The Bewitching of the American Mind
January/February 2026Interview with historian Molly Worthen
“Toxic” and “polarized” are the two words most often used to describe American politics in 2026. Historians, sociologists, and political scientists offer varying explanations for how and why the nation’s public discourse has devolved into a tribal stalemate of “us” versus “them.” But author Molly Worthen invites us to view the current political crisis through a different lens—the history of charisma in American life.
In Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History From the Puritans to Donald Trump (Forum Books, 2025) Worthen explores 400 years of charismatic movements and leaders—both political and religious. These are groups and individuals who’ve struggled to translate transcendent ideas into the realm of the everyday, and in doing so, they’ve left an indelible stamp on America’s religious and political dynamics.
Worthen is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She’s the author of several books, including Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2013), and her work has appeared in such national media outlets as the New York Times, Slate, and The New Yorker.
Liberty editor Bettina Krause, together with Alan Reinach, president of the Church State Council, recently interviewed Molly Worthen on their weekly podcast Just Liberty. While the conversation has been edited for length and clarity, you can listen to the entire interview on YouTube at @LibertyMag_1906 or by searching for “Just Liberty” on your podcast platform of choice.
Just Liberty: Most of us have a vague idea what charisma means. We meet someone who’s especially charming and we say, “Well, they have charisma.” But what exactly are you talking about when you use that word?
Molly Worthen: Charisma is often a term we punt to when we are observing a dynamic between a leader and followers, and we can’t quite account for what’s going on. We don’t understand the appeal, or maybe it’s something that’s having an effect on us, and we can’t quite parse it or understand it in ourselves. So we call it charisma and move on.
When I started this project, I definitely confused charisma with charm. I would define charm as an interpersonal quality; a person’s ability, for instance, to work the room at a cocktail party, or someone with the ability, in a conversation, to make you feel like the center of the universe, as if your problems and your concerns are theirs. And so when I was embarking on this project of writing about charismatic leaders across four centuries of American history, I thought I would be writing about a lot of charming people, people who had that magic in interpersonal encounters, people who were effective public speakers, good-looking, with sex appeal.
But I was surprised to find this described only a small minority of the people I found myself writing about. In fact, what I discovered in my research is that charisma is different. It often comes in the form of people who are not particularly amazing public speakers, not particularly good-looking. They’re appealing maybe to some people, but usually they are downright repulsive, or very off-putting, to some other large swath of people. And in fact, that polarizing effect is a more reliable marker of charisma than someone who’s effective in a cocktail party setting.
I think the heart of charisma is a particular type of storytelling. It’s a leader’s ability to invite potential followers into a new narrative about what the world is about, the meaning of their personal struggles and sufferings. It’s an ability to invite them into a connection between their own puny individual story and a big, exciting, transcendent narrative premised on a new view of reality, different from what they saw before. To me, that’s really the heart of charisma, and that’s the consistent pattern from the 1600s to our own time.
This book is about charisma in the two important senses of the term. We’ve just now been talking about charisma as we use it colloquially today, but charisma has had that meaning in English for only about a century. In the early twentieth century the sociologist Max Weber took the term charisma and borrowed it from the context of biblical studies and church history and applied it to politics. But before that, the term was strictly a specialized theological term. It’s a term that Paul coins in the New Testament, and it means, in different parts of the New Testament, slightly different things. Coming out of the ancient Greek word charis, meaning divine anointing, gift of God’s grace, it’s a gift that can bring with it great benefits and sometimes unexpected punishments. Paul uses it to speak of the gift of a free-grace salvation to all Christians. In his first letter to the Corinthians he also uses it to describe specific spiritual gifts, the gift of healing, speaking in tongues, prophecy, these unexpected supernatural anointings from God that Christians experience.
And that’s really what charisma meant before Weber’s political use of the term. I’m interested in the intertwined history of those two senses of charisma because, to me, humans are, in a fundamental way, religious beings. We crave a connection with supernatural power; we crave a role and a transcendent story. And so while the two senses of charisma are certainly different, they’re connected to the same underlying human impulse.
As American society has become more secular, as fewer Americans seek that divine connection within the traditional lanes of Christian experience, I don’t think that hunger goes away. I think it’s going to find someplace to land, and one place it lands is in this relationship with charismatic leaders.
Just Liberty: You make the case in your book that the U.S. is a particularly fertile ground for charisma to take hold and shape political and social movements. Why? What is it about American society that makes us particularly susceptible to charismatic leaders?
Worthen: This is, in a broad sense, a post-Reformation story. It’s a story about America as a particular site of cultural, social, religious, and political experimentation that takes certain dynamics and impulses present in the Protestant Reformation to perhaps their farthest conclusion.
Prior to the Protestant Reformation, certainly, there’s plenty of undercurrents and dissent, rebel monks and mystics and so forth in the context of medieval Catholicism. But the Catholic Church as an institution had relatively effective checks and balances for modulating and controlling this rebel impulse to challenge institutions. This impulse is core to charisma, both in the biblical sense and in the sense that Max Weber has bequeathed to us. Charisma is this X factor that is not tamed by institutions. It’s an end run around institutional power, whether that’s claiming a direct hotline to God or claiming an authority that gives you the power to challenge establishment political figures and so forth.
Within medieval Catholicism that impulse was present, but it didn’t mount a fundamental challenge to the Catholic Church as an institution. And the major Protestant Reformers, Martin Luther, John Calvin—these guys were not radical anti-institutional rebels. In many ways they’re wanting to reform existing institutions and build their own; they’re not saying everybody has the mandate to hear directly from God. Martin Luther was quite horrified, in fact, when some of his more radical disciples began to take his idea of the priesthood of all believers, and reading the Bible on your own in the vernacular, to radical conclusions. But there is in the Reformation that seed, a mandate, to locate the core of what it means to be Christian within your personal connection to the divine. Your own interior experience. And that’s a powerful idea that then, in the context of America, just catches fire.
People often use the expression “a free marketplace of religious ideas” to describe religion in America. I think we need to be careful about that, because there certainly still were, in the colonial period up through our own time, cultural and political guardrails. There are real preferences for traditional Protestantism. We are a Protestant country in so many meaningful ways.
That said, compared to Europe, everything’s relative. And compared to Europe, America is very much a wide-open marketplace. From the beginning of European contact in America, we see quite a diverse range of religious dissenters. Many of the early immigrants come to the colonies because they’re persecuted or they’re limited in some way in their religious practice. And inherent in the colonial environment is institutional weakness. It’s not possible to have the same top-down control on religious expression as was possible in the Old World.
It’s there from the beginning, even in Massachusetts Bay and the first generation of Puritans in the 1630s—which is not exactly a society we think of as an open religious free-for-all. But still, it’s an environment in which renegade dissenters who want to claim direct authority from God can do so with a degree of political and religious influence that’s not possible in the Old World.
I think there’s a way in which religious entrepreneurship, if you want to use that term, is more possible and more in the American context. And that supercharges charisma as a form of authority, as against other kinds of authority, such as authority based on institutional roles, or military might, or claims about tradition.
Just Liberty: So, jumping forward to today, how do the dynamics of charisma cross over from the religious to political? Has political identity in America always had a religious undertone, or is this a more contemporary phenomenon?
Worthen: Historians are always trying to thread the needle between recognizing features of our own time that are new while drawing attention to important continuities. I don’t think you could point to a period in American history when politically activated individuals were not bringing to bear their metaphysics, their broader view of transcendent sources of morality.
I think it’s fair to say that Americans today—like other Westerners—have weaker connections and loyalty to religious institutions than in generations past. And the weakening of churches is part of a much bigger story of the weakening of institutional affiliation and loyalty generally. There’s really no category of big, established institutions—whether we’re talking about Congress, Supreme Court, universities, mainstream media, even the military—to which Americans’ sense of loyalty and trust has not diminished over the past couple of generations. We’re simply more atomized and individualistic.
So that said, we are still, I think, seeking a sense of transcendent meaning: “What’s the point of it all?” We want to be on the side of the good guys. We have tribal impulses, whether you want to call it original sin or the fruit of evolutionary psychology, it’s absolutely there, always right under the surface, ready to spring out.
I think that partisan bodies—super PACs, some of the more extreme media outlets, certain political candidates—have been really adept, especially with the help of social media, in grabbing on to that hunger, filling that vacuum so that more and more Americans feel their partisan identity is a core part of who they are. And that partisan sense of core identity has expanded to eat up more and more issues. Issues that were perhaps once fodder for compromise are now issues that have become shorthand for your core identity—whether it’s universal health care, your stance on guns, your view on private school vouchers. Your position on these issues is now shorthand for which side of the “us versus them” line you stand.
Just Liberty: Let’s pull in another element, and that’s the recent dramatic growth in independent charismatic religious movements such as the New Apostolic Reformation. How do you see this growth in these charismatic movements playing into the political dynamic that you’re describing?
Worthen: There’s so much complexity in the New Apostolic Reformation that it’s always important to attach an asterisk to generalizations we make about it. The media and scholars naturally focus far more on those particular church networks and evangelists in this subculture that are politically activated. They’re less interested in others that are simply focused on missions and evangelism. So that’s an important caveat.
But certainly, it’s not an accident that this form of Christianity that’s exploding worldwide is highly enthusiastic—and I mean that in the theological sense of religious enthusiasm. It’s also individualistic in the sense of prioritizing the freedom of one’s own connection to the supernatural form of Pentecostal charismatic faith.
We’re seeing a tremendous evolution in the landscape of American Christianity away from the traditional denominational structures that, since the colonial period, we’ve used to characterize Protestantism. Charismatic Christianity is a form of religious expression and organization, both within America and the global South—where it’s growing by leaps and bounds—that thrives in contexts in which institutions are weak. It’s not a way of being Christian that requires a lot of institutional structure. You don’t need seminary degrees if you want to be a pastor or an evangelist. Instead, you need a personal anointing. It’s all about personal networks.
It can become quite alarming, politically, to many observers when Pentecostal charismatic theology and worldview have this confidence that God will act in an immediate, visible, unmissable way, along with the idea that “I am His agent in this.” Many of these groups also have a very vivid set of expectations about the end-times, about eschatology, that adds another level of urgency.
In some ways, perhaps, other Christians should listen to Pentecostals and charismatics in this view of God’s imminent power—I think many Christians domesticate their idea of God. At the same time, there’s a good reason to counterbalance that with a healthy appreciation of the Christian doctrine of original sin and the fact that humans are more likely to be mistaken, than correct, about their expectations of God’s power.
It’s a human impulse to align the gap between our own power—our own desire for authority—with God’s authority. And so, in a Christian subculture, without very robust institutional checks and balances, I think this impulse—which in moderation is biblical and, from the Christian perspective, healthy—can metastasize. It can grow into something that, when armed with political authority, creates moral hazards.
All humans of whatever religious persuasion need a healthy culture of self-interrogation. We all have a tendency toward “motivated reasoning.” We all tend to stay in the lanes of our existing presuppositions and biases, regardless of inconvenient facts.