Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump

The “story of American charisma” is one of destructive leaders advertising apocalyptic futures, institutionalists wielding big government, and trailblazers fighting for social progress, according to this illuminating intellectual history. Worthen (Apostles of Reason), a history professor at UNC Chapel Hill, traces 400 years of charismatic American leaders, from 17th-century “prophets” who excited adherents with “the terror and ecstasy of God’s presence,” to 20th-century “agitators,” such as Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, and dangerous “gurus” like Donald Trump who have garnered outsized influence in the wake of widespread losses of faith in public institutions. At the heart of this history, Worthen writes, is the paradoxical human desire for personal agency and connection to “force[s] greater than ourselves,” which became pressing after the Protestant Reformation remodeled “medieval people’s relationships to divine power,” and was supercharged in an America defined by individualism. 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. (May)