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Spellbound
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Spellbound

How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump

About the Book

What happens when Americans lose faith in their religious institutions—and politicians fill the void? From the Puritans to Donald Trump, this sweeping history will change your understanding of the forces that create leaders and hold their followers captive.

“Elegant and insightful, Spellbound is an important contribution to the urgent project of understanding America in our time.”—Jon Meacham

Everyone feels it. Cultural and political life in America has become unrecognizable and strange. Firebrands and would-be sages have taken the place of reasonable and responsible leaders. Nuanced debates have given way to the smug confidence of yard signs. How did we get here?

In Spellbound, historian Molly Worthen argues that we will understand our present moment if we learn the story of charisma in America. From the Puritans and Andrew Jackson to Black nationalists and Donald Trump, the saga of American charisma, Worthen argues, stars figures who possess a dangerous and alluring power to move crowds. They invite followers into a cosmic drama where hopes are fulfilled and grievances are put right—and these charismatic leaders insist that they alone plot the way.

The story of charisma in America reveals that when traditional religious institutions fail to deliver on their promise of a meaningful life, people will get their spiritual needs met in a warped cultural and political landscape dominated by those who appear to have the power to bring order and meaning out of chaos. Charismatic leaders address spiritual needs, offering an alternate reality where people have knowledge, power, and heroic status, whether as divinely chosen instruments of God or those who will restore national glory.

Through Worthen’s centuries-spanning historical research, Spellbound places a crucial religious lens on the cultural, economic, and political upheavals facing Americans today.
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Praise for Spellbound

“Finally—someone with something new to say about Donald Trump! Molly Worthen’s training as a historian of religion allows her to see what others have missed: Trump is the latest variation in a long, fascinating, and often weird history of American charismatic leaders. With her usual wit and energetic prose, Worthen connects the dots so we can see the full picture.”—Beverly Gage, professor of history at Yale University and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

“The great story of charisma in American history, from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to MAGA, has never been more thrillingly told, never more learnedly explicated.”—Tom Holland, co-host of The Rest Is History podcast and bestselling author of Pax and Dominion

“Elegant and insightful, Molly Worthen’s Spellbound is an important contribution to the urgent project of understanding America in our time. Far from polemical, the book explores the nature of charisma, that essential and elusive element in the course of human events. . . . A truly original study.”—Jon Meacham, professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of And There Was Light

“America is a land of paradox, one that separates church and state but invests its politics with a religious fervor and looks every four years to elect the new messiah. In this book, Molly Worthen sets these peculiarities of American culture in the context of a broader narrative, examining the changing nature of charisma and of the often latent but always dynamic relationship that exists between the great and the good and the people who grant—or ascribe to them—such cultural power.”—Carl R. Trueman, professor at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center

“A vivid, deeply researched exploration of charisma . . . A masterclass in historical analysis, skillfully demonstrating that charisma is not about the person, but about the ever-changing needs of the societies that embrace them.”—Library Journal, starred review

“Drawing on fine-grained historical research, Worthen makes insightful forays into how power is mediated in the public sphere and how Americans express their need for ‘transcendent meaning and . . . worship’ through means that can seem anything but divine. It amounts to a revealing window into shifting currents of American social, religious, and political thought.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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Excerpt

Spellbound

1.

Revolution

Boston, 1636

On the morning of October 25, seven of the most powerful men in Massachusetts Bay Colony gathered at the home of John Cotton, on the slope of Beacon Hill, facing Tremont Street. The houses in the neighborhood, built mostly of logs, stones, and mud, their roofs thatched with local grass, welcomed autumn drafts and leaks. Boston was a small, struggling place of only a few thousand residents, a far cry from the bustle of the settlement’s namesake—the Lincolnshire town where the Gothic tower of St. Botolph’s Church soared above the Fens and Cotton had preached until 1633, when anti-Puritan persecution drove him to board a ship to Massachusetts.

The men arrived at his home after the breakfast hour: ministers, elders, and deacons, as well as John Winthrop, who recently had served as the colony’s governor. Some had doubts about Cotton’s theology. When he preached that the Holy Spirit dwelled in members of the elect, his language sounded vague and mystical, liable to give laypeople the impression that they could receive direct messages from the divine. But the men had not gathered to interrogate their colleague—at least not today. Instead, they awaited the arrival of Cotton’s most loyal congregant, Anne Hutchinson.

Hutchinson likely passed friends and acquaintances on the walk to Cotton’s house. She was known to many in Boston, even before her current troubles. Families called on her to help deliver babies safely, and to help them understand the suffering and death that so often came with childbirth. Hutchinson had lost several of her own children; she would give birth sixteen times before the end of her life. “She did much good in our town, in womans meeting at Childbirth-travails, wherein she was not only skillful and helpful, but readily fell into good discourse with the women about their spiritual estates,” Cotton wrote.

The men sitting in Cotton’s home had summoned her because they feared that her counsel was leading the saints of Boston astray. The regular gatherings at her home—ostensibly to discuss the wisdom gleaned from that Sunday’s sermon—first appeared innocent enough. But now they happened too often, and attracted men as well as women. Cotton, Winthrop, and the others were alarmed to learn that her followers included the colony’s current governor, Henry Vane, a young politician with connections in King Charles I’s court.

Local clergy heard that Hutchinson had harsh words for their sermons. She declared that hardly any Massachusetts ministers preached under what Puritans called the “seal of the spirit.” Instead, she said, their emphasis on scrutinizing one’s good deeds and pious thoughts for signs of salvation amounted to a gospel of works righteousness. The idea that good works could earn God’s grace was, to a Protestant, the worst of all heresies. She exempted only John Cotton and her brother-in-law John Wheelwright. Where Cotton spoke in elliptical terms about the Holy Spirit’s messages (via scripture) to the elect, Hutchinson used the same logic to grant laypeople a radical degree of independence: No more docile efforts to prepare yourself for salvation according to the preacher’s instructions. Prick up your ears for the direct call of the Holy Spirit.

At that October meeting, Cotton assured the other ministers that his views on “the indwelling of the person of the Holy Ghost” in members of the elect aligned well enough with their own ideas. He proposed nothing so reckless as “personal union” with the Holy Spirit, “as Mrs. Hutchinson and others did,” Winthrop noted in his journal. When Hutchinson arrived, she “was very tender at first,” recalled the minister Hugh Peter. But that diplomatic spirit gave way to candor. She told the men “that you are not able ministers of the New Testament and know no more than the apostles did before the resurrection of Christ.” When Winthrop called her “a woman of ready wit and bold spirit,” he did not say it in admiration.

Forerunners

What sounds like an obscure theological debate was, in fact, the first great battle over American charisma: a fight over who gets to lead, who gets to encounter God’s power, and how. Beneath the archaic Puritan language lie familiar concerns: Is there a God, and did he choose me? If so, why is my life full of suffering, and whom can I trust to explain it? Hutchinson’s conflict with the leading ministers and magistrates of Massachusetts—and the destructive force they saw in her—marked the advent of the American prophetic tradition.

Hutchinson did not invent that tradition. She brought to the New World a set of spiritual gifts and techniques honed by a long line of female prophets going back to the second century, when Montanus “stirred up” his two female disciples, Prisca and Maximilla, “and filled them with the false spirit, so that they talked wildly and unreasonably and strangely,” according to the fourth-century church historian Eusebius. In twelfth-century Germany, Hildegard of Bingen defended her visions by declaring that God could no longer rely on sinful men and had turned to the weaker sex to express his divine word. One day, God appeared to her in a blaze of white-hot fire and boomed a backhanded compliment:

Insignificant earthly creature! Though as a woman you are uneducated in any doctrine of fleshly teachers in order to read writings with the understandings of the philosophers, nevertheless you are touched by my light, which touches your inner being with fire like the burning sun. Shout and tell! . . . [A]lthough you are trampled by the male form because of Eve’s transgression, speak nevertheless of the fiery work of salvation which this most certain vision reveals to you!

In the late Middle Ages, Christian Europe fell into crisis. The Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, and the Papal Schism chipped away at the authority of the church and spurred a small but growing number of women to test the boundaries of spiritual expression. In the fourteenth century, the Virgin Mary appeared to Birgitta of Sweden and described holding her son’s broken body after the crucifixion. “I took his body on my lap; it was like a leper’s, all livid. His eyes were lifeless and full of blood, his mouth as cold as ice, his beard like twine, his face grown stiff,” Birgitta recorded. Those not haunted by such vivid encounters could take advantage of the medieval idea of the “spirit of intelligence,” the practice of interpreting scripture with the help of the Holy Spirit to see beyond its obvious “carnal” meaning. By the time the teenage Joan of Arc was claiming that the Archangel Michael and other saints had told her to take to the battlefield and liberate France from English domination, Europe was saturated with mystics—especially women. The clerical elite, worried about divine visions appearing indiscriminately to unschooled laypeople, wrote manuals on “the discernment of spirits,” the art of distinguishing a real prophet of God’s word from a faker or a tool of Satan.

If their main worry was that some of these prophets would sidestep institutional discipline and claim knowledge direct from the divine source, they weren’t wrong. When church officials told Marguerite Porete to stop spreading her “Heresy of the Free Spirit,” she promptly mailed a book of her writings to three prominent theologians, then continued traveling and preaching independently. Church authorities burned her at the stake in 1310. A pro-English church tribunal sentenced Joan of Arc to the same fate. But most prominent mystics—many were elite nuns from aristocratic families—played by the rules. They valued the protection of father-confessors who could vouch for them, remove inadvertent heresies from transcripts of their visions, and protect their independence by confirming their deference. “I am taught inwardly, in my soul. Therefore I speak as one in doubt,” Hildegard wrote to Bernard of Clairvaux in a letter asking him to interpret one of her visions. “Hearing of your wisdom and piety, I am comforted.”

About the Author

Molly Worthen
Molly Worthen is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a freelance journalist. She teaches courses on North American religion and politics, global Christianity, and the history of ideas. She writes on these themes for The New York Times and has contributed to The New Yorker, Slate, The American Prospect, Foreign Policy, and other publications. She has also created video and audio courses on the history of Christianity and the history of charismatic leadership for the Great Courses and Audible. Her previous books are Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism and The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill. More by Molly Worthen
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