Unveiling a Hidden Narrative

John G. Turner explores Molly Worthen’s “Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump.”

By John G. TurnerJuly 7, 2025

• History

• Philosophy & Religion

THE BOOK OF ACTS narrates that the followers of Jesus gathered together in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, roughly 50 days after Passover. Tongues of fire rested on each of the apostles. They began to speak in other tongues. A crowd of “Jews from every nation under heaven” heard the commotion and rushed to the scene. Remarkably, they could hear the apostles in their own native languages. Peter stood up and explained that God was pouring out His Spirit on all people, and he told them about the death and resurrection of Jesus. “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation,” he pleaded. The response was mixed. Some in the crowd made fun of the apostles and accused them of being drunk. Three thousand, however, accepted what Peter taught and were baptized.

Molly Worthen’s new book Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump takes the New Testament as one starting point in defining her admittedly “nebulous” subject. The apostle Paul used the term “charismata” to describe gifts from God such as healing or speaking in tongues. As Worthen notes, “Charisma, in the apostles’ original sense, ha[s] never dried up.” But most Americans deploy the word shorn of its Pentecostal roots. They think about charisma as a leader’s magnetism, a combination of good looks and rhetorical skill, and that leader’s uncanny ability to attract and even bewitch their followers.

What lies at the heart of that charismatic relationship between leaders and followers? The German sociologist Max Weber understood the phenomenon as “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men.” But what is that quality? Charismatic leaders “must stand outside the ties of this world,” Weber suggested. They point their followers to a radically new future. Weber both feared and admired charismatic leaders. They possessed the potential to break through the routinized nature of modern societies. But their unpredictable power threatened to destroy essential norms.

Worthen offers a whirlwind tour of the pantheon of American charisma. She groups her subjects into chronological categories: prophets (such as Anne Hutchinson), conquerors (Andrew Jackson), agitators (Marcus Garvey), experts (Adlai Stevenson), and gurus (Oprah Winfrey). How did she select her examples? And why did she exclude ultra-charismatic Americans such as Muhammad Ali and Taylor Swift? Worthen could have written a much longer book, but she is most interested in charisma in religion and politics. Her choices allow her to identify an enduring “metaphysical craving” within a superficially secular culture.

This approach has strengths and drawbacks. Worthen’s vignettes feature sparkling prose and penetrating insight. This is especially true for the more obscure figures in Spellbound. Readers will wonder why their knowledge of American history passed over remarkable women such as Maria Woodworth-Etter, “the most prominent and controversial female evangelist in the United States” at the turn of the 20th century. After years of poverty and grief (she and her first husband lost five children at young ages), she began having visions of Heaven and angels and a field of grain ripe for the harvest. “I was baptized with the Holy Ghost, and fire, and power which has never left me,” she wrote.

Woodworth-Etter became known as the “trance evangelist.” She promised audiences that the Holy Spirit could overcome their sins and heal their suffering. Men and women came forward to the altar and fell down as if dead. Woodworth-Etter attracted crowds as large as 20,000, men and women desperate for miracles and convinced that she was a conduit for divine power. Why did they place their faith in her? She became famous in middle age and was, per Worthen, “no particular beauty.” One journalist reported that “she controlled the audience in [a] marvellous, miraculous and not easily accountable way.” More refined Protestants considered Woodworth-Etter and her followers an embarrassment, but such critiques did not blunt her appeal.

Worthen’s pantheon also features Guru Maharaj Ji and the 80,000 American devotees he attracted in the early 1970s. The guru came to the United States from India in 1971 at the baby-faced age of 13. He and his followers—known as “premies,” from a Sanskrit word meaning “lover of God”—established the Divine Light Mission. Local devotees turned their homes into ashrams, invited the curious, and told them how Maharaj Ji had filled their lives with sweetness and meaning.

Maharaj Ji himself was an egomaniac and a religious grifter. He claimed to be the “one true Lord of the Universe.” And while he told premies to live communally and abstain from sex and meat, he favored fancy watches and traveled in an emerald-green Rolls-Royce. Nevertheless, devotees longed to see him, to lock eyes with him, to kiss his feet. When they had the rare opportunity to do so in “darshan” (sight) lines, many felt something akin to the spiritual shock that repentant sinners experienced at Woodworth-Etter’s revivals. Nurses and doctors monitored post-kiss devotees in “darshan recovery areas.” Critics denounced the Divine Light Mission as a cult that brainwashed gullible young Americans. They had a point. Maharaj Ji became increasingly authoritarian by the mid-1970s. He wanted total loyalty from his followers, most of whom drifted away from the ashrams.

The Divine Light Mission sounds like a fringe movement, but Worthen observes that it wasn’t alien to the American culture of its time. Rather, it “present[ed] an intensified version of ideas in mainstream culture.” Premies considered “inner experience” rather than scripture or science “the most reliable guide to truth.” They wanted a “selfhood gilded with significance” and opportunities for self-improvement.

Millions of other Americans wanted those things as well. Tim Gallwey was a premie for a time. Then, in 1974, he published the best-selling The Inner Game of Tennis, which taught that, with the correct mental focus, individuals almost immediately could master the sport. Within a few years, Gallwey had founded the Inner Game Institute and received handsome fees for helping executives master the “inner game” of management. Millions of nonexecutive Americans became the not-exactly-secular devotees of business gurus like Gallwey, Tom Peters, and Ellen Lightman. “They have the capacity to infect others with this spirit and so to release the high levels of human energy required for extraordinary achievement,” observed one consultant. That was true in some cases. Oprah, for example, was one of Lightman’s clients.

Worthen’s brilliant final chapter weaves together the Toronto Blessing (a charismatic revival that began in 1994 and attracted at least one million visitors from the United States and around the world), Rush Limbaugh, and Donald Trump. She observes that decades of wealth inequality, high rates of drug abuse, and stagnant progress for white men with high school educations left many “vulnerable to a guru who sneered at institutions that had failed them, affirmed their suffering, and promised new power.” They had listened to Limbaugh on the radio for decades, and now Trump became their political savior—a combination of executive coach, reality television star, and populist firebrand. He was the “people’s billionaire,” according to his ex-wife, Ivana Trump.

Worthen notes that many journalists struggled to explain Trump’s appeal. Neither his hair nor his physique made him traditionally handsome. His speeches rambled. There was no Obama-esque eloquence. And his policy prescriptions were a mishmash of racism, obvious pandering to Evangelical Christians, and economic grievances. “If the history of charismatic leaders teaches us anything,” Worthen corrects, “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 certainly had flair and a populist touch. His admirers loved watching him serve customers at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s last year. Trump’s theater of self-aggrandizement did “conjure for millions of Americans […] the feeling that someone powerful saw them, and heard them, and spoke for them.”

But Worthen pinpoints something else, something she sees as the key to the whole centuries-long drama of American charisma. “The heart of charisma is the act of unveiling a hidden narrative,” she argues. “It invites followers to take up roles in a roster of morally stark characters and fold their lives into a plotline curving toward justice.” A charismatic leader asks their devotees to “find the strange freedom that comes from being swallowed by something much bigger than [themselves].” It is, at its core, a religious experience.

Spellbound’s conclusions are not as persuasive as its individual vignettes. As Worthen herself notes, “it seems absurd to apply the term ‘charisma’ to figures as radically different as [Shakers founder] Mother Ann Lee and Andrew Jackson, or Adlai Stevenson and Oprah.” It’s not quite absurd, but these radical differences do lead to a sometimes strained analysis. Charisma remains a “nebulous thing” at the end of the book. That’s not Worthen’s fault. Especially if one stretches back to the New Testament sense of charismata as spiritual gift, there’s a necessary element of mystery here. No single quality or cluster of qualities explains the nature of charismatic leadership.

If the heart of charisma is “unveiling a hidden narrative,” though, what enables certain figures to do so in a manner that attracts followers and creates a movement? Many religious leaders unveil hidden narratives in a bid for followers. Why do so few truly catch fire? Countless politicians seek to exploit grievances. Why did Ross Perot, another popular billionaire, fall short of the presidency Trump eventually obtained? Did Trump possess greater charismatic gifts? Or did he simply emerge at the right moment of peak grievance?

Furthermore, are there really common threads that run through the varied relationships all of these leaders had with their followers? Men like Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan had charisma in spades, but they weren’t unveiling hidden narratives. They were both great storytellers, but they told familiar, well-worn tales that resonated with large majorities of Americans.

Worthen’s argument about the religious nature of the charismatic relationship merits both appreciation and scrutiny. She acknowledges that the United States has become a “more secular country” in the sense that “Americans’ trust in and loyalty to established institutions has collapsed.” Compared to the early 20th century, fewer people attend church or other places of worship on a regular basis. More dissent from traditional doctrines. By most obvious measures, American culture is far more secular than a century ago.

At the same time, Worthen observes, “Americans’ desires for a source of existential meaning” have simply moved in new directions. “Humans are fundamentally religious,” she postulates, “in the sense that we yearn to impose order on the chaos of existence and worship some source of ultimate meaning.” Her formulation echoes the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich’s definition of religion as “ultimate concern.” Accordingly, “devoutly religious” and “proudly skeptical” Americans are both “searching for a role in a plot grander than the one they are living.” Worthen asserts that this fundamentally religious impulse has persisted over the centuries. “[O]ur own era is not actually that special,” she observes.

Of course, if one defines religion in this broad, even nebulous manner, it is almost impossible for it to subside. People will always seek existential meaning, choose comforting stories, and worship idols. Yet there is also a significant difference between religion—at least as traditionally understood—and politics. Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson needed a dedicated cadre of operatives and volunteers, but all they asked of most people was a quick trip to the ballot box, and perhaps a small donation. Mother Ann Lee, Joseph Smith, and Maharaj Ji did indeed ask their followers to surrender everything and begin new lives. Most healthy congregations ask a great deal of their members.

These are quibbles. Spellbound is a wild and satisfying romp through the history of American religion and politics, and a simultaneously sober and hopeful appraisal of the present moment. For Max Weber, Worthen notes, charisma was “an alloy of authoritarian and democratic impulses.” In the wake of World War II, many sociologists and psychologists understood charisma as a clear and present path to demagoguery, a concern that has resurfaced today. Worthen is less worried about whether charisma is dangerous or salutary. It can be either. What is certain is that it is inevitable. “Americans will continue to seek out charismatic relationships with God, and with his mortal ambassadors,” she concludes.

Most of those relationships will attract little attention. A few will become mass movements—some demagogic, others democratic. The good and bad news, as Max Weber maintained, is that they rarely last. A leader’s divine mission must always prove itself. Their followers must fare well. And they often do not. Most charismatic leaders flame out, for better and worse. Most of Maharaj Ji’s devotees quickly drifted away. Barack Obama’s “hope and change” petered out more quickly than many pundits predicted.

But not always. Billy Graham—how did Worthen not include him?—maintained his charismatic influence for many decades, as did Andrew Jackson. So has Oprah. And, on occasion, so do demagogues, who sometimes maintain their hold even if their followers do not fare well. Weber, after all, would not have been so sanguine had he died in 1940 instead of 1920.