Charisma—from Puritans to Trump, with Molly Worthen

Historian and journalist Molly Worthen explores the mysterious and potent force of charisma, and its power to shape American identity, culture, politics, and religion. She explains how storytelling, transcendence, and authority are used by America’s most charismatic leaders.

Drawing on her new book, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, Worthen shares how charismatic authority reveals deep human desires for meaning, agency, and transcendence. The conversation explores themes of vulnerability, spiritual hunger, religious disaffiliation, and the evolving nature of belief and belonging in modern society.

Worthen unpacks the often-overlooked distinction between charisma and charm or celebrity, examining the role of storytelling in cultivating authority and devotion.

She also shares how researching this subject intersected with her own spiritual journey, culminating in her recent conversion to Christianity.

Key Moments

• Molly Worthen discusses her latest book, Spellbound.
• Charisma: a relational, story-driven phenomenon, not mere charm or celebrity
• Our religious impulse persists despite declining traditional affiliation
• Worthen’s personal spiritual journey: from intellectual agnosticism to Christian faith while writing the book
• Donald Trump’s narrative charisma and religious-political appeal examined in depth
• Human longing for transcendence and meaning as the root of charismatic power

Episode Highlights

1. “Evangelism is just telling people what happened to you.”
2. “The heart of charisma is the leader’s ability to tell a story … that does a better job at explaining the chaos and the suffering.”
3. “We want the comfort of knowing that some force larger than us is ultimately in charge—and yet we also seek agency.”
4. “I came to realize I was writing a book that was fundamentally about spiritual hunger—and that I myself had that hunger too.”
5. “Authenticity as a personal style has no necessary relationship with honesty.”
6. “We kid ourselves if we think more sources solve the mystery of charisma—reality is an asymptote we never perfectly reach.”

About Molly Worthen

Molly Worthen is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializing in North American religion, politics, global Christianity, and the history of ideas. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times and author of several books, including Apostles of Reason and The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost. Her most recent book is Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump.

Show Notes

• Authority—who should we listen to?
• Internal battles within American evangelicalism
• The definition of charisma and its distinction from charm, celebrity, and power
• Charisma: “ the allure in a leader that gives him or her the power to move a crowd that is premised on a relationship. … You need two parties at least. It’s not solely a quality of fluorescence that shines out from the individual without other people to interact with it.”
• The leader’s ability to tell a story that explains the audience’s experience of life
• Paradoxical quality: we want our decision to make a difference in our fate, but we also want some being or force larger than us to make it all okay.
• “ It’s not just about looking at the one who is the special anointed one, but it’s that somehow through that person, I too, or we too, see ourselves more clearly.”
• Special revelation and stories of experiencing God in particular ways
• “Capturing the ineffable”
• Role of charismatic leaders in American religious and political life
• Impact of Joseph Smith, Anne Hutchinson, JFK, and Adlai Stevenson
• Why institutional religion no longer captures spiritual impulse for many Americans
• Storytelling as the essence of charismatic authority
• Evolution of American individualism and the cult of authenticity
• How mass media, trauma, and cultural crises shape charismatic influence
• Coming to terms with the limits of your “source base”—”Reality is an asymptote.”
• “It’s that sort of transcendent storytelling ability that is the heart of charisma.”
• Mormonism and the charisma of Joseph Smith
• Leaders like JFK and Adlai Stevenson offered different models of modern charisma
• “So much of my book is really about the fortunes of established institutions in American culture because charismatic figures always define themselves vis-à-vis institutions.”
• Routinizing charisma (cf. Max Weber)
• “The gap or the consistency between what our subjects are, are thinking and intending consciously and what they actually do.”
• Intuition versus analysis—steeping in cultural milieu and operating out of personal life experiences
• The Puritan heretic Anne Hutchinson
• “Very few humans are out-and-out cynics.”
• Charismatic figures aren’t always attractive or eloquent—they resonate through meaning-making.
• “ The religious impulse is finding a place to land other than organized religion.”
• Protestant roots of American consciousness tied to authority and self-discovery
• Humanist psychology and positive thinking
• “The age of the gurus”
• Charisma and Contemporary Politics: Donald Trump
• Trump’s story of victimhood, self-made success, and defiance of institutions as a charismatic myth
• Trump’s stream-of-consciousness style perceived as authenticity by many followers.
• “For example, his rambling stream-of-consciousness speaking style that actually is a core to his appeal, I think, for many Trump supporters because it comes across as a kind of authenticity—as a willingness to tell it how it is and speak off the top of his head. And authenticity as a personal style has no necessary relationship with honesty in terms of correspondence to, you know, empirically verifiable facts.”
• The alignment between his narrative and the prosperity gospel
• ”While Donald Trump is no one's idea of an orthodox Christian, he grew up in Norman Vincent Peale's church in New York City, Marble Collegiate Church, hearing the prosperity gospel, the gospel of positive thinking.”
• ”I think Trump has a, has a really acute spiritual instinct for. That picture of reality one in which we can really reshape reality with our minds.”
• Early support from independent charismatic church networks shaped his rise.
• Importance of positive thinking theology (e.g., Norman Vincent Peale) in his spiritual instincts.
• “I suppose I was about two-thirds of the way through the rough draft of this book when I was rudely interrupted by the Holy Spirit. I have always studied Christianity as a very sympathetic and, frankly, envious outsider and never was entirely happy with my agnostic fence sitting, but also wasn't actively looking to resolve my metaphysical questions.”
• “ I’ve always had this conviction that humans are fundamentally religious creatures and they have this impulse to connect to a transcendent source of meaning to worship.”
• “I came to realize that I was writing a book that was fundamentally about spiritual hunger and how humans cope with it. But that I myself had had that hunger as well—that I’m not immune to that feature of the human dilemma.”
• “We want to be pulled into something transcendent, where we are more fully ourselves.”
• Praying for a mystical experience—at least being “strangely warmed”
• ”God had already done something to my desires—I was walking in the direction of Jesus already.”
• “ I always see every kind of historical problem as somehow having to do with contesting visions of human nature.”
• “There’s this silly misconception that Christianity is intellectually stultifying—that to become an orthodox, traditional Christian is to shut off all kinds of questions and accept a black-and-white way of thinking. And that has not been my experience.”
• Research project on miracles
• “ Evangelism is just telling people what happened to you.”
• Conversion was driven by rigorous academic inquiry into the resurrection and New Testament
• Experience echoed themes in the book: story, vulnerability, and being seen
• Her analysis: “God had already done something to my desires before the arguments convinced me.”
• Post-conversion excitement about theological study, healing, and miracles

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.