How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Trump w/ Molly Worthen

Molly Worth and welcome to The Road to Now.

Thanks for having me.

We've been excited to have you about your new book since you were our guest at a live Roads Now recording in Carrboro, North Carolina in early 2020.

I believe it was just months before the pandemic.

We had you, Doug High, and Rufus Edmonston.

We were talking about political charisma.

That's

right.

That was one of my first tries at talking about this stuff.

And here we are, five years later, and Spellbound, How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump.

Your new book has just come out.

We're excited to talk about it.

Okay, so your last book was about evangelicals.

How do we go from evangelicals to the history of American charisma? How do we get there?

Yeah, I was looking for a project that would help me get into the ways in which religion and politics are intertwined.

And I was responding, I think, to two problems.

One more immediate, one kind of big picture.

The immediate problem was, this is 2015, 2016, and I guess like everybody, I was looking at the American political landscape and was really struck by the the incredibly polarized reactions that Donald Trump provoked, that there's this huge swath of the country for whom he was this incredibly compelling figure, and of course remains very compelling.

And of course, for a huge swath of the country opposed to that, he couldn't be more repellent.

And I was just fascinated by, you know, what is the dynamic in this one individual that produces that polarized set of reactions? The second more big picture problem that was on my mind was that it seems to me people who pay attention to religion, journalists, scholars, have for generations relied a lot on a few, I don't know, maybe simplistic ways of measuring how people feel and act about religious sentiment.

So they pay a lot of attention to poll numbers on things like church attendance, religious affiliation.

And every time one of these polls comes out, for the most part, you know, since the late 1960s, these numbers have steadily declined.

I have always thought that the religious impulse is really core to what it is to be human.

And just because these surveys are no longer capturing where that impulse is going, it seems to me it's a mistake to think that it is vanishing.

And so my question was, well, if that impulse is no longer landing quite so frequently in the pews, where is it landing? And my working hypothesis was maybe one place it's landing is in this relationship between certain leaders and their followers.