It was a startling, uncanny moment—and all the stranger when watched again. At the first Democratic primary debate of the 2020 election cycle, the candidates were each given 45 seconds for their closing statements. Eric Swalwell discussed student loan debt, John Hickenlooper methane regulations. Kamala Harris had her talking point ready about a “3 a.m. agenda,” and Joe Biden had his about “restoring the backbone of America.”
When it was Marianne Williamson’s turn, she sounded a different note. “This man [Trump] has reached deep into the psyche of the American people and he’s harnessed fear for political purposes,” Williamson said. “So Mr. President, if you’re listening, I want you to hear me, please. You have harnessed fear for political purposes, and only love can cast that out. So I sir, I have a feeling you know what you’re doing. I’m going to harness love for political purposes. I will meet you on that field, and, sir, love will win.”
Williamson, who had had an eclectic career as the “spiritual leader” of a Detroit church, as the bestselling author of A Return To Love, along with many other books, as an activist, and as Oprah Winfrey’s “spiritual advisor,” was considered the longest of long-shot candidates, and her performance at the first debate confirmed that she was no ordinary politician. For example, when asked whom she would call first if elected president, she replied that she would call the prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, to say, “Girlfriend, you are so on.” Not exactly a response designed to sway a swing voter. But in the memes and watercooler conversations afterwards, Williamson was all anyone wanted to talk about.
And then, when Williamson put it in a professional, forceful performance in the second debate, including a stirring call for reparations for slavery, even the establishment media found itself compelled to admit that something was happening. “It feels insane to say this, but Williamson out-debated virtually everyone else on the stage,” Jamelle Bouie wrote in The New York Times. Anderson Cooper compared her to an omniscient narrator in a play, seeing what none of the other characters could. The Philadelphia Inquirer stated flatly that “Williamson won the Democratic debate.” David Brooks was moved to write a column contending that the Democratic Party had for a century allowed itself to be trapped into a narrowly materialist worldview and that, of all the candidates, only Williamson knew the path to beating Trump. “It is no accident,” Brooks wrote, “that the Democratic candidate with the best grasp of this election is the one running a spiritual crusade, not an economic redistribution effort.”
During this election cycle, Williamson ran again in the Democratic primaries, then dropped out, then ran again, then dropped out again. She won’t be president, or even a major-party nominee. But notwithstanding her electoral failures, she remains relevant to the American scene, as much today as four years ago. It wasn’t just that Williamson, with her long years of television experience, had some of the same primetime-ready speaking style that Trump did, setting her apart from what she called the “wonkiness” of the other Democratic candidates. It was also that, as Emily Witt wrote in a New Yorker article on Williamson and the New Age, “She represents something that feels new: the entrance of this spiritual movement into electoral politics.” More than other third-party candidates—more than Cornel West, more even than Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—Williamson embodies an old tradition in our politics, older than the Whigs, more ineradicable than populism.
For while Williamson’s vibe may have felt new, it wasn’t, not at all. It’s just that we rarely see it attached to presidential contenders. In a recent Gallup poll, 33 percent of Americans identified as “spiritual but not religious.” That’s, by any measure, an impressive electoral bloc—and one which has had precious little representation from the political class. That coalition (if that’s the right word for it) would seem to comprise the Age of Aquarius seekers of Williamson’s generation (she was born in 1952), the millennials who participated in the 2010s psychedelic renaissance, the 50 million Americans who watched The Oprah Winfrey Show on a weekly basis, and the vast swathes of American society who have moved away from organized religion but have found themselves no less interested in higher meaning. This spiritual strain is much deeper in American life than is usually acknowledged.
Spirituality is clearly a broad church, but it has recognizable features: an interest in the transcendent, a willingness to trust in intuition and the imagination and to look beyond surface materiality, and a belief in some sense of design within the broader scheme of the life of an individual. It could also be summed up as a belief in energy—i.e. that the “material world” is comprised ultimately of energetic vibrations. Sometimes, that belief in the efficacy of “energy” has a dark side: Williamson used to tell AIDS sufferers that they could cure themselves through visualization practices.
Notwithstanding her electoral failures, she remains relevant to the American scene, as much today as four years ago.
If we look under the hood of American politics, spirituality—if not occultism—shows up far more often than one might expect. It’s in the somewhat lurid stories of Abraham Lincoln consulting with a medium at the height of the Civil War, and of Ronald Reagan permitting an astrologer to set the timing of debates and press conferences, and of Florence Harding being driven to distraction by an astrologer’s prediction of her husband’s demise—which turned out to be accurate. But it’s also in the ways that leading political figures describe themselves as shaped by a transcendent conception of the world that does not fit into the confines of established religion—of Obama in 2006 writing of his mother, “For all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known,” and of Lincoln being described by a close aide as “deeply and genuinely religious without being in any way what might be called a religionist.” A spiritual conception of American destiny may well have propelled Reagan into politics, and even Donald Trump is—as Williamson intuited—shaped by an outlook with deep roots in the spiritual tradition. What made Williamson unique was that she talked openly, in a political setting, about spirituality, a set of ideas themselves interwoven into American politics from the beginning.
There are numerous stories of the occult in early American history—a Revolutionary War soldier would claim that an angel appeared to George Washington at Valley Forge and gave him the courage to continue the war; and Washington’s ghost apparently returned the favor by visiting John C. Calhoun in the 1840s and warning him of the dangers of secession. But the watershed moment in nineteenth century spirituality was the “discovery” in 1848 by the teenage Fox sisters in Rochester, New York, of their ability to communicate with the dead. This spiritualist movement would take a cold bath at the end of the century when two of the Fox sisters publicly confessed that it was all a hoax—and, now, spiritualism tends inevitably to be referred to as a “fad” or “craze.” But that formulation does a disservice to how widely it was practiced and to how deeply it entered into the psyche of the era. Harvard Divinity School’s Ann Braude, in her classic history Radical Spirits, calls spiritualism “ubiquitous on the American scene at mid-century” and inseparable, in the early years, from the women’s rights movement.
Horace Greeley, the polymathic newspaper editor and presidential candidate, would mentor the Fox sisters and invite them to live with him. And Victoria Woodhull, something of a precursor to Marianne Williamson in the integration of spirituality and politics, would be the first woman to run for president, launching her bid in 1872 with the Equal Rights Party, which combined suffragism and spiritualism. (For her efforts, Woodhull was arrested on a charge of obscenity and spent Election Day in jail.) And the Fox sisters themselves appear, per primary sources, to have been invited to the White House to carry out séances for First Lady Jane Pierce, who was bereaved after the death of her son Benny months before Franklin Pierce’s inauguration.
It’s like I turned my head and an almost contemptuous attitude towards faith had become normalized on the American left. It grieves me, and it grieves many of us, that this over-secularization has veered so many people in the direction of Republicans.
But the most dramatic irruption of spiritualism into American political life was Mary Todd Lincoln’s “open and avowed” interest. She regularly met with mediums and, according to one historian’s calculations, hosted approximately eight séances in the White House. Standard biographies of Abraham Lincoln tend to treat spiritualism as Mary’s obsession, with Lincoln warily indulging her, but, in 1891, a medium named Nettie Colburn Maynard published a memoir called Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist?, which described séances conducted with Lincoln present and for Lincoln’s benefit. According to Maynard (obviously an interested party), the shades she communicated with encouraged Lincoln to move forward with the Emancipation Proclamation at a pivotal moment in December 1862, advised him to visit the Army of the Potomac in April 1863—a celebrated visit that helped to revive the Army’s flagging morale—and convinced him not to lose heart after the disastrous Battle of Chancellorsville. Since its publication, there has been a furious back-and-forth debate on Maynard’s claims. In 1941, prolific biographer Jay Monaghan intensely analyzed Maynard’s assertions and concluded, “There is some evidence to show that Lincoln did attend several séances.” More recently, David Herbert Donald, in his authoritative Lincoln, places Lincoln at one séance only.
By the early 1910s, a cluster of Washington hostesses conferred with the astrologer Marcia Champney—and, if some accounts are to be believed, she had an even higher batting average than Maynard’s. In 1909, according to Carl Sferazza Anthony, a historian of presidential families, Champney predicted that the recently-widowed Edith Galt—who would not marry Woodrow Wilson until 1915—would one day move into the White House. Florence Harding became particularly dependent on Champney. In February 1920, Champney predicted that Warren Harding would be the next president—that “no power on earth can stop him … but he will not live out his term.” And, according to Anthony’s biography of Florence Harding, Champney gave a series of prescient pieces of advice. She told Florence, at a moment when her husband was wavering, to be sure that Warren attended the 1920 Republican convention in Chicago, where there would be “a long, hard fight but he will win.”
Florence was convinced enough that she consulted regularly with Champney throughout the Harding presidency—sneaking Champney up the back stairs of the White House, much to Champney’s discomfiture. Anthony reports that Florence sometimes directed an aide to rearrange the president’s schedule when, after consulting with Champney, she feared danger. Not long into Harding’s presidency, she began to suspect that Champney knew more than she had let on and, in Champney’s account, demanded, “I want to know the rest of the horoscope—the part that you did not tell me.” But Champney continued to hold back, declining to tell Florence that her husband would be betrayed by friends. And, according to an article by journalist Harry B. Hunt, she visited Champney during Harding’s illness in 1923 to get her prognosis, at which point Champney looked at the horoscope and declared, “It is the end. He will never recover.”
Some of the account of Champney’s influence rests on claims she made years later in her article “When An Astrologer Ruled The White House,” but there is no real question that Florence Harding regularly consulted her. William Howard Taft, then chief justice, wrote in 1921 that Florence Harding was known to be in a terrible way thinking of the tragedy that Champney had prophesied for her husband.
The scandal of Champney continued well into the Coolidge administration. In 1926, Harry Houdini, who had a sideline in exposing charlatans, launched a crusade attempting to ban fortune-telling in the District of Columbia, and in the process he somewhat inadvertently revealed the extent of high-class Washington’s dependence on the occult. Houdini’s undercover investigator coaxed Champney to boast that “almost all the people in the White House believed in spiritualism,” while Jane Coates, head of the Spiritualist Church of America, said, “I know for a fact that there have been spiritual séances held at the White House with President Coolidge and his family.” Houdini, testifying before Congress, waved around an envelope of $10,000, offering it to the mediums if they could produce a single verifiable psychic phenomenon—which Champney promptly claimed on the basis of her prediction of Harding’s death. Champney didn’t get the money, but, as was so often the case with her, she got the last laugh. Not only did Houdini’s proposed bill fail, but Champney (according to her later account) predicted that Houdini would be dead by November of that year—and, in fact, he died on October 31.
If spiritualism was the first great spiritual “religion” of the nineteenth century, Theosophy was the second. Theosophy was based on the teachings of Russian-born Helena Blavatsky, who claimed to be the disciple of a group of ascended “Masters” and to have copied over a series of ancient teachings from a monastery in Tibet. Declaring that “it is in America that the transformation will take place and has already silently commenced,” Blatavsky in 1875 founded the Theosophical Society in New York. Although her teachings would ultimately have the most impact in India, where they were instrumental in the foundation of the Indian independence movement, they radiated also through the United States.
In 1919, the Iowa farmer Henry Wallace came under Theosophy’s spell. Wallace, in 1933, was selected Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture, and he became one of the more prominent stewards of the New Deal, administering the far-reaching Agricultural Adjustment Act. At the same time, however, Wallace was in regular contact with the Russian mystics Nicholas and Helena Roerich, who were, through Helena Roerich, in telepathic contact with the same Hidden Masters who had communicated with Blavatsky; according to Benn Steil’s biography of Wallace, he underhandedly financed an expedition by the Roerichs to locate the hidden city of Shambala somewhere in the vicinity of Mongolia. In a series of letters, Wallace wrote to Nicholas Roerich as “Guru,” he was addressed in turn as “Galahad,” and they discussed how best to influence Roosevelt—referred to as “The Flaming One”—to enact the directives of the Masters.
Wallace, then, represents one of the most fascinating what-ifs in American history. It took a tightly-orchestrated convention coup by Democratic Party operatives in 1944 to replace Wallace on the ballot with Truman. Had they not pulled that off, the end of World War II and post-war reconstruction would have been run by a believing Theosophist, in sometime contact with the Masters.
Probably the single best-documented intrusion of spirituality into presidential politics is the near-total reliance of Nancy Reagan on her astrologer, Joan Quigley. Ronald Reagan himself had deep spiritual leanings that went largely unreported during his presidency. He had, as popular writer Mitch Horowitz demonstrated with a neat bit of sleuthing, been influenced in particular by the spiritual thinker Manly Hall. In a 1943 essay, Hall wrote of a “strange man” who appeared in Independence Hall in July 1776, and, when the delegates were flagging, delivered a speech so stirring that they, in a frenzy, rushed forward and signed the Declaration of Independence. “No one to this day knows who [the speaker] was or where he came from or where he went,” concluded Hall—suggesting that he was “one of the agents of the secret Order guarding and directing the destiny of America.”
It’s a bit of a stupid story, and it’s ultimately traceable to an account written in 1847 by Edgar Allan Poe’s friend George Lippard. But the point is that it made an impression on Reagan and encouraged his turn towards politics. In speeches and essays decades apart—including when he was president—Reagan would cite the Declaration of Independence story, in language echoing Hall’s.
Nancy, meanwhile, had a longstanding interest in astrology and, according to Quigley, regularly consulted with her starting in 1973. Recounting the achievements of her spiritual technologies, Quigley was no more modest than Nettie Maynard or Marcia Champney had been. In her memoir, Quigley called herself “the Teflon in … the Teflon presidency.” She took credit for the “timing of all press conferences,” as well as most speeches; for the timing of Anthony Kennedy’s Supreme Court nomination, which, to achieve maximum auspiciousness, was “timed with a stopwatch … to the exact second”; for the unusually late start of the Reagan-Carter debate in 1980, which was an astrological “gamble,” betting on a time of day that would make Carter a bit optimistic and careless and thus more likely to make gaffes (as he duly did); and for encouraging Reagan at the Geneva Summit of 1985 to move away from his “evil empire” rhetoric.
Unlike with some of the other cases of spiritual advisement, there is no doubt of the basic validity of Quigley’s claims. Nancy Reagan’s reliance on Quigley was somehow kept secret for the bulk of the Reagan presidency—Quigley wrote that her family was well aware of Nancy’s “constant calls” to Quigley’s San Francisco residence but never divulged the secret; and White House correspondents “often wondered at the unusual takeoff times for Air Force One” but without ever guessing that it was because Quigley was dictating the timing. But in 1988 Reagan’s estranged chief of staff, Donald Regan, wrote a tell-all memoir including the revelation that he had resigned from the White House in part because the Reagans’ over-reliance on astrology made normal business impossible. “It was an essential truth about the way the Reagans operated,” Regan wrote in an article following his book’s publication. “It was a daily, sometimes hourly, factor in every decision affecting the President’s schedule.” The basics of Regan’s assertion—that Nancy regularly consulted with Quigley and that it affected the president’s schedule—were confirmed in an unusual White House press conference in 1988 and by Nancy Reagan in her 1989 memoir.
For Quigley, astrology was no more or less than a science, which could be used somewhat in the way that a sports team might rake the grounds of its home stadium to give itself more favorable bounces. Some events, Quigley claimed, are “absolutely fated,” but in others there is room for contingency, and Quigley’s job was to look into her charts—actually, she used computers to better analyze the data—and advise on which influences could be expected at which times.
For others under spiritual influence, power itself has a mystical component, which brings us to Donald Trump. As The New York Times wrote in 2016, “For all that has been written about Mr. Trump’s high-profile careers—as a real estate developer, a casino owner and a reality-television personality—relatively little attention has been focused on the role religion played in shaping his personality.” And that role is considerable. Fred Trump, the former president’s father, came across Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking in the 1950s, and, as Donald Trump’s niece Mary wrote in Too Much And Never Enough, “The title was enough for him.”
Although a Christian minister, Peale was part of a direct lineage of New Thought philosophy, which traced its way back to the spiritualist beliefs of the nineteenth century. The New Thought iteration—which took shape toward 1900—featured many of the beliefs now associated with the New Age. “The Secret” and the “Law of Attraction” are, for instance, New Thought. Peale had been deeply shaped by the New Thought writer Ernest Holmes, and, as Mitch Horowitz writes, “His philosophy was core New Thought.”
During Donald’s childhood, the Trumps regularly attended Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. In 1977, Peale officiated at Trump’s marriage to Ivana, and, in 1993, Peale’s successor officiated at Trump’s marriage to Marla Maples—whom Trump may have met at Marble. In 1983, Trump, in a choice bit of Peale-ianism, told The New York Times, “The mind can overcome any obstacle. I never think of the negative.” In a 2009 interview with Psychology Today, he credited Peale with his comeback from bankruptcy. “I refused to be sucked into negative thinking on any level,” he said.
For Trump biographer Gwenda Blair, there was no argument that Trump owed his rise to the power of positive thinking. “It’s a fact,” she told Politico in 2017. “He weaponized it.”
Which brings us back to Williamson. “I have a feeling you know what you’re doing,” Williamson said of Trump in that first debate appearance. In Williamson’s view, Trump had taken the entire rich tradition of New Thought, New Age, spiritual thinking—of mind over matter—and allied it to hate and anger. “He offers people false hope and the real problem is that the Democratic Party isn’t offering any hope at all,” she told me by Zoom.
And for Williamson, the Democratic Party took a wrong turn back in the 1970s or ’80s, when it departed from religion and spirituality in favor of an unimaginative materialism.
“I don’t understand exactly what happened,” she said. “It’s like I turned my head and an almost contemptuous attitude towards faith had become normalized on the American left. It grieves me, and it grieves many of us, that this over-secularization has veered so many people in the direction of Republicans.”
By giving up any spiritual language, Williamson argued, the Democrats had forfeited not only critical voting blocs but a vast domain in which to speak boldly and imaginatively. “The Democrats have not risen to the largeness of this moment. They don’t know how to speak on this level,” David Brooks wrote in 2019. In this view, a corrective wouldn’t necessarily mean slipping mediums into the White House or calling up one’s favorite astrologer—although that seemed to work out well enough for Lincoln and Reagan—but it would mean recognizing spirituality as core to the American experience and as a vital plane of expression.
For Williamson, the call to run for president arrived in a vivid, uncanny moment. It was right after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, and she had what would be called in twelve-step programs “a moment of clarity.” She told The New York Times, “The thought came to me in such a clear and powerful way. It was almost as though I could hear the spirit of my late father: ‘This must not go unanswered.’”
Spirituality, like an underground river, has accompanied the mainstream of American history. Its iconography is deeper than “brat” or small town football coaches, and it will be here long after TikTok is gone. It is both more prominent and more deeply-felt than standard political accounts might suppose, and all that remains is for it to more openly declare itself. “We have proven now that what we touched transforms,” Williamson declared to a rally in 2019. “What do you call all those yoga mats? That’s from our crowd. What do you call all that mindfulness stuff? Our crowd. And the only reason politics hasn’t transformed is because we haven’t been there yet.”