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Of This World is a podcast dedicated to discussing religion and politics. Co-hosts Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a historian at Wesleyan University, and Nick Tabor, a journalist and author, talk with scholars, writers, and theologians working at the seam between faith and the secular. Across each episode they return to one question: can there be an effective religious left in the United States? A joint production with Commonweal magazine.
This is Nick Taber. I'm a journalist and author living in New York.
Speaker 2:And my name is Daniel Simons Jenkins. I'm an assistant professor of history in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, and this is Of This World.
Speaker 1:Hello, this is Nick Taber. You're listening to Of This World, a podcast of Common Wheel magazine where we talk about religion, politics, and history. Joining me today is my cohost, Daniel Steinmetz Jenkins. Daniel, how you doing?
Speaker 2:Doing well, thank you.
Speaker 1:Glad to hear. Well, for our second episode, we're very excited to welcome our first ever guest. Today, we're talking with Molly Worthen. Molly is one of the most distinguished scholars out there on American religion. She's a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also the author of several books.
Speaker 1:Her second book was Apostles of Crisis of Authority and Rigorous History of Evangelicals in the twentieth Century. Molly also writes for magazines and newspapers. She's written many pieces for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Slate. She often uses her background and religious history to illuminate current trends in American life. But we're here today to talk about her latest book, How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump.
Speaker 1:I can say it's a fabulous book. Just a first rate work of research and analysis. It reminds me a lot of Richard Hofstadter at his best, in particular, Anti Intellectualism and American Life, a book that I know Professor Worthen knows well. In that book, Hofstadter goes back to the colonial era and follows this thread all the way through American history. And I think one thing that Molly's doing, among others, is sort of carrying on that legacy, that kind of history.
Speaker 1:But I also wanna say that Spellbound is also just a very good read. Maui has an eye for great characters and great anecdotes. The prose is very good. And so it's a book that manages to make a serious argument while also being entertaining, if I can use that word. So, Molly, it's an honor to have you on the show.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much for having me, and that was such a nice introduction. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Oh, it was sincere. So, to start with, I just wanted to ask, why a book about charisma? You know, what gave you the inspiration for this and what were you hoping to find out when you set out to do the research?
Speaker 3:The book started, I guess, nearly a decade ago now. So it was 2016 and it was, I suppose, the confluence of of a few things. Like a lot of people, I was looking out at the political landscape and trying to make sense of it. Particularly, I was struck by the fact that, this one particular politician, Donald Trump, could provoke among one swath of the country, adulation and admiration and real excitement. And then the same individual, the same news stories, the same speeches and tweets and everything else could provoke among another huge swath of the country, not just indifference or dislike, but but out and out revulsion.
Speaker 3:And I I guess I was asking, you know, what what is the phenomenon that is provoking both of those reactions? So that was the the kind of political context. Then I think I had been struggling for a while with a problem that I think faces any of us who study or write about religion. And that is the fact that for a couple generations, at least, we have relied a lot on poll data on kind of institutional numbers to give us a shorthand for what is going on with the spiritual impulses of of The United States, of the Western world broadly. So I mean, we we pay attention to things like rates of church attendance, you know, statements by the elites of of organized religious institutions.
Speaker 3:And we know that, you know, since the nineteen seventies, those statistics with some interesting exceptions, especially recently, been generally trending down. But I guess I've always thought that humans are in some pretty fundamental way religious creatures. And by that, I just mean, I think that we have a an inbuilt desire to connect ourselves with a big transcendent story and find meaning that way, orient ourselves that way. And it's a mistake, I think, to to assume that that impulse is just evaporating if it's not showing up as it once did in traditional houses of worship. So the question is, okay, well, then where ought we to look for it?
Speaker 3:And I thought maybe one interesting place to look for that impulse is in the relationship between certain leaders and their followers.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. I want to get to talking about the two senses of charisma. Danny and I were talking about this before the show, and I remembered that the first time I heard the term charisma was in the '90s when Bill Clinton was president. And my dad hated Bill Clinton, but he would say things like, Well, the guy's got a lot of charisma. And I could kind of piece together that this meant he's charming, he has a magnetic personality, he's a good speaker, but I also grew up in a church that had an element of faith healings and people speaking in tongues.
Speaker 1:I would hear it described as a charismatic church and I never understood what the relationship was between those two senses of the term.
Speaker 2:Let me add on to that. My mom and dad were swept up in the 70s in the so called charismatic movement, Jesus People movement. And so I was raised in the charismatic nondenominational church. So reading this book, that was the first thing that came to mind. Of course, the term is used by political scientists and so forth.
Speaker 2:So I mean, yeah, it'd be great to maybe get into that a little bit in terms of the origins of this term because it seems to be used both directly as it concerns religion and then as it concerns politics.
Speaker 3:You are both like the ideal readers for this book. So I'm so happy. I didn't know this about about your backgrounds. I wanted to write a book that would give me an excuse to learn more about charisma in both senses of the term. The original theological sense is I suppose much more straightforward.
Speaker 3:Charisma comes from the ancient Greek charis meaning anointed by the gods, you know, bestowed, you know, the gods have bestowed on an anointed individual power that could redound for good or evil. In the New Testament, St. Paul takes this route and makes it charisma, which has slightly different meanings in different parts of the New Testament. In his letter to the Romans, it describes that the general saving gift of saving grace bestowed on all Christians in his first letter to the Corinthians, he uses it to apply to more specific spiritual gifts, tongues, healings, prophecy, this sort of thing. And so on the one hand, I'm interested in the book in tracing the way in which predominantly American Christians have understood the manifestations of that spiritual power.
Speaker 3:But it is intertwined, I think, inseparable from charisma in the other maybe more colloquial sense. And part of why I was interested in this topic is because I think we use the term charisma in everyday speech when we're talking about politician or a leader of some kind. We use it in a fuzzy sense. We, I think, punt to it when we are observing a phenomenon that we can't quite make sense of, but we know that it there's something going on that alludes kind of rational quid pro quo materialist explanation. And I think this was a sense that that the German sociologist Max Weber had when he quite deliberately borrowed the term a bit more than a century ago from the world of church history and biblical studies.
Speaker 3:And he he repurposed it, I think, that the burgeoning social science disciplines, you know, which he was a pioneer, we're trying as much as possible to, shoehorn humans into, you know, fairly positivistic materialist boxes, but there was stuff going on that they couldn't make sense of with those tools. And so he was almost trying to, I don't know, domesticate a theological idea. So you read, you know, his definition, redefinition of charisma in writings that many of which were gathered and pieced together by his widow and colleagues after his death in 1920. And you see him casting it as a type of authority that is distinct from authority premised on tradition or one's role in an institution or access to military force. It's it's a relationship between a leader and followers, based on the leader's ability to convince followers that he or she has a kind of a otherworldly supernatural power or set of achievements.
Speaker 3:And so as much as Weber was trying to, you know, untether the term from its theological context, it doesn't really succeed. But he's the one who very much bequeathed to us, the word as we use it today. But I think over, you know, the intervening century as it, you know, made its way from German to English and filtered down from academia into journalism and popular culture, it's become much vaguer. Certainly, I started this research, I confused charisma with charm.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I thought I would be writing about a lot of really charming people. People with high emotional intelligence, really good at at working a room. The the characteristic way people describe encounters, personal encounters with Bill Clinton.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I thought everyone I wrote about would be an amazing public speaker. Now these things show up here and there in the cast of characters I ended up assembling, but really more as the exception rather than the rule. The more reliable rule is the deeply polarizing effect that charismatic leaders have on followers. I think those who are really who really are at the core of a charismatic movement, they have a large number of people who adore them and then a lot of people who loathe them and not a whole lot who are just lukewarm. I was also interested in how charisma travels, the way it moves through media networks and is so contingent on media technology and can kind of exist and spread separate from personal encounters with with the individual leader.
Speaker 3:And all of this led me to define charisma in that second sense as a particular kind of storytelling. So I think the heart of charisma is a leader's ability to invite followers into a new story, a transcendent narrative about their place in a kind of a bigger picture of the universe. And it's a story that is better at explaining their suffering, their desires, their yearnings than other stories on offer in the culture, often particularly stories being offered by institutions and elites. So the leader is really important, but the locus of the charisma is the story. And it's it's connected to charisma in that New Testament sense.
Speaker 3:They're not actually they're not actually separate. There there is, beneath both of them, a a a a related yearning for a connection with with the transcendent.
Speaker 1:Mhmm, that makes sense. You know, I love the way that you don't only quote from Weber's books, but actually bring him into the story as a character. He makes this trip to The United States and he observes what's happening here in sort of a Tocquevilleian way, and he feels like he needs this vocabulary to explain what he's seeing. But one question I had as I was reading it was, so America's not the first place where there have been compelling leaders who have been able to draw crowds and persuade people. And so what's uniquely American about it?
Speaker 1:And why did we not have a term like this before, you know, the early twentieth century?
Speaker 3:Yeah, this is a really important question. And of course, Weber, you know, he did not limit himself to American examples and his flushing out of this new idea of charisma. But my book is very much an American book. Mean, I guess like most historians, I I I'm very interested in being precise about context. And while I do think that there are features of of the dynamics that I I chronicle in the book that we can perhaps see in other cultures.
Speaker 3:And I think that the book is maybe a useful generator of questions that we might pose to other cultures. There's so much about it that is very specific to the story of The United States. In many ways, it is a post reformation story. It's a narrative of what happened to this impulse that got unleashed in Martin Luther's rebellion against the Catholic church in the sixteenth century and metastasized into its, in many ways, most exaggerated form in the context of American culture. What I mean by that is, you know, and this is not to romanticize the medieval Catholic church's control or, you know, monopoly on on access to the supernatural.
Speaker 3:But I think it's fair to call the the medieval Catholic church a pretty a pretty functional kind of supernatural economy with, you know, a lot of doors and windows by which individuals could could access a sense of connection with the divine and various more or less successful ways of dealing with dissenters. You know, let go start your own, you know, monastic order or, you know, okay. We've got this woman who's getting having visions. Let's get her a diplomatically sensible father confessor who can kinda be her translator, steer her clear of heresy, and and then she'll she'll be a source of inspiration. Right?
Speaker 3:And while Martin Luther, I mean, it he understood himself to be simply reasserting proper submission to proper authority. He was he was in no way a sort of proto democrat. There is at the core of his theological revolution, this emphasis on the individual's relationship with god and and standing before before god and an emphasis on the the testimony of interior individual conscience that does break open the Catholic monopoly on charisma, I think, you could say. And and then I think as this evolves and and and jumps the Atlantic, I mean, there is in the that first sort of ecosystem of European immigrants, a disproportionate number of kind of free church dissenters, who, again, are not are not proto democrats, you know, we shouldn't sort of collapse the gulf between the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay and and, you know, later ideas of religious freedom. But they they do share that similar emphasis on on the individual's desire for for what the Puritans called divine assurance, and and and how that is a really a kind of a story about you and and your relationship to the supernatural.
Speaker 3:And I think there's a way in which the American cultural landscape as well as the geography. I mean, is it it leads to not a totally free religious marketplace by by any means, but one that is compared to any pure cultural situation. The friendliest two characters, I guess, could call spiritual entrepreneurs. Mhmm. I mean and and it is a place where even prior to the revolution, but certainly after the American revolution and the way in which the revolution lops off, you know, a whole chunk of the kind of Anglo American political tradition, namely the Tory part of that tradition that puts more faith in centralized power.
Speaker 3:There is in American culture this this deep suspicion, this tendency to at least be quite ambivalent toward toward powerful institutions. And that in combination with this kind of relatively free for all religious marketplace, I think has left us with a culture in which charismatic leaders, both those operating in in the lanes of religion and those who are who are more political, they they have really outsized purchase on the culture. So if you're interested in this phenomena, there's a way in which, you know, America gives you sort of the ultimate petri dish.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Okay. Well said. Yeah. You know, I was thinking about how you I think the phrase that you used to to describe Charisma in the paw line sense, like the way he uses it in the epistles is a shower of grace, and that does imply a pretty direct relationship with God.
Speaker 1:And so I guess from that perspective, it's easy to imagine how it would come to have more of an outsized role in Protestant Christianity than it would have in the Catholic church where things are more mediated. But in order to give readers a sense of the texture of the book, I think it would help to talk about maybe one or two of the characters whose stories you tell because you did so much excavation about religious figures and movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And I'm thinking of some of the people who surrounded like Joseph Smith, instance, like Parley Pratt, Cora Scott, people I had never heard of before I read this book. Those are just two examples, but maybe you could pick someone or two, maybe a character who's close to your heart and talk about how that person's story relates to the arc of the whole book.
Speaker 3:I learned a lot from having this excuse to dig more deeply into the story of Joseph Smith and the founding of the Mormon Church in in looking at the nineteenth century, which is in the the period, the era I call the era of the conquerors. I was interested in both sort of straightforward political conquerors who had real charismatic power. So Napoleon is in that part of the book, Andrew Jackson. But I was also interested in metaphysical conquest, I guess. And Joseph Smith is a a great example of that.
Speaker 3:He's also someone who really helped me clarify my my working definition of charisma. I think going into that research, I mean, you know, just because of teaching religious history, I I was broadly familiar with his story. And I'd always thought of him as recorded in the sources as as really good looking, tall for his era, these, you know, sort of electric blue eyes. But as I got into more of the primary source testimony, I mean, found I found some of that, you know, I quote an early convert talks about shaking his hand and feeling the holy spirit thrill her from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. But you can find just as much, if not more testimony from skeptics, who had the opposite reaction who said, you know, this guy's obviously a charlatan.
Speaker 3:He has these weird fat hands. I had just no desire to even talk to him. So okay, so what's going on there? Right? And then and then simultaneously, was thinking about the significant wave of converts to the Mormon church in the British Isles, and really the first, you know, decade and a half of the church's existence.
Speaker 3:Right? These are hundreds, eventually north of a thousand individuals who make the decision to shut down their lives and move across the Atlantic to this tiny hamlet on the banks of the Mississippi. Right? Nauvoo, Illinois, sight unseen. And they have never laid eyes on this prophet.
Speaker 3:So, you know, there there goes any theory of it being all about Joseph Smith's personal magnetism. These are people who encountered the story of his revelation through missionaries, through reading the Book of Mormon, and and the and the Mormon kind of mastery of publication technology as it existed at that time and how you build networks. So that helped me clarify the way in which the the story is really is really the locus. But Smith had this instinct for navigating that the precise balance of of skepticism and credulity in his era and crafting, offering a revelation that was distinct enough from kind of mainstream post puritan protestant worldview that most of his converts were coming out of without being so alien as to lose any connection with with the world his his, potential followers were coming out of, you know. So if you have read any of the Book of Mormon, you know that it it it has the the feel of the King James Bible.
Speaker 3:It has that kind of authority to it. And it is a it's a an account that centers the new world and and and graphs the new world onto the familiar biblical narrative by tracing the stories of essentially lost Semitic peoples, tribes of Israel essentially and their their fate in in The Americas and turning that into a a way of reinterpreting the American continent in the nineteenth century. So they're one of their first priorities, this first generation of of Mormons under Smith's leadership is the conversion of Native Americans, you know, people that they viewed as descendants of one of these original peoples chronicled in the Book of Mormon, the Lamanites. And you can look at early editions of the Book of Mormon and and and see that it, you know, it said on the title page, this is a message to the Lamanites. The first Mormons spoke in tongues fairly frequently, which, you know, can be surprising if if one's frame of reference is only twenty first century Mormon practices that would you know, the the church began frowning on on things like tongues quite a while ago.
Speaker 3:It's not something that you encounter today to my knowledge. But early on, I mean and this was something that Smith did not I don't I don't believe he was the main instigator. But as he saw a kind of hunger for a sense of spiritual power and a a a personal anointing, a sense of a role in this big story, he he managed the the practice of tongues and allowed it to happen. And early Mormons who spoke in tongues understood themselves to be having a, you know, divine gifting of indigenous languages, especially equipping them to to evangelize native American peoples. Because this is this is the story of it's kind of a it's a it's a spiritual manifest destiny.
Speaker 3:It's it's very much in line with more sort of secular varieties of conquest, but it's one that was speaking to, I think, a very specific set of of theological needs that early nineteenth century Americans had. And I put him and the the story of the Mormons in conversation with figures who I think are also sort of spiritual conquerors, and those are spiritualists. These teenage girl trans speakers Cora Scott being probably the most famous of them, who are very much on the fringes of, you know, kind of heterodox Christianity. But I think more mainstream than than we appreciate. And and I think, you know, they reflect a sort of hunger for contact with the spirit world, a picture of the universe in which death is not the end and, you know, we are invited as humans into an eternal progression, which, of course, also echoes Mormon theology, also has this vision of eternal progression.
Speaker 3:And and I I think it's it's quite moving to to learn about these these young women who, I mean, you know, this is a a time when it was scandalous for a single woman to ride the train alone. Let alone, you know, walk into an auditorium ostensibly in a state of trance and address a mixed crowd of thousands of people, fielding impromptu questions, you know, developed by a an ad hoc committee of members of the audience, almost always men who sought to come up with questions they thought would absolutely stump, you know, a girl in her teens or early 20s. And so she could only answer them and and you know, use them as a as an excuse for a rift, if truly she was inhabited by a spirit. But often this is happening in the context of, you know, an age prior to modern antibiotics when so many families are grappling with the recent death of of mothers and and children and and infants. And many of these women themselves who are attracted to contact with the spirit world are are really they're they're turning grief into a kind of spiritual motive energy in a way that I think is kind of hard for us to appreciate because we have it so easy in this age of modern medicine.
Speaker 2:You know, as I was listening to you talk there and thinking of Mormonism in the nineteenth century, which was one of many millenarian movements that took off during that time, and, of course, this coincides with industrialization. And you mentioned Weber and Weber's conception of charisma. Is this essentially can we I mean, you know, it'd be hard to make this argument going all the way back to the Prose of Reformation. But is this essentially a story about the disenchantment of the world and the attempt to find sources of enchantment through the leaders who can kind of make you spellbound, right?
Speaker 1:The leaders and the the leaders and the stories they tell.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right. And then the only reason why I asked that is because, I mean, I'm just curious, just given the starting point of the conversation about Trump. And, you know, a lot of people who don't like him often do have a kind of disenchanted, not all of them, but more scientific oriented, maybe more educated at universities, maybe more focused on rationality and science. And this stuff is just strange and odd and weird. Right?
Speaker 2:So I guess I'm fine trying to find a way to streamline everything in my own simple way, but it does seem like that's maybe one way to do this kind of p PBS through line I'm trying to put forward here.
Speaker 3:I yeah. I think there's a lot to what you're saying. Part of what I'm trying to suggest though is that that sense of mutual alienation that especially is is prominent in in our experience of American culture today. The sense that, you know, either you are on one side of the of the culture war or the other, and whoever's on the other side is a totally alien species. And often, religion in a one sense of the supernatural's existence or its absence is bound up in that.
Speaker 3:I'm trying to suggest in the book that that actually it's more accurate to think of ourselves as on a kind of continuum and to see beneath the world view of, you know, whoever is baffling you, a set of kind of pre political, pre theological hungers that you have too as as a virtue, just a part of being being a human. And that, you know, our reactions to to other people should should prompt a kind of interrogation in ourselves. But I mean, that that said, I I do think that there's there's a lot to your your your diagnosis of this through line of disenchantment. In many ways, it's a it's a book about secularization and what happens to the religious impulse as rates of participation in traditional forms of institutionalized religion decline. One of the the kind of narrative moments that I stumbled upon that was really, instrumental in in launching the project.
Speaker 3:It was actually the first chapter I drafted was the chapter in which, Max Weber enters as a character, that Nick alluded to. And, and and as part of, you know, his and his his wife Mary Anne's tour, kind of grand tour of The United States, they go to the World's Fair in Saint Louis. This is in nineteen o four. And I was fascinated the more I learned about, you know, his time there and the, you know, I I found, you know, the the the sort of record of the this, like, academic conference that was happening alongside this this World's Fair and all of these theologians and psychologists reflecting in their early twentieth century, you know, enlightened, you know, modernist way about about, primitive religion. But at the same time, there's, you know, all kinds of quote unquote primitive religion happening on or near the fairgrounds that I I particularly got interested in this, woman revivalist named Mariah Woodworth Etter, who's not a name that people generally know today unless they're specialists in this area.
Speaker 3:But in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, I mean, she was one of the most famous evangelists in the country and she was famous as a trance evangelist. So, you know, if you attended her revival, I mean, you would you would see people suddenly, falling into a state of trance and they might they might fall to the ground and lie, you know, lie there for minutes or even hours. Or sometimes Mariah Woodworth Etter herself would would sort of freeze for extended periods of time. And she was this kind of diminutive woman, the opposite of Amy Simple McPherson. If if, you know, people are familiar with her story who, you know, Amy Simple McPherson, who's a generation later, was, you know, very glamorous and always, you know, up on the the most, you know, cutting edge Hollywood, you know, trend and dyeing your hair blonde and bobs and and, you know, gorgeous dresses.
Speaker 3:Mariah Woodworth Etta Etta, you know, she she disdained even even cutting your hair into bangs. Right? Like, that was just, you know, a sort of satanic fringe, I think she called it. And she was very, very demure and, you know, swath and fabric. But she was able to, I mean, just become for people who attended her revivals, this vehicle of supernatural power.
Speaker 3:And she's she's kind of anticipates much of what becomes the Pentecostal revival. But I was I was fascinated by the coincidence of these things that that here is Max Weber developing his idea of charisma in the sense that we use it today at the very same time that someone like Mariah Woodworth Edder is is really instigating this this more powerful encounter with the spirit. And, you know, in short order, her Pentecostal brothers and sisters would launch that, you know, worldwide revival. Right? That's, you know, already going in the at this point, and the big Azusa Street revival is in nineteen o six.
Speaker 3:And I thought, I just don't think this is this is an accident. And as different as they are, I I do see Weber and the the kind of holiness Pentecostal types as both responding to modernity and expressing a kind of a deep ambivalence toward modernity, toward the shortcomings of a sort of neat and tidy rationalist picture of the world and picture of human nature. I mean, as much as Weber, you know, as mister disenchantment and, you know, famously called himself religiously unmusical. He was, you know, he was fascinated by world religions, you know, wrote across the whole gamut of of religious traditions. And if you, you know, read him on sort of modernization, and he's, you know, one of the great theorists of of modernization and the rise of of bureaucracy, you sense in him this kind of ambivalence toward charismatic leaders.
Speaker 3:I mean, on the one hand, he he was this he was a liberal who who admired and rooted for so much of what he saw happening in the evolution of the modern West, but he was also deeply concerned about the dehumanization, you know, in in what he famously called the iron cage of modernity, you know, and you always you almost have the sense that he's he he sees charismatic figures as as these, you know, sort of radical interrupters of of the of the gears of the modernist system. And they are, you know, they're they're a crucial part of of preventing twentieth century culture from turning into this totally anti human machine. So very much that interplay, you know, and as it unfolds and and the way it it it does not jibe with I think this sort of religious core that we have as humans is as much of what this book's about.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. You know, as as we've been talking, I've been thinking more about this tendency that charismatic figures have to not only to draw in crowds, but also to turn some people away the way they tend to be quite polarizing. And I wonder if you could say a little more about that. Like what is it about them or the stories they tell that produces, you know, sometimes kind of violent negative reactions as well as positive ones?
Speaker 3:The difference between a story and just a set of policy proposals is that a story has a narrative arc, you know, it has a teleology, a plot, it's going somewhere. And it has a cast of characters, it has people who are heroes and those who are villains, And it does not include everybody. And I should say too, that by calling charismatic leadership a type of storytelling, I'm not trying to suggest that all charismatic leaders liars, that they're all they're all sort of just weaving fantasies. I mean, I think we have a tendency to equate storytelling with fiction. And that's not my intent here.
Speaker 3:I think charisma in and of itself is morally neutral. And where we begin to to be able to analyze a leader as an agent of moral progress or not is in asking, does the story that he or she tells, is it rooted in a picture of the world that we can verify, you know, through recourse to to, you know, other sources of information? And and certainly, there are leaders for whom that is not true. And they are they are deriving their appeal by kind of drawing back the veil on a pseudo reality. And that's become a more and more viable way of building a movement, I think in our era of such a such a such weak trust in institutions, and this illusion that we all have that by virtue of looking at our glowing rectangles, we can, you know, do our own research when when, of course, we know that we're being funneled into, you know, echo chambers and and don't have you know, the the fact checking apparatus that I think we we flatter ourselves to believe in.
Speaker 3:But I think the poll the polarization stems from the the power of a good story, and we find a leader revolting when we are written out of of the story he is telling or we are cast as as villains. And we we find it, by contrast, inviting and compelling when it's a story that gives us a sense of of agency tempered with the security of knowing that I'm not really the one in the driver's seat. I'm I'm simply playing a role in this in this bigger story that is unfolding, that is in the hands of of larger powers, whether that's divine power or or the power of of leaders whom I trust. So, you know, I think it's it's an interesting exercise when we find ourselves having a reaction of revulsion in in response to a movement or, you know, a leader's message to ask, what is the story that that this leader is offering? And what is my relationship to it?
Speaker 3:And and maybe that process of interrogation leaves me feeling simply all the more firm that this is a story based on lies, and it's a it's a it's a damaging one. But maybe it may might prompt me to see blind spots in myself and and to see that people who are who are having the opposite reaction to this leader simply they under they understand his story in a totally different way, and I think that can be illuminating.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Well, you know, in some ways, Trump's Trump makes all all of this stuff all too clear. I've had the experience of being at a Trump rally, standing in the Cordendauf section for reporters, and have him say, direct the crowd, look at those people, those are your enemies. So in those cases, I don't have to think too hard about you know, what what position I play in this story as a journalist or why why I'm having a negative reaction to it.
Speaker 2:Part of the show is to talk about not just the religious right, but progressive you know, the possibility of progressive politics infused with religion. Commonwealth is a liberal, you know, publication. And one of the things you hear right now, lot of well, not a lot, but many commentators say is that the Democrats need their own, you know, they're so afraid of charisma or they're so afraid of populism in particular, but they actually should run populace. And as I listened to you talk about storytelling, are you sympathetic to this idea that maybe what's needed is a kind of new story for the other side to have something to counter this other story that isn't rooted in facts or isn't isn't, you know, as problematic as in the way that you're describing the way that you Nick described it. Something to be born again, I guess you could say, in terms of a new political vision because that seems to be where some wanna go.
Speaker 2:Right? Which is like the the Democrats have erred by in in their fear of charisma, they they wanna be anti charismatic. They want to be anti populist. And this this this isn't the times in which we're living.
Speaker 3:I think that's right. I think Democrats are are the the party of institutions, and the the rise of Donald Trump is unintelligible without understanding just how weak institutions have become, you know, sort of across the board, and I would include the Republican Party, you know, on that list of of weak institutions. But certainly, in the last election, I think Democrats handed Trump just a total gift by running Kamala Harris who, if she was anything, was absolutely the face of institutions. And so many Americans just see those institutions as as having failed them as as full of hypocrisy, whether that's fair or not. Right?
Speaker 3:I think that the Democrats currently have a have a bench of that includes many really gifted orators. But it is not clear, as you suggest, that that they've hit on a unifying story. I think one way of understanding democratic electoral fortunes over the past few years is as a referendum on a story that they did tell that failed to convince and indeed alienated a lot more Americans than they realized. And that was a story based on sorting sorting people into into heroes and villains along a a rubric of of fairly simplistic identity politics and and emphasizing, you know, certain categories of identity as as really the the the most intrinsic piece of of who you are. And it it just turns out that that's not that's not how most Americans want want to think of themselves.
Speaker 3:And, you know, the the fact that we had we saw movement in really every demographic category except for white men, I think, in toward, you know, toward Trump is is, I think, really an indictment of that of that narrative. And I and and so perhaps one way to understand the rise of Zoran Mamdani is as a sort of case study in attempting to to really transition to a very different kind of story. And Mamdani comes out of that sort of, you know, 20 narrative and much of the journalistic coverage of his biography has emphasized the way in which, you know, he's a product of a particular kind of higher education experience that very much leans into that progressive identity politics vision. But it seems to me that the story he ran on in New York was a sort of old left class alliance, of, you know, be aware of yourself as a member of the proletariat kind of story. Now, whether that that will work nationally, I mean, I think I think the answer is no, not with not without a lot of tweaking, but but maybe broadly speaking, the future does lie in some sort of resurrected version of of more a class based story that allows for for a broader coalition than turned out to be possible a lot in the narrative that the Democrats attempted to run on over the past decade or so.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, this has me thinking about some commentary that I saw right after he won the I think after he won the primary with sort of centrist Democrats saying, well, this doesn't really prove anything or show anything, like, except that when you have a figure who's really charming, and I'm sure they used the word charismatic in this commentary, like that he can defeat incumbents, he can defeat well known established figures, he can win an election. Like if you had a Zoran Mamdani who had centrist politics, who was just promoting, I don't know, the abundance agenda or whatever, that person would be just as successful. And I think this really speaks to these two different understandings of charisma here. You're saying it's not just about the personality, it's also about the story they're telling.
Speaker 3:That yeah. Absolutely. And and and also, I I think humans are hungry for not a metaphorical, but a very real connection with the supernatural. And I'm so I'm fascinated by the poll data that we've seen recently suggesting that younger Americans in particular, especially young men are returning to church or converting. Not you know, not an enormous numbers.
Speaker 3:This is not a revival, but there's something there's something going on. It's not limited to The United States. There's interesting data coming out of France and The UK as well. But they're they're converting to or joining the weird churches, the highly supernaturalist churches. And, you know, part of what's become so distorted about our political situation in in America is the way in which in the absence of affiliation with with organized religion, I think a lot of people have looked to political identity as a source of transcendent meaning.
Speaker 3:And I think all the great world religious traditions at their best are number one, from the perspective of the kind of empirical enlightenment, deeply, deeply strange and unapologetically strange. And number two, they refuse to be kind of neatly slotted into boxes of any partisan platform. And so if they invite your allegiance, then they compel you to be constantly questioning your own party and the compromises that human politicians make in a way that I think is absolutely crucial for a healthy political ecosystem. So I hope that some part of the the rebuilding, the recovery that happens over the next generation has to do with a kind of rediscovery of the the healthy role that that very weird religious institutions have to play in our political culture.
Speaker 1:You know, one other thing I'd like to ask that I think might be a good one to end on, one, I mean, big part of your argument here is kind of taking the focus a little bit off of the leader and the leader's personality. And certainly you say that charisma has a lot to do with stories, but you also make the point in the book that it's a relationship between the leader and the crowd. And I think you even say toward the end of the book that a leader's charisma can sort of disappear if people stop believing them or believing the story they're telling. So in a sense, the crowd has the ability or the authority to of strip a leader's charisma. And I'm curious about whether that ever happens and how.
Speaker 1:Is it a matter of another story kind of coming in to replace the old one, or is this something we've seen in the American story?
Speaker 3:That's an interesting question. So as my mind runs across the the, you know, movements that I write about, so many of them end because the leader comes to some sort of, you know, end himself. Maybe one, I mean, one illustrative example is is the career of Marcus Garvey, the great black nationalist who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which was for a brief time in the in the late teens and early 20s, the largest mass movement of African descended peoples in the in the world. And it got on the radar of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI apparatus because of its subversive, very sort of separatist vision of kind of pan African unity and the economic and political implications of that.
Speaker 3:But as you know, as Garvey's career becomes more and more of a national story and he ends up arrested on probably slightly trumped up charges of mail fraud and imprisoned, but then deported, and yet he dies in London in 1940, and and I think from the perspective of 1940, it probably would have appeared that he is someone who had lost his charisma because his followers had lost reason to think that he was truly building this kind of divinely anointed movements and he because because he had lost in this play for worldly power. But so much of the, you know, the referendum perhaps on a charismatic leader success or failure has to do with our time horizon. If we zoom out a little bit, and we we follow some of the history of the local chapters of the UNIA, which continued to work and build local networks in a really interesting way. And we we think about the legacy of of Garvey in the next generation of black nationalists and civil rights leaders, and we pay attention to, you know, people like Malcolm x whose parents were both Garveyites and, you know, was very much formed by that movement.
Speaker 3:I think the the the afterlife of the story, the charismatic power of the story proved to be actually quite powerful beyond the demise of Garvey the man.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for joining us, and it was just a real pleasure. And I think the remarks, especially about the appeal of weird Christianity today and the the kind of cascade effects that can have, I found that to be I should look into that more and write about it myself or something, but I think that's great. I a great idea. But thank you so much, Molly, for joining us.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:That's all the time we have for this episode. We wanna thank Commonweal for sponsoring the show, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us.