The power of charismatic narrative

Molly Worthen’s Spellbound is an elegant, witty, readable, original, and deeply troubling book. A professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Worthen has spent two decades immersed in American social and intellectual history, and it shows.

Worthen acknowledges that her interest in charisma was sparked by Donald Trump’s alarming political success. How could a man who is despised by virtually every facet of the American elite conquer the Republican Party and ascend to the White House?

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Trump didn’t succeed by being eloquent, charming, sexy, or good-looking, Worthen argues. Rather, the suffering, fears, and anxieties of a large swathe of the American public meshed perfectly with the story Trump was selling.

Human beings, by Worthen’s account, are always looking for a simple, compelling narrative that explains who we are and why we’re here. When well-established explanations no longer make sense of the world, charismatic leaders fill the vacuum with fresh narrative.

A good charismatic narrative invariably divides the world into heroes and villains. Such a narrative invites obscure individuals to embark on a heroic quest; those written out of the new narrative typically recoil in disgust. By Trump’s account, America was being ripped off by corrupt politicians, lying journalists, and self-satisfied intellectuals, and only Trump could fix it. For Worthen, this story is the latest iteration of an ancient pattern.

In classical Greek, the word charis referred to a gift from the gods. The apostle Paul used the word charisma as a shorthand reference to the miraculous gifts of the spirit on display in the early church: prophetic utterance, miracles of healing, and glossolalia. In the early 20th century, Max Weber used the word charisma to refer to any relationship between leaders and followers that’s rooted in a compelling story that, for the true believer, makes sense of a chaotic world.

Worthen defines the word charisma in this Weberian sense. It isn’t about charm, hypnotic eyes, or sex appeal. It emerges from an overarching story that links leaders and their followers in a symbiotic dance. Charismatic narratives are subversive because they associate established leaders with myopia, failure, and corruption while painting the purported victims of the official story in a heroic light.

Billy Graham may have been charismatic in the conventional sense (persuasive, attractive, charming, etc.), but by design he was entirely conventional. His message was reassuring for many because it was familiar and never challenged the status quo. Spellbound isn’t about people like Graham.

Instead, Worthen begins her account with the story of Anne Hutchinson, a 17th-century Boston resident who challenged the Puritan establishment. Because salvation was utterly dependent on the uncoerced grace of God, Puritans believed, only a careful moral inventory could provide evidence of divine election. Hutchinson disagreed. The Holy Spirit, she said, working through the witness of scripture, could provide full assurance of divine election. Hutchinson’s coterie of followers embraced this new theology with rapturous relief; the religious authorities, not surprisingly, were appalled. After a tense trial before Boston’s all-male religious establishment, Hutchinson was condemned as a heretic and forced into exile. Hutchinson’s experience, in Worthen’s view, illustrates both the attractive and repellant character of charismatic narrative.

A recurrent theme in Spellbound is the way the death of young children—a cruel fact of premodern existence—forced many women into a profound spiritual crisis, often with revolutionary consequences. Desperate to make sense of tragic experience and freed from the demands of childcare, women like Hutchinson, Shaker founder Mother Ann Lee, Maria Woodworth-Etter, and Aimee Semple McPherson were radically open to a fresh word from God.

Spellbound also highlights the contributions of Black leaders like Dona Bea­triz Kimpa Vita (a visionary figure who called for African independence in the 18th century), Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, William Seymour (the father of Pentecostalism), Kwame Nkrumah (the American-educated prime minister of Ghana), anti-colonial activist Angela Davis, and Martin Luther King Jr. In radically different ways, these leaders offered charismatic counternarratives to an established story riddled with White supremacist assumptions.

Charismatic narratives naturally reflect the tensions and challenges of their particular epoch. In the early 19th century, Worthen says, the charismatic narratives once propounded by prophetic figures like Hutchinson and George Whitfield were supplanted by visions of territorial conquest sponsored by Andrew Jackson and, in the spiritual realm, Joseph Smith. In the 20th century, a world war and a depression opened the door to populist agitators like Huey Long and, in the religious sphere, McPherson.

By mid-century, thanks largely to the depredations of fascist demagogues, Americans had grown suspicious of charismatic storytellers. The success of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal served as an advertisement for social planning. Americans were more open to expert leadership in the postwar period, Worthen says, than at any time before or since. Vestiges of the traditional American mistrust of experts remained, however, forcing politicians like John F. Kennedy and civil rights leaders like King to live in the tension between expert opinion and charismatic narrative.

By the mid-1970s, in Worthen’s telling, the age of the expert was over. In a chapter titled “Breakdown,” she chronicles the slow collapse of confidence in American political, social, and religious institutions. The resulting narrative vacuum was filled by religious self-promoters like the Guru Maharaj Ji, media stars like Oprah Winfrey, and entrepreneurial hucksters like Tom Peters.

The Toronto Blessing movement, which first attracted media attention in 1994, was fully charismatic in Worthen’s sense because, although virtually leaderless, the nightly revival meetings featured a clash between demonic and angelic forces that purportedly would soon replace secular government with the kingdom of God. “The dominionists’ ‘Seven Mountain Mandate’ aspired to capture the ‘mountains’ of church, family life, education, government, media, the entertainment industry, and corporate America,” she writes.

This militant brand of signs-and-­wonders Christianity was encouraged by the collapse of consensus and confidence within the academic world. The deconstructive philosophy of Herbert Marcuse and the anti-war and anti-­colonial rhetoric of activists like Davis created uncertainty and confusion within the American left. This set the stage for the nihilistic cynicism of Rush Limbaugh. Once the last vestige of confidence in established authority had been vanished, an opportunist like Trump was free to inject his unique brand of charisma into the American bloodstream.

Both Christian dominionists and working-class voters who felt betrayed by neoliberal globalism embraced Trump as their savior and defender. His free-association rants at rallies and on social media may have inspired a mix of laughter and incredulity in elite circles, but for his followers, the fact that he didn’t sound like a politician was evidence of authenticity.

“If the history of charismatic leaders teaches us anything,” Worthen writes, “it’s that observers who are trying to understand a leader’s relationship with his followers make a mistake if they focus on the cogency of his arguments, the soundness of his factual claims, or the attractiveness of his personality.”

Trump was telling a simple story, and his critics were not. The American establishment was swept aside, Worthen believes, because from the late 1960s onward they failed as storytellers:

The midcentury experts—the Cold War technocrats and professors, the Washington brain trusts, sensible public intellectuals, and even respectable liberal clergy in the most distinguished pulpits—failed to tell a good story. They could not offer a sense of cosmic assurance anywhere near as satisfying as the old enchantments.

In Worthen’s view, the elite sectors of American society have traditionally provided a sober, pragmatic, and distinctly anti-charismatic counterweight to charismatic storytelling. With confidence in all forms of expertise reduced to ruin, she says, a curious intermarriage of nationalist politics and charismatic religion rushed to fill the void.

Did the storytelling failure of “respectable liberal clergy” contribute to our present malaise? If so, some painful self-­examination is in order. But we must also ask if charismatic storytelling is simply inconsistent with the ecumenical and inclusive values of liberal Protestantism. Might it be that liberal American Christians backed away from “the old enchantments” because, as Worthen suggests, charismatic narrative invariably divides the world into the elect and the damned?

Spellbound raises serious questions for liberal Protestants. Any English major understands that compelling narrative demands conflict between antagonists and protagonists. Can religious and political visions that celebrate peace, justice, universal love, and radical inclusion provide the raw material for a charismatic narrative?