I wonder if that is maybe a distinct category or it's mostly used to refer to politicians or people in politics who happen to be charismatic.

Gosh, I mean, you know, these are terms that are partly terms of convenience, you know, and I think part of being a historian is you are bringing to life the tremendous variety of just weird, fascinating human behavior.

It's also your burden as a scholar to make some generalizations.

And so in the book, I try to kind of step back and forth between characters for whom the primary arena was was mainstream secular national politics and those for whom the primary arena was more religious.

But, you know, there are so many interesting cases.

I mean, there's probably no figure in the book who is purely in one or the other, right? I mean, I start the book with the story of the infamous Puritan heretic Anne Hutchinson.

Yeah.

And what does that tell us about the present moment and the kinds of, you know, technologies that charismatic leaders have to inhabit or learn to shape?

Yeah

... or sent the message, "People smarter than you have dealt with that.

You don't need to worry about it.

Just trust that this is true." I have been so helped, and I know so many students on my campus have really benefited from our study center, uh, which is, you know, one of a kind of movement of, um, ecumenical ministry hubs that have attached themselves to secular universities over the past couple of generations.

One of the earliest ones was at University of Virginia, which began in the '70s, and they've been popping up since then, but there's really been a spate of them founded just in the last 10 or 15 years.

The one at UNC is 10 years old.

Uh, and it's a, it's a, a lovely house that is just right on the edge of campus, staffed by Christians, uh, some of whom are, are ordained, all of whom have some kind of relationship to academia, but it's distinct from the university.

Yeah.

Now, would you say that they are exceptions to the charismatic rule? Would you say they have almost a negative charisma, that dorky charisma, or do they just have, these famous ones, or do they just have full-on charisma?

I think they have charisma for, for a, a, a s- a relatively small subculture.

Uh, overall, over the longue durée of American history, Americans have a record of being pretty ambivalent, if not outright suspicious of expert elites.

The one exception is roughly 20 years after World War II, in which as a result of the trauma of the war and a sense that charismatic leadership equals Adolf Hitler, equals, you know, mass murder and destruction of civilization, um, there is this, uh, huge reaction against that, both at the level of kind of journalists and academics, but I think also at a more popular level and a sense that, okay, if c- if charismatic leader, leaders and inviting people into a story is, it leads to that, leads to Holocaust, it has no place in a modern Western democracy.

And in fact, we are gonna trust the stories that the expert technocrats tell us about what America is, where authority should lie, where we're going as a country.

And so that's the one period in the history of this country in which I think you can fairly say that for a large swath of Americans, experts, y- you know, of the type that you're describing, uh, really have broad purchase on, on the society and invite a lot of people into the story they're telling.

I think they kind of, they end up rather squandering the, that trust, and, and many people lose their faith in institutions for good reason.

Is that still a factor in the current, uh, charismatic woman who's likely to be seen as charismatic, a Marjorie Taylor Greene, say, or pick any other example?

What did she say happened to her?

She reported that she had seen two angels, and they had delivered this amazing message to her.

They told her that her body was a vessel for the Holy Spirit, that in fact, Jemima Wilkinson, the 23-year-old human female, had died, and now her body was a vessel for this androgynous divine presence.

Uh, she stopped dressing like a conventional woman of her time.

She stopped, uh, using female pronouns whenever she could, uh, wore her hair long and, uh, wore a large gray felt hat, uh, began dressing in a smock that concealed her figure, looked a bit like a dressing gown, sometimes wore a purple cravat, and she launched a preaching campaign.

Her message in the, the context of the revolution, right? This is 1776, that she has this attack and is reborn as the public universal friend, is a kind of vague one that is, uh, compatible with a lot of different theological questions and doubts about existing churches, questions about the end times that a whole range of followers were having in, in this era.

And she begins speaking to all kinds of crowds, uh, of, of people who are out of sync, I guess you could say, in some way or another, with the prevailing rhythms of society.

What should I be doing when I feel like I'm gripped by somebody who has the story that feels like it's unlocking something within me, and I feel like I need to follow this person? What are the questions I should ask myself that, you know, I don't have the luxury of hindsight of waiting thirty years to see how something has turned out, but in the moment, what kind of questions should I ask myself to determine if I'm on the right path?

Yeah.

I thought I would be writing about a lot of really charming people, people who are great at working a room.

You meet them at a party, they make you feel as if all of your problems are their problems.

I thought, you know, all my subjects would be really good-looking and, you know, have sex appeal.

I imagined that they would be amazing public speakers.

And those, uh, qualities were not absent from my cast of characters, but I would say they're truer in the breach than in the pattern of things.

And in fact, most of the people I ended up writing about over the big swath of American history, from the early 1600s to the present, are, uh, were really polarizing.

Yeah.

Um, so start wherever you want the story of charisma in the United States, um, you know, where does it take us? What is its role in sort of the populism of the 19th century? However you wanna tell the story.

Oh, gosh, that's probably the most open-ended question (laughs) I've, I've ever, I've ever gotten, so I'll just start rambling and you can interrupt me when you wanna flag something.

Um, you know, part of the luxury of being a historian as opposed to, you know, these quantitative social scientists who are all caught up and worried about, about their methods and things, is, is my project with any book I'm writing is just, it's an occasion to get to learn about I- interesting people and, and stories that I, I didn't know enough about before.

Um, and then that, you know, that has a sort of dialectical relationship with the patterns that start to emerge to you as you're continuing your research that then suggests, "Okay, I need to be looking here and there and focusing on these kinds of people." So that's sort of a caveat.

I start the book with the, uh, famous infamous Puritan heretic Anne Hutchinson, who, uh, in the 1630s, you know, she s- she starts out as a, as a reputable kind of part-time midwife who's, uh, helping families deal with the, you know, continuous, uh, nightmare of inf- infant and mother mortality that, you know, is, is human existence prior, prior to the 20th century, right? So in, in a sense, she's a person who's doing theology in the trenches, I think, and is really, uh, having to grapple with the ways in which the, the Christian message as it's being preached from most pulpits in Massachusetts Bay is-...

uh, leaving people without, without comfort, without, uh, really a, a sense of assurance, what the Puritans called assurance that they are among the elect and have a place in God's grand story, no matter their suffering in this moment.

And so, she starts running these Bible studies.

Where do you come down on the- the technological aspect of- of all of this? But also, do you have any glimmers of hope that we will be able to adjust like we did? You know, eventually we adjusted to the existence of radio, we adjusted to the existence of TV, but the pace of innovation with the social media stuff seems like it's just, it's gonna be a while before we get institutional gatekeeping, meaningful institutional gatekeeping back.