Historians have long struggled to describe and corral the amoeba-like diversity of American religious history into a comprehensible narrative. How does one sketch a through-line that makes sense of everything from Huguenots and Schwenkfelders to Black Muslims and Heaven’s Gate? It’s not for lack of trying. One possible theme is populism (historian Peter W. Williams) and another diversity itself (Catherine L. Albanese), and some have tried to enlarge the geographical scope to all of North America (Robert Handy, Mark Noll). Perhaps the most ambitious attempt, Sydney Ahlstrom’s Religious History of the American People (1972), is now more than half a century old. The book won the National Book Award, but even Ahlstrom’s magisterial volume was criticized for inordinate attention to New England; one review was entitled “By Puritans Possessed.”
Only a fearless historian would rise to this challenge. Molly Worthen’s Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump (Forum, 2025) doesn’t explicitly assume this task, but she offers a compelling template for understanding both American religious history and American history. Charisma, she writes, may be nebulous, but it helps us see relationships “between leaders and followers; between individuals and unseen power” throughout American history, “this peculiar way that our species has found to attach ourselves to authority, to organize the confusions and disappointments of life into a story that means something.”
Worthen, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, offers a taxonomy for understanding charisma since the end of the Middle Ages. Prophets, she argues, formed a bridge from the Old World to the New, but they challenged cherished institutions. Conquerors early in the nineteenth century chafed against the predestinarian creed of Calvinism, while Agitators at the turn of the twentieth century attacked the modern state. Following World War II, Experts “embraced the zenith of traditional institutions’ authority across Western culture and politics, and nurtured Americans’ faith in the power of technology and bureaucracy to solve large-scale problems.” Not surprisingly, Gurus followed in their wake, capitalizing on Americans’ loss of faith in institutions, proffering instead the gospel of self-actualization.
With splendid prose and a deep understanding of American history, the author proceeds to populate this taxonomy with examples of charismatic leaders who articulated the tensions of their respective eras, individuals whose “charismatic relationship with followers depends upon a special sensitivity to the era’s anxieties.” She cautions, however, that charisma is different from mere charm, a lesser attribute.
Worthen tries to head off readers who want to question her choice of charismatic examples, but such caviling is inevitable in a narrative this sweeping. Why, for instance, does she lead off with Anne Hutchinson (by Puritans possessed?) and fail to mention Jacob Leisler or Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, whose charismatic personalities and incendiary rhetoric represented a comparable challenge to regnant authorities? Why does Charles Grandison Finney, by any measure the most influential evangelical of the antebellum period, receive only glancing attention in an era characterized, Worthen insists, by the elevation of free will? Similarly, how does Billy Graham (the most truly charismatic person I’ve ever met) and his corporate-efficiency evangelism not appear on the roster of experts who affirmed traditional institutions in the postwar era?
Charisma is different from mere charm, a lesser attribute.
Those minor objections aside, Worthen supplies a rich array of colorful characters, many of them lesser known. Benjamin Lay, a Quaker, deployed “deliberate acts of outrage” in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets. Tenskwatawa impressed others as filled with the Holy Spirit, Andrew Jackson exuded a sense of majesty, and Joseph Smith Jr., who along with Brigham Young and other Mormons spoke in tongues, propagated “the ultimate free-will faith.” Cora Scott and other Spiritualists understood “the rasping anxieties of the industrial revolution, the grime of cities, the confusion of the Second Great Awakening, the din of steam and rails,” offering evidence of another world. William J. Seymour and the Pentecostals of the Azusa Street revival provided disempowered people a spiritual vocabulary to “protest against the routinization and rationalization of religion,” as did Marcus Garvey and Aimee Semple McPherson.
At times, the seams of the author’s taxonomy strain to the point of bursting. George Washington was “an anti-prophet, radicalism’s counter-agent” during the time of the prophets, “an icon of confidence in hierarchy and institutions.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a politician most historians would classify as charismatic, was the “anti-agitator,” a voice for moderation and stability in Worthen’s era of agitators, and Robert McNamara “possessed a type of anti-charisma.” (The justification arguably occurs at the conclusion of the book, when Worthen asserts that “charisma is a dialectic of opposing impulses, a pattern of action and reaction.”)
The guru era extends to the present, and Worthen chooses to open with Maharaj Ji, a Hindu guru active during the 1960s and 1970s, rather than, say, Swami Prabhupada, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, or Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. “The Maharaji Ji was the ideal guru for an era disillusioned with institutions, doctrines, and Western claims to cultural superiority,” she writes. Humanistic psychology and group therapy flourished, and by the turn of the twenty-first century, “political professionals and otherworldly holy men could no longer claim a monopoly on charisma,” the author writes. “The divine power had not leached out of the concept, but Americans had learned to divinize a kernel of selfhood they imagined inside them.”
A less intrepid scholar might have stopped there, consigning the phenomenon of Donald Trump to faculty-lounge discussions for years to come, until a time when historians have a better perspective on the events of this past decade. Worthen, commendably, forges ahead, and her analysis of Trump provides some of the book’s most provocative arguments. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, many Americans had fallen into what the author calls “credulous cynicism,” leaving them “vulnerable to a guru who sneered at institutions that had failed them, affirmed their suffering, and promised new power—especially if the guru presented himself as that American paragon, the self-made man.” The fact that much of Trump’s persona was fiction mattered not at all, nor did his disjointed flights of free association. “Spellbinding speeches mattered less in the age of cable news sound bites and social media,” Worthen writes. “If the history of charismatic leaders teaches us anything, it’s that observers who are trying to understand a leader’s relationship with his followers make a mistake if they focus on the cogency of his arguments, the soundness of his factual claims, or the attractiveness of his personality.”
Trump speaks the rhetoric of victimization better than anyone I’ve known. It’s always about him, of course; he’s the victim, but what Worthen calls his “theater of self-aggrandizement” provided millions of Americans “the feeling that someone powerful saw them, and heard them, and spoke for them.”
Spellbound offers a rich narrative and a compelling thesis. The material is so dense that it invites further analysis; for example, the author teases frequent references to a charismatic figure’s eyes—Worthen mentions the eyes of George Whitefield, Tecumseh, Joseph Smith, Franz Anton Mesmer, Charles Lane, and William Seymour, and I would have added Finney and Graham—but this characteristic remains largely unexplored. That in no way diminishes the scale of the book’s ambitions or the persuasiveness of its argument. The centrality of charisma in American life may not have all the universal explanatory power the author claims, but it’s nevertheless a thesis that merits careful attention and scrutiny.