of evangelicals about C. S. Lewis and his role in evangelical intellectual life. And many of them told me that the Narnia novels made it possible to engage with fiction in a way that had been kind of verboten in their fundamentalist subcultures. But he introduced them to this mode of art and thinking about theology in these sort of multi-dimensions, that then had all kinds of ramifications for their ability to engage in other kinds of literature.
Geoff Kabaservice: I should add that that second book of yours was Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism, which came out in — 2015, I want to say?
Molly Worthen: 2013, I think.
Geoff Kabaservice: 2013, okay. And is it true that that was actually the first intellectual history of twentieth-century evangelical Christianity?
Molly Worthen: Oh, I don’t know. I mean, I suppose there have been lots of historians who’ve taken some chunk of what is really a very complicated, messy culture — American evangelicalism — and written on it. And I could not be comprehensive, but I did try to take core samples across a deliberately wide range of traditions going from Mennonites to Pentecostals and in-between, trying to figure out: How is it that this is such a diverse community and tradition, and yet the public mainstream image is this fairly narrow kind of Jerry Falwell idea of what it is to be a public Christian? How did we get there? And so one of the detours was through this interesting story of American evangelical Anglophilia, frankly — it’s not just Lewis, although he’s at the center of it — and the particular relationship of, say, English departments at places like Wheaton College to that Anglican apologetics tradition.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’ve actually had people quote to me a line from your book, which I’m paraphrasing here again, but it says something to the effect that “All evangelicals are children of estranged parents, pietism and the Enlightenment, but behave like orphans.”
Molly Worthen: That’s right. Yes, I was proud of that line, and my editor wanted me to cut it. And I stood by it, and I’m glad I did.
Geoff Kabaservice: But again, you were taking evangelicals seriously, even if you were actually being quite critical of people like Francis Schaeffer, for example.
Molly Worthen: That’s right. I struggle all the time with whether I put too much importance on the role of ideas in history. Sometimes I have days where I think maybe Marx is right and it’s all epiphenomenal. But I’ve always had this impulse — and maybe this is Charlie Hill and Yale’s Directed Studies and its imprint on me — but I’ve always had this impulse to, unless there’s a good reason to think someone is being duplicitous or insincere or disguising deeper motives, to believe them when they say they believe something about the universe and to take it seriously. I don’t think that precludes exploring, in a clear-eyed way, material motives, hunger for power, racial prejudices and this kind of thing. But I’m really interested in the ideas. But sometimes I wonder if that interest is rooted in a search for coherence, a desire for the world to make sense, which seems increasingly foolish. The more you live and study and around human beings, the more you realize how inconsistent we are, and how very few people actually live in a way that is totally aligned with their declared presuppositions, if they even know what those presuppositions are.
I am, though, committed to a wide range of ways of investigating how ideas show up in our lives. Just because the average person you pass on the street has never read Plato or Augustine doesn’t mean that in some important way they don’t bear the imprint of those great minds and texts, simply because of the civilization they’re in and basic ways of thinking about what it is to be human. They may have not in some direct line — we shouldn’t be naive about it — but I do believe that we are in this intellectual genealogy and the ideas imprint themselves, even if we cannot ourselves always articulate that legacy.
Geoff Kabaservice: You had mentioned that you were received into evangelical Christianity in 2022 under the guidance, I guess I would put it, of… let’s see, was his name J.D. Greear?
Molly Worthen: That’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: The former president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Molly Worthen: That’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: Without getting too much into that, has that conversion experience changed your view of politics or higher education?
Molly Worthen: That is something I’m still kind of wrestling through. And I do think that part of my new openness to the claims of Christianity depended on a state of being somewhat disillusioned with higher education and a strain of illiberalism that became more and more prominent in recent years. In thinking about how I approach my teaching and my writing, I don’t see a massive shift. I think if anything my instincts in the classroom are just now better supported by Christian presuppositions about the dignity of all humans and the need to treat humans as ends in themselves and not means.
I changed my mind on a really important question, which is… For a long time, I more or less believed that philosophers in the more secular wing of the Enlightenment had come up with satisfactory solutions to the problem of: How do you derive universal moral claims without any theistic grounding? Even if they had not found a workable substitute for religion culturally, as a mode of transmitting practices and beliefs, at least they had figured out the intellectual problem. But I simply changed my mind on that. I became just much less persuaded by people like Emanuel Kant, and more and more convinced that those guys had kind of climbed up the Christian ladder and then kicked it away rather than rebuilding a path up themselves.
So I now feel more integrated, I think, in terms of my worldview. I will say, though, that becoming a Christian and really working hard to drop or at least tone down my anti-supernaturalist bias, was I think my biggest hurdle. I mean, even if I was an agnostic and I would have happily told you that I was open to all kinds of wacky claims about the universe, in practice I was a materialist who didn’t really give serious credence to the possibility of divine intervention or these goofy things actually happening. But when I learned to turn that dial down in my worldview, it did open me up to a range of questions that I just hadn’t really allowed to penetrate my consciousness before.
My conversion really orbited around a very intense investigation of the historical evidence for the Resurrection. But once I got through that process and became a Christian, my next research project, if you will, was into testimonies of contemporary claims of miraculous healings. And this took me down a path of wide reading in books on this as well as interviews with both people whose roots are in various parts of the Global South, where miraculous healings are more commonly attested to, but also people in academia with backgrounds like yours or mine who’ve had crazy things happen to them. And in the course of that, I had conversations with people whom I could not help but find extremely credible. And I ended up writing about the conundrum of whether you can scientifically prove a miracle has occurred, recognizing all of the problems with that, and the fundamental paradigm clash between the scientific method and double-blind studies and so forth and what Christians believe about a God who capriciously intervenes in our world.
But that’s a set of questions that is deeply resonant with the experience of, you might argue, a majority of humans on this planet. The number of people who testify to these kinds of things happening is astronomical. But I had simply not… I just paid no attention to it before. I just had blinkers on. So in that sense, I guess I’m aware of questions. I’m also more sensitive than I was as an agnostic journalist to the kind of reaction I would always get when I would interview sources for articles: where, say, I would be interested in talking to someone because they had a particular church affiliation, they were involved in a particular ministry, and I would say, “How did you become a member of such-and-such Presbyterian church?” And they might say, “Listen, I’m just a Christian.” And I would always think, “Okay, yeah, yeah. But I’m interested in you because you’re this kind of Presbyterian, right? You have these affiliations.”
Now I understand that. I mean, when I want to wind up my secular liberal friends and family, I lean into my membership in a Southern Baptist church. But I didn’t get baptized into the Southern Baptist Convention, I got evangelized in this particular church — which is a credit to this subculture’s emphasis on evangelism and my church in particular. But I am in this church not because of a deep commitment to Southern Baptists’ history and practice, which of course has loads of problems in it, but rather because I think it’s the best place for me to figure out the basics of Christianity and get discipled and learn the Bible. That’s what’s most important. And I think that’s something that I understood at an intellectual level before, but now I understand it much more viscerally.
Geoff Kabaservice: So speaking of people to whom strange things have happened… A few years ago, kind of as a favor to a friend, I wrote a history of women in the Southern Tier of upstate New York. And this was part of what Whitney Cross had called “the Burned-Over District,” where there were lots of spiritual uprisings, and this made it a very rich area to find out about women who had lived there in the past. And one of them was — well, I’m not sure you can call a woman, but it was Jemima Wilkinson, who, as she told her story, was born a woman, died around age nineteen, and then was reincarnated as the Public Universal Friend, a kind of Quaker heterodox prophet who was neither male nor female. Do I have that more or less correct in my memory?
Molly Worthen: That’s right, yes. She was born and grew up in Rhode Island, and so she ended up eventually in the Burned-Over District. But yes, her story is one that I got very interested in in Spellbound.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, and she founded the establishment of New Jerusalem on the shores of Lake Keuka in upstate New York. But you put her in the category of… You have five types of charismatic leaders: Prophets, Conquerors, Agitators, Experts, and Gurus. And you would put her in the Prophet category, I think.
Molly Worthen: That’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: Which makes sense to me. But you say that three of those typologies — Prophets, Agitators, and Gurus — are essentially destroyers, as opposed to the Conquerors and Experts who are institution-builders. Why would you have put the Public Universal Friend in the category of destroyers?
Molly Worthen: Yes, because she built New Jerusalem. Because I think her legitimacy and the resonance of her message for her followers was so deeply premised on an attack on existing institutions and the particular way of speaking into the chaos of post-Revolutionary America. So many of her followers had kind of bounced around as a result of families being partially destroyed or uprooted in the course of the Revolutionary War, and her proposal for that was a deeply separationist one of escape. And if you look at New Jerusalem, it’s not at all the equivalent of the institution-building that you see in someone like Joseph Smith and his important successor, Brigham Young, which really took a thoughtful and strategic approach to creating an established organization that would have a chance of really surviving the founder.
I think Jemima Wilkinson, the Public Universal Friend, was committed foremost to her own cult of personality, and that this is a major reason why shortly after her death the community dwindled — because she didn’t really build anything. The Prophets, as a category, derive their character and their authority from standing just far enough from established traditions and institutions so that their blows land and they’re able to criticize, but not so far away that they’re alien. They’re in this sort of middle territory where they really need to be close enough but not too close, and I think Jemima Wilkinson is really spot in that lane.
Geoff Kabaservice: And so you would put the Church of Latter-day Saints founder Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, I guess, in the category of what you call Conquerors. Why conquerors, exactly? They sound more like institution-builders to me.
Molly Worthen: That part of the book includes some real conquerors in the military sense, like Andrew Jackson and Napoleon, but it includes metaphysical conquerors. I think for me Joseph Smith’s proposal, his pitch to new converts, is essentially a messianic, supernatural version of Manifest Destiny. If you look at early Mormon texts and priorities — and I think this is something that gets lost as the history of the church develops — I was really struck by the emphasis on not just kind of building a kingdom out, building a new Zion out west, but also converting and assimilating the indigenous peoples of the continent. Sure, most Christian groups were interested in missions to the Indians, but that priority is at the core of early Mormon culture and theology in a way that is without rival, I think. If you look at the first editions of the Book of Mormon, one of the subtitles is “A Message to the Lamanites” — the Lamanites being, in Mormon theology, mythology, the ancestor people of large swaths of indigenous American Indians. And so there’s this very specific mandate that Joseph Smith lays out that really ties the legitimacy of the Mormon story about salvation to the conversion and assimilation of the Indians.
These early Mormons also spoke in tongues all the time. Now, this is not something that Mormons do today, and it was banned by the church in the later nineteenth century. But the first generation of Mormons were constantly getting struck by the Holy Spirit, and they were speaking in these speech sounds that observers understood to be indigenous languages. This was supposed to be the Holy Spirit equipping them for this very specific task of conquering but also ennobling and giving over the rightful divine inheritance to indigenous people. So I would challenge any kind of very simplistic “This is just a story of white colonialism.” I think the place of indigenous Americans in early Mormon mythology is really complicated, but it’s quite central, and I think the lens of metaphysical supernatural conquest is a useful one.
Geoff Kabaservice: I wish we had more time to dwell on the entirety of this beautiful tapestry that you are portraying in the other categories, but I have to close by asking you about Donald Trump, whom you place in the final category of Gurus — and you also group them with the destroyers. Can you tell me why Donald Trump, in your opinion, merits that description?
Molly Worthen: As you say, there are these earlier periods that I characterized by charismatic leaders who had an anti-institutional destructive impetus: the Prophets and then the turn-of-the-twentieth century Agitators, people like Huey Long, for example, and Marcus Garvey. I think what is particular about this third and last era that we are in is that institutions and traditions are at a nadir of public trust and investment, in a way that permits the impulses and charismatic techniques that do have forerunners in those earlier periods to have outsized impact. So there isn’t the same balance in the ecosystem of authority, I think, in our own time. And I think that the genius of Donald Trump is in the intersection of the personal stories that he has been telling about himself and then himself as a kind of hero for the American people that started long before his political career, that go back to the 1980s.
And if you read his conversations with New York tabloids, his early appearances on the Oprah Winfrey show, you hear him talking about how rigged the system is and how so many people have tried to screw him over, but he’s always gotten revenge, and no one will pull one over on him. And so why would you participate as a good-faith citizen in a system that is totally broken and corrupt anyway? And that feeds quite naturally into his narrative for the country and his promise to be this sort of bearer of justice for people who feel that in one way or another they’ve been screwed over.
I think too his rise is partly to do with his ability to capitalize both instinctively and strategically on certain features of the American spiritual landscape. So in some ways, that’s a straightforward story of pragmatic alliances with the Christian Right, or the activation of underappreciated elements of American evangelicalism, particularly the independent charismatic churches that he’s become so close to. But that relationship really has its origins in his own spiritual formation, if you will. I would never call Trump an orthodox Christian, but it’s always worth remembering that he grew up hearing the preaching of Norman Vincent Peale at his family church, Marble Collegiate Church in New York — Norman Vincent Peale being the author of The Power of Positive Thinking, kind of the godfather of American Christian prosperity gospel, which you might argue is one of if not the dominant spiritual strain in this country and is premised on this very confident belief that you can reshape reality with your mind. I think that’s something that Trump believes in his core. And he comes by that spiritual heritage and that instinct for connecting with this certain view of divine power, he comes by that fairly naturally because of his biography. So that’s why I think he both has this particular story as an individual, but he has intersected with a moment in our political and cultural ecosystem where a leader like him can have a lot more impact than perhaps would have been possible a generation ago.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. You make me think of the line from Ephesians: “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers.” Always worth keeping in mind when you’re talking about Donald Trump. Molly Worthen, I could talk to you at infinite length, but I thank you so much for joining me today to talk about your wonderful new book, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump.
Molly Worthen: Thanks so much for having me.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform, and if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact at niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.