Ideas - The Dark Side of Charisma: Molly Worthen

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

Charisma can be a dangerous thing in politics. Writer and scholar Molly Worthen examines how today’s breed of charismatic leaders presents themselves as having the power to transform lives, transfixing their followers into unquestioning fealty, in her 2023 Larkin-Stuart Lecture. *This episode originally aired on Oct. 3, 2023.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Today, I want to talk about charisma and the strange things that it does in politics and in religion. For most of us, most of the time, charisma is an attractive trait. But maybe not always. active trait. But maybe not always. Charisma is the irresistible, sometimes dangerous allure that gives a leader the power to move a crowd. Molly Worthen teaches history at the University of North Carolina. To me, what charisma is really about is the impulse to worship, to connect with someone or something transcendent that lends meaning to our puny mortal lives

and gives us a sense of control over the chaos, even if we're not the ones in control, a confidence that someone is. But there's a darker side to charisma. Charismatic leaders can mobilize fanatical movements that turn politics, religion, and societies upside down. So we've got this age of the experts giving birth to the age of the guru. We've got the decline of institutions, the rising authority of these charismatic leaders seemingly untethered to any human authority other than themselves and the totalizing worldview they offer. And by the time we get to the 80s,

the guru, this is not just a leadership model you see on the margins. Molly Worthen is also the author of Apostles of Reason, The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism, and an upcoming book about the history of political and religious charisma in America. Thank you all for being here on this busy afternoon. Charisma is a word that I think we throw around a lot without being very clear on what we mean by it. So just for fun, I went back through the archives of the Globe and Mail, like the past few months,

I didn't get carried away, just to see kind of how, how has this word charisma, how has it popped up recently in the Globe and Mail, like the past few months, I didn't get carried away, just to see kind of how how is this word charisma, how has it popped up recently in the Globe? Here are some examples I found. First, in an obituary for Bobby Hull, we have a reference to his distinctive blend of power, energy, and charisma, which seemed to have something to do with his physical presence, with his slap shot, his charming smile in menswear ads. Or here's a reference to the former CEO of the National Bank of Canada, Louis Vachon, whose force of personality and charisma made him both a public figure and popular with shareholders. I mean, it's not clear what the charisma had to do

with simply the fact that he was extremely competent in the 2008 financial crisis. Then here's a line from a Globe article analyzing the next American presidential race. This is quoting a Republican strategist. "'Some politicians are artists. "'They read their audience. "'They have charisma.

"'Donald Trump is an artist. Ron DeSantis is an accountant. All these examples are interesting, but they all leave me wondering, what exactly does the author mean when they use the word charisma? So let me give you my working definition up front. Charisma is the irresistible, sometimes dangerous allure that gives a leader the power to move a crowd. I think the flip side of that allure is the revulsion that you feel if you are watching

a political rally or a sermon or someone speaking on TV and you are not under the charismatic person's spell. In that case, you feel like a professional chemist who is watching a demonstration of medieval alchemy. And you have to admit that somehow it's producing results, but how can this be? It's an illusion. There's just no there there, right? It's this results, but how can this be? It's an illusion. There's just no there there, right? It's this real disconnect.

I am using words like spell, alchemy, and this is a common temptation when we are trying to talk about charisma. I've noticed that even totally secular people resort to quasi-magical or religious or hypnotism metaphors. They use words like mesmerize, magnetize. We talk about converting followers to a cause. This is because charisma is a concept that we punt to when we can't identify totally rational material explanations for the relationship between a leader and followers.

When we know there is something else going on and we don't understand it. This is exactly why the sociologist Max Weber borrowed the term charisma from the world of church history and biblical studies a little bit more than 100 years ago. He's really the one who deserves the credit for coining this term in the sense that we use it today as a kind of political authority that is distinct from the authority of tradition or institutions. Authority that has to do with a leader convincing followers that he or she has accomplished some supernatural feat or has some amazing superhuman power, a power that resides in a special way in the leader as a person. The word charisma comes from the ancient Greek charis,

meaning divine anointing, chosenness by the gods, a chosenness that brings with it a special power for good, perhaps, but maybe also for evil. In the New Testament, St. Paul takes that Greek idea and he tweaks it a little bit. He makes this charisma, grace, spiritual gifts bestowed by God. Charisma in a strictly theological, biblical sense has had a fascinating 2,000-year history since then. And different groups of Christians have come to understand charisma in radically different ways, from the quiet, kind of abiding presence of the Holy Spirit to absolutely raucous speaking in tongues. And one thing that I'm trying to figure out is how exactly the stories of religious charisma and political charisma, in the sense that Max Weber used it,

how these are actually intertwined, because I think they are. What you're hearing are excerpts from the 2023 Larkin-Stewart Lecture that Molly Worthen delivered at Trinity College at the University of Toronto, a college that was founded

by John Strawn, a staunchly establishment figure and the first Anglican bishop of Upper Canada. I have to admit, I feel a little awkward talking about charisma in the college founded by John Strawn, because if there was ever a man who disapproved of charisma, I'm pretty sure it was him. When I lecture about Strawn at UNC in my course on religious history in North America, I show my students a slide of that portrait that you have of him in Strawn Hall, the one where he's wearing the sleeves that are so billowy that it looks like he could take flight, right?

Very practical garment, by the way, allowing room to wear your winter furs underneath a surplus, right? And he has that grim look on his face, that sort of permanent grumpiness at the dawn of modern democracy and all these enthusiastic evangelicals running around with no discipline. The family compact did not owe its authority to something as flimsy as charisma. Strawn believed in the established church, in institutions, tradition, precisely because he saw how vulnerable the average depraved human is to demagogues and dangerous ideas. And he was not wrong about that. Actually, I think Strawn would appreciate

that we are here talking about charisma taking seriously its strangeness and its dangers, even if he would be disappointed that I am probably not going to end with a call to reestablish the Anglican Church. the Anglican Church. The brief of the Larkin-Stewart lecture invites the speaker to talk about theology, broadly defined. To me, what charisma is really about is the impulse to worship, to connect with someone or something transcendent that lends meaning to our puny mortal lives and gives us a sense of control over the chaos, even if we're not the ones in control, a confidence that someone is. For a long time, scholars who focus on religion have relied on certain benchmarks of

religious institutions to try to learn things about this human impulse. So they paid a lot of attention to things like church membership numbers, you know, attendance figures, this kind of thing. But these tools don't serve us very well anymore every year seems to bring a new study showing the rising number of the so-called nuns right n-o-n-e-s in both the u.s and canada these are the people who say they affiliate with no religious tradition whatsoever that figures now something like 35 of people in canada and 29 in the United States. And I'm especially interested within that group in the people who call themselves spiritual but not religious. So what's so interesting is that the vast majority of these people who say I'm not affiliated do not want you to call them an atheist

or even an agnostic. So they have some kind of set of metaphysical beliefs beyond strict materialism, but it's not clear what. So that religious impulse does not seem to be going away, but we cannot count on finding it in the usual places. So the question then is, where should we look? And I think one place we need to look is this fuzzy phenomenon known as charisma. And in cases where a public figure's charisma really baffles us, when we really don't get it, that's a sign that we need to look even harder. So this afternoon, I want to try to step back from our current political moment and kind of put it in a longer perspective and look at the particular kind of charismatic appeal that seems to have real power right now, especially in the United States, and think about what that has to do

with our human need for religious experience and authority. I think the patterns are a bit different in Canada, but the stories are intertwined, as they always are. First, let me start with a basic question. That's a question about authority and trust, and how North Americans get their information about the world. A huge number, especially young people, have turned away from traditional media and get their political information from YouTube channels or TikTok or some random string of links that show up in their social media feed. And in these new medias, maybe especially on the political right, but certainly not only on the right, we're seeing a surge in the popularity of

conspiracy theories. The people hawking these theories promise access to hidden truths. No, they promise they're kind of pulling back the curtain and revealing to you the corruption in the structures of power. They seem to be exploiting many North Americans' distrust of expert knowledge, expert claims about evidence, whether we're talking about global warming, COVID-19, or something else. A nationwide poll by Abacus Data that came out last summer suggested that Canadians go in for conspiracy thinking about as much as Americans. This study found that 44% of Canadian adults believe that, here I'm quoting, big events like wars, recessions, and outcomes of elections

are controlled by small groups of people working in secret. Now that figure strikes me as awfully high, way higher than I wanted, frankly, to make my point. I think we can safely say that these theories have traction. They have traction north and south of the border. I want safely say that these theories have traction. They have traction north and south of the border. I want to stress that these trends are not new. If we got into a time machine, we went back to America at the turn of the 19th century, we would find a culture awash in conspiracy theories about Freemasons and Illuminati and how they control politics. We

would hear politicians like Thomas Jefferson exploiting popular suspicion of the governing elite, even though he fancied himself among those aristocratic elite himself when it suited him. And up here, right, people would have told you that the family compact that ran Ontario politics, including dear John Strawn himself, had a malevolent behind-the-scenes control, right? I mean, this is part of the story behind the violence of 1837. I will say, though, that

generally Canadians have had more faith in elites, more faith in institutions. Your rebellions never got to the point of a violent revolution, and this remains one of the sort of basic but so essential facts about our shared history. In any case, I think it is best to think of conspiracy thinking and distrust of established authority as themes that ebb and flow in North American history, sometimes really making a stamp on the culture and in other eras receding a bit, but never going away entirely. So the question is, why have these themes boiled over in our own time? Why are North Americans today especially vulnerable to believing an alternative reality? vulnerable to believing an alternative reality. Or another way of putting it is why have political leaders and commentators had especially great success in pushing these very human buttons

in the 21st century? I want to suggest that the era immediately preceding our own. So say from the 1950s to roughly the 1980s. That period set us up for this in some special ways. That was the era when respect for professional expertise reached kind of a peak. And then I think it fell apart. And in our own time, we have seen the rise of a different type of charismatic leader, a type I call the guru. Now, what's a guru? Number one, a guru tells you to put your trust in him or her as an individual. Now, they may link themselves to an institution or a tradition, a holy scripture, but they position themselves as the best interpreter. Number two, a guru presents a totalizing worldview.

So if you accept the assumptions they present, then you have answers for every big question about right and wrong and the ultimate goals of life without having to think a whole lot about it. Third, that worldview is based in some sense on an alternative reality or a radical reinterpretation of reality that leaves you with a set of facts, a set of claims at odds with what outsiders see. Number four, gurus usually operate adjacent to electoral politics rather than right in it, although sometimes they do make the leap. And five, they often position themselves as pseudo-experts, or at least they draft off academic or esoteric ideas, institutions, ways of speaking in order to project authority. The 50s and the 60s were, I think, in many ways the heyday of cultural authority for scientific, secular expertise in North America. I think of higher education really booming after World War II, lots of federal investment in research. I think about a bit later, you know, that the technocrats working for John F. Kennedy

on economic policy, the Vietnam War, the space race. From a certain angle, this period looks like the pinnacle of secular expert authority. In the context of Quebec, I think one way of understanding the quiet revolution is to see it as a new cadre of intellectuals who wanted to break up the alliance between the church and the government of Premier Maurice Duplessis, to put the reform of Quebec society in the hands of professional elites, experts who controlled state machinery. I think there are echoes here of JFK's brain trust.

I think there are echoes here of JFK's brain trust. You could make the argument that Pierre Trudeau's famous charisma was his ingenious combination of the sophisticated intellectual with the tough guy, because maybe Canadians want their prime minister to be both those things at once. I'll add that the 1950s, the early 60s, were the last time when you could say that traditional religious institutions, religious experts, if we put that term in scare quotes, that these people were in charge also.

So this was the last era when the United Church, the Catholics, the Anglicans in Canada, then down south, the more liberal Protestant churches, churches we call the mainline Protestants. This was the last period when those groups were really thriving, at least by the numbers. In 1950, Canadian church attendance as a proportion of the population actually exceeded U.S. church attendance by a third to one half. And Quebec, before the 1960s, Quebec probably had the highest church attendance in the world.

Today, U.S. church attendance is one half to two thirds greater than in Canada. And whereas the established middle class liberal Protestant churches once had a huge share of that. Those denominations, I mean, they've generally peaked around 1960, and they've really crashed since then. Another trend I want to flag in the post-war era is the beginning of the charismatic renewal movement. This is a revival, an explosion of the Holy Spirit in churches that had never known the Holy Spirit before, at least not in this miraculous, immediate, sensory way with hands up in the air, people getting slain in the Spirit, speaking in tongues, prophetic words. that charismatic renewal actually started in Canada during the healing campaigns among Pentecostals in Saskatchewan and Vancouver in the late 1940s, the latter rain movement.

But these revivals spread around the world, and in some ways, charismatic renewal breathed new vitality into churches, including established churches. At the same time, you could argue that, like revivals usually do, charismatic renewal helped chip away at traditional Christian institutions, and it emboldened over the long term independent, non-denominational, megachurch pastors and religious entrepreneurs, rather than the older parachurch groups and established denominations.

Now, you probably also associate the 50s and the 60s with the rise of the counterculture, certainly a movement driven by skepticism of institutions. And Christianity had its own version of that, the Jesus People movement. My point is that by the 1960s, we have a complicated picture. The expert, the educated establishment church leader, these folks are still somewhat comfortable in their cultural authority, but this is starting to erode. The late 1960s, the 1970s, were many things, but one thing they are often called is an age of cults, or to use a less loaded term, an age of new religious movements,

ranging from the infamous and scary ones like Jim Jones' People's Temple, Roche Thériault and the Ant Hill Kids in Quebec, to cases that were sometimes benign and sometimes could become abusive, like the evangelical charismatic Children of Love, Scientology, both of which started in the United States but had significant missionary outposts, you could say, in Canada. Yogi Bhajan's story is really interesting. Maybe some of you know this. He emigrated from India to

Toronto in 1968 with the help of a Trinity graduate, James George, who was serving as high commissioner to India at the time. It was himself something of a spiritual seeker. I think he was intrigued by Yogi Bhajan. Once Yogi Bhajan got here, he helped jumpstart Eastern Canada's first Sikh temple. He became something of a media figure. He had been promised a position in what was going to be a new yoga studies department at U of T. But this did not pan out, not quite sure why. He ends up moving to Los Angeles, and that's where he founded the Healthy, Happy, Holy organization, and he starts attracting a lot of Westerners with his combination of yoga and sort of reinterpreted Sikh teachings. He introduced Kundalini yoga to the United States.

This is that more arduous style of yoga compared to the more common Hatha practice. He claimed that he had learned Kundalini as a young man by having a helicopter lower him into the mouth of a cave in the Himalayas where he found a great yoga master and he knelt at this guy's feet for three days until the yogi agreed to teach him. He also had a genius for capitalizing on the Sikh warrior tradition and Americans' kind of associations with that. He founded a Sikh security company that guards courthouses and military bases, takes in something like a billion dollars a year.

He was an ingenious businessman. He preached a kind of prosperity gospel based loosely on Hindu and Sikh principles, kind of blended with the American gospel of self-empowerment. He founded a natural foods company, yoga centers. He owned a lot of real estate. If you've seen yogi teas in the store, that's Yogi Bhajan. He had his fingers in a lot of pots. I dwell on him because he's a great example of this long-standing pattern in North American history, which is the wannabe guru who begins his career in Canada, but ends up having to move to the United States, or at least kind of aim at American audiences to really make the guru thing work. work. I'm thinking of the great Pentecostal evangelist, Amy Semple McPherson, or the Catholic radio preacher, Charles Coughlin, or more recently, Jordan Peterson. My take on this is that American religious culture has always been much more entrepreneurial, more of a free-for-all, with more of a DIY spiritual ethos.

Molly Worthen teaches history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She gave the 2023 Larkin-Stewart Lecture at Trinity College in Toronto. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy.

Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. Charisma has always been a huge asset in politics, the magic potion that connects a successful political leader with voters. It was there in droves with John F. Kennedy and the age of Camelot in the White House. And I can assure all of you here who have reposed this confidence in me

that I will be worthy of your trust. We will carry the fight to the people in the fall, and we shall win. Then there was Trudeau-mania in 1968. It seems like electing the Beatles or something to be prime minister. Because I've already tested three times. The same here. I love them. A charismatic but unworthy candidate versus a good one who's low on charisma? Well, it's not really a fair fight. Molly Worthen argues that a different kind of charisma has emerged over the decades, and it's dramatically reshaped our age, turning political leaders into quasi-messianic demagogues.

I am your voice. I alone can fix it. Over the course of the 20th century, across the West, we have seen the decline of people's trust in the authority of institutions and a hunger for some kind of anointed person to explain it all. But I do think these feelings are especially pronounced in the United States. Let me say a little bit more about this wave of new religious movements in the 70s and 80s, how that kind of fits into this story. These movements varied tremendously in their theology and practice, but they all generally orbited around a guru, a charismatic leader who commanded a pretty high level of

obedience, who could look at you and make you feel seen, transfix you with his gaze. Suddenly you feel that all of your existential problems are out there in the open and they are acknowledged as real and serious and here is someone presenting a solution. It's natural to think, okay, so this age of the cults, this was kind of a counterculture thing. This is a story about hippies and activists getting disillusioned with mainstream experts and institutions, looking for someone with all the answers, preferably someone who would horrify their parents. But at the same time, I think we can identify guru figures on the right. From the conservative evangelical perspective, the 70s were a rough time.

Women's rights, gay activism, racy sex ed textbooks, even within evangelical churches and seminaries, this was a time of pretty well constant arguments about the Bible, about what it says about women, missions, everything. They look different from the gurus on the left, but the basic dynamics are recognizable. I'm thinking of James Dobson, trained as a psychologist who founded Focus on the Family, Bill Goddard, who founded the Institute of Basic Life Principles and packed thousands of people into week-long seminars focused on Christian ways of dealing with family conflict, controlling children's behavior. To some extent, the messages of these groups also resonated in Canada. Focus started a branch here in 1983. Goddard's group ran seminars up here as well. But conservative

white evangelicals never enjoyed the same kind of comfortable cultural authority in Canada that they did south of the border. I don't think they've ever had quite the same kind of mainstream cultural impact here that they've had in the United States. And I think of Seymour Martin Lipset, you know, that great analyst of cross-border comparisons, and his sweeping generalizations are helpful here. Canadians have generally been less populist, more aware of class identity, and therefore perhaps less inclined to be sold on Christian libertarian politics than south of the border. This is a beginning to explaining why you see a significantly smaller Christian right movement coalesce up here than in the United States.

Maybe the most important guru of the Christian right in these years was a guy named Francis Schaeffer. He taught evangelicals that saving America, saving Western civilization, required defending biblical inerrancy, number one. That is, defending this view of the Bible as holy without error, not just in matters pertaining to salvation, but in every scientific and historical fact. And then living that out across your whole life through what he called the Christian worldview that would apply to everything. Schaeffer was a Presbyterian. He converted as a teenager at a tent revival near where he grew up outside of Philadelphia. He is famous for founding a Christian commune in the Swiss Alps near Geneva, a place called Labrie for shelter in the 50s. For about 20 years, beginning in 1963,

Schaeffer toured the United States, dazzling evangelical audiences with this very breezy account of Western civilization. He really cut a striking figure. He would always show up in his trademark Swiss hiking knickers and knee socks. And at a time when most conservative white evangelical men were very clean cut, he wore his hair kind of long and unkempt. He had a goatee. It's sort of an arresting nasal voice that was really stuck in your ear. He would start telling

you about the downfall of ancient pagan Rome. Within a few minutes, he'd have you in the Middle Ages accusing Thomas Aquinas of suggesting that the human intellect was untainted by original sin, and thereby Thomas Aquinas is like this Pandora figure, sort of liberating reason from proper submission to the Bible. And for Schaeffer, history goes downhill from there, and it hits rock bottom when the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down state bans on abortion in 1973. But Schaeffer made this story about so much more than politics. He made da Vinci and Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, all these guys relevant to the culture wars. He had

that power of distilling these thinkers into a neat and tidy package and leaving you feeling, oh my gosh, I really understand Aquinas. I understand Kierkegaard. Just feeling empowered. You think about this from the perspective of evangelicals who had this narrative of the life of the mind, universities as not really being theirs. And here they were getting this invitation to become intellectually engaged, and yes, this was a call to kind of save their civilization. So Schaefer just left their heads spinning. His books and multi-part video series sold millions. He wanted his followers' intellectual awakening to inspire political action. He had not really been a culture warrior type until the Roe

versus Wade Supreme Court decision. That really radicalized him. This is a time when in the United States there was really no Protestant national pro-life movement to speak of. It was a Catholic thing, generally. Schaeffer is the one who deserves a lot of the credit for persuading Protestant evangelicals to make this their issue and to start picketing abortion clinics. Although this is important, he himself was not operating in the formal ministry of any denomination or established parachurch institution. We're talking about charismatic authority here. We're talking about charismatic authority here. And I do think you see in Schaeffer the intellectual style that has become so powerful among American

evangelicals, more broadly on the American right, and that is this distrust of secular experts and media, and this automatic rejection of information from these sources, based not on engagement with the evidence they're presenting, but based on their faulty worldviews. If you decide that a media source does not share your worldview, you can dismiss it as fake news. Schaefer inspired better-known leaders of the Christian right, Tim LaHaye, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, all these guys looked to Schaeffer as a huge influence. It is not an accident that these guys' careers really took off in the 1970s, the great age of collapsing institutional authority. Scholars like to zoom out and call the big picture here secularization. I think we normally understand that word as a comment solely about

organized religion, but to me, the main meaning of secularization is much broader. It's the eroding trust of institutions in general, and a corollary of that is eroding trust in experts, the sort of experts who are trained by, who are loyal to institutions. The rise of charismatic cult leaders and gurus who were independent of any institution, even if these people were personally deeply religious, this is still a key aspect of secularization. So we've got this age of the experts giving birth to the age of the guru. We've got the decline of institutions, the rising authority of these charismatic leaders, seemingly untethered to any human authority other than themselves and the totalizing worldview they offer.

And by the time we get to the 80s, the guru, this is not just a leadership model you see on the margins, in weird subcultures or political extremes. This is a model of authority that takes off in the self-help industry, among televangelists on daytime TV, among architects of the Christian right, people like Francis Schaeffer, and in that interesting mix of self-help and televangelism that you see in a person like Oprah Winfrey, who was just coming to national attention in the mid-1980s. And I would argue that you see this

in a brash New York businessman who went on to Oprah's show a couple of times and mused idly about running for president. Now, when I scan Canadian religious history, looking for an analog to Francis Schaeffer in the 1970s or today. I don't find one among any of your megachurch pastors or your evangelical politicians. I actually, maybe you have thoughts, you correct me here if you have other ideas, but I actually think the closest analogy might be Jordan Peterson. His books have hit bestseller lists here

as they have in the States. He's probably the most widely read Canadian author in the world right now. Peterson is cagey on his personal metaphysics, but he has that secret sauce that Schaeffer had. He has this ability to step way back and give you a sweeping, seductive overview of the course of civilization, a narrative that answers the anxieties of his fans, especially young men, who feel their life has become meaningless, no one respects them. It's telling that Peterson hit the scene about a generation after Schaeffer. This makes me wonder if Canada is coming a bit late to the guru age, but is coming.

Yes, your rates of religious attendance collapsed much more quickly than in America. But I wonder if for an awfully long time, your faith in other institutions held on. And I'm wondering, is that really true today? I'm thinking of the hollowing out of Canadian media, the way American outlets, in I think a newly aggressive way, are really making a play for Canadian audiences. I'm thinking of the ongoing Hockey Canada scandal. It's true that

the Canadian financial system is much more secure, and so is your social safety net, so you don't have the same degree of economic precariousness that we have in the States that I think exacerbates people's vulnerabilities. Plus, a university education is so much cheaper here. So people outside of higher ed are less motivated to scrutinize what's going on in universities and

what kind of the experts are doing. I think that's a major difference between the manifestation of the culture wars in the U.S. and the way in which your universities here have been, to a significant degree, much more insulated. But a decent welfare state cannot paper over cultural divides between rural and urban Canada, between French and indigenous and other communities. And a welfare state does not fill the existential void. The existential void is the bottom line to me. My main point is that guru charisma is a deeply religious phenomenon. It is a kind of perverted version of the New Testament anointing. By the time we get to our own century, yes, it does look like America and Canada are becoming less religious. But humans are deeply religious creatures.

We have an abiding desire to worship. We want to connect with some source of transcendence that lifts us out of our mundane experience, that tells us that the chaos and the suffering that is our condition, that it actually means something. And in our own time, gurus have stepped into the breach. And in our own time, gurus have stepped into the breach. They provide these things in a way that jibes with our atomized, lonely culture,

where we're all sitting alone on the couch, playing with our phones, and marinating in the general message that you're supposed to live your best life now, but on your own. Don't trust any traditions or institutions. Optimize your authentic self, whatever that's supposed to be. The consumption of social media feeds and news shows that reaffirm our pre-existing prejudices and give us little dopamine hits along the way, this has become the defining liturgical practice of our time. If you watch political rallies now, and I think this is true on the right and the left,

one thing you cannot miss is the omnipresence of smartphone cameras filming. Every other person on the crowd has their phone in the air, you know, they're recording the moment, they're flipping the phone towards themselves for the occasional selfie, and it's as if the most important thing is to capture this epic movie I'm in, you know, confirm that I'm in it. Maybe I'm only an extra, but I am part of this story. When we're not at the rally ourselves, when we're seeing video clips of this guru worship, this worship of the self, we feel revulsion because it strikes us as idolatry. It strikes

us as a false religion, a golden calf. And you think, just as a good ancient Israelite was supposed to think, how can these people defile themselves and blaspheme against the real things that are sacred, true reality in this way? What are they getting out of this? How can they fall for this false authority? These are all very reasonable questions, but they are usually questions that we ought to also ask ourselves about the gurus and sages who might have a little too much influence in our own lives. Let me step back now and try to pull this together. We have these religious impulses, this impulse to worship,

to cling to a leader who can provide us with a totalizing narrative. We have this impulse to draw clear boundaries around our group as the pure and holy sect and the other group as a bunch of idolaters. I don't think that these impulses will ever go away, no matter what happens to traditional religious institutions. The only recourse, whether you are personally secular or religious, is to become more aware of these impulses, to be thoughtful about the objects of worship and the gurus you choose,

rather than allowing them to choose you. Now, is following a guru always a bad thing? I've portrayed gurus and the guru mode of politics as a damaging force. I think generally it probably is. But following a guru in the sense of an independent leader with whom you feel a deep connection, who shows you what your life means and where it should go, this does not need to be a bad thing if that guru leads you into a wider community, engagement with a set of institutions and traditions that have checks and balances and authority distinct from any single individual. So maybe what I'm talking about is keeping your eye out not for a guru, but a prophet, a prophet who points away from himself or herself and who says things that make you uncomfortable at least as often as he says things that you want to hear. Thank you.

That was Molly Worthen giving the 2023 Larkin-Stewart Lecture at Trinity College in Toronto. Following the lecture, Professor Worthen took questions from the audience, including one about Joseph McCarthy, the American senator who spearheaded the Red Scare and its persecution of suspected communists in the 1950s. If you look at people trying to make sense of the fall of the authority of the expert, people like the historian Richard Hofstadter, who wrote a great book called Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which he published in 1963, he starts that book with Joe McCarthy. And he says that Joe McCarthy is not creating out of thin air, but certainly egging on this idea that the feminized egghead is sort of disloyal to the country,

not a true American, needs to be purged. But then Hofstadter goes on to show how this is a long tradition McCarthy is sort of capitalizing on. And in a sense, Eisenhower made his career in contrast to the feminized egghead too, right? in contrast to the feminized egghead too, right? And the intellectuals, the university professors found their favorite candidate in Adlai Stevenson, who was sort of the apogee of the intellectuals' effort to be the candidate of the people and sort of bridge that gap. Maybe the only candidate in the history of the American presidential elections

who was truly drafted, who really didn't want to run. But then he sort of becomes the foil that someone like John F Kennedy borrows from selectively, right? So JFK knew how to be the war hero while also having his brain trust and being the Harvard guy and somehow kind of being approachable and not letting the specter of the out-of-touch ivory tower intellectual expert overtake his public persona. Now, your second point is the degree to which there is this strain of sort of witch hunting. And I would say it shows up on the right and the left in our current moment in politics, that there is a deep sense of boundary policing and a sense that both sides feel themselves to be so harassed and persecuted that they cannot afford to show any weakness or

acknowledge any dissent within their ranks. And so there's this constant need to cast out or reaffirm those boundaries in a way that does perhaps echo the model of Joe McCarthy. You mentioned Oprah Winfrey, but all the other gurus are male. Could you say something about the sexual dynamics of all of this? Because it seems to me that there's a role of oppression of women that kind of runs through all of this as well. I think it is the case that not all but most of these guru figures are men. My research is trying to span the period from roughly 1600 to the present.

Women are more common in these earlier eras that I treat. There are striking echoes between the first period of the history I treat, which I'm calling the Age of the Prophet, and I write about people like Anne Hutchinson, the great Puritan, well, heretic is what she was deemed by the magistrates and clergy who had an incredible following. I mean, had sort of most of Boston

coming to her twice weekly meetings to deconstruct the sermon and talk about how you didn't need to go through the clergy but you would be told by the Holy Spirit. You could be assured of your election directly by the Holy Spirit. And this is still a working hypothesis. I do think that it is not a coincidence that the rather male-dominated age of the gurus coincides with some of the real meaningful victories of second wave feminism. And there's a way in which the 70s and 80s and beyond, this is

the first era when women, they have less motivation to make that end run and use what is frankly a fairly weak form of authority. Charisma is usually fairly ephemeral because they have more access to institutional pathways than they have had in the past. I do think though that there is, I mean, if you look at many of these guru figures, I do think though that there is, I mean, if you look at many of these guru figures, there is this pattern of sexual predation in many of these movements. I think it is important to not make this a story entirely about kind of erotic appeal and sexual domination. I think that is sometimes a manifestation of how these gurus draw people in, but it is a manifestation of this deeper

kind of existential lack. So we can do justice as historians, as observers of human communities, to the complexities of human motivation while also acknowledging kind of the power and what is sort of unique about the leader. The followers are so complex. One of the fascinating things about charisma is that it depends on the followers. And as soon as the followers no longer believe you have the gift, it vanishes. So it's like this alloy of democratic and totalitarian impulses. Around this point, Professor Worthen fielded one last question

about whether the role of religion in politics is necessarily a nefarious force, and whether it's useful or accurate to describe Donald Trump's relationship with his base as that of a cult leader. The answer to the first question is that religion, like all human ideologies and institutions, is drenched in the corrupting residue of, depending on your view, original sin or evolutionary psychology. Right? Pick your origin story. Either way, humans are tribal. And we have these efflorescences of noble behavior in our

history, and I think a general trajectory that I do believe is sort of trending in the direction of getting better and better at reining in our tribal instincts, but those instincts are not going away, and so I don't see religion as any more to blame for any of the terrible things that have happened in human history than any other kind of form of a human reaching for power and transcendence and organization. I mean, as many humans have died as a result of totally materialist ideologies or motivations as have suffered due to religion. So I see religion as just sort of human. It's very provocative to think about Donald Trump's movement as a cult. I resist the temptation to use that analogy for a few reasons. Number one, I spent a lot of time with American evangelicals, also Catholics who

voted for Trump. I've just become convinced that there's a huge range of reasons why people supported him. I've met so many Christians for whom the issue was purely the Supreme Court and purely their view of abortion. And I think this is something that the secular left does not understand. The secular left too often believes that the commitment to banning abortion is totally about controlling women's bodies. Of course, yes, it is tied up with a history of feminism, but if you talk to pro-life Christians, you hear something very different, which is a view of the ethic of life that simply understands the fetus differently. I'm really intrigued by developments I see, especially among younger evangelicals, to in many ways learn from the Catholics and learn to cast that ethic of life much more broadly and to

really face what has been a real hypocrisy among older generations of pro-life evangelicals, to care about life in this one instance but really not invest in the social support networks necessary to support a family all the way along. And I hear more and more evangelicals talking in terms of support from the womb to the tomb. And of course, there's often a lot of daylight between that nice slogan and meaningful decisions about resources and politics. But especially among younger Christians, I see something very different happening. So that's one reason why I would resist the word cult. Also seems to me, so if you posit, you know, kind of your cliche Trump voters kind

of sitting before Fox News for a couple of hours every night receiving this particular narrative, right, to say that this person is a member of a cult, that seems to me to let them off the hook. member of a cult, that seems to me to let them off the hook. And also it lets us off the hook, right? So it denies the agency of that person to go out and kind of seek other sources of information, maybe learn about some of the people they're being told to demonize. But it also lets you off the hook, because now you can dismiss this person with whom you disagree as a cult member, who's obviously irrational, who doesn't occupy your reality, whose complaints about the universe you don't have to take seriously. So either way, it's a sort of obstacle to the kind of thoughtful, critical, but empathetic

engagement that is our only way forward in our civilization. Molly Worthen is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author of Apostles of Reason, The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism, and a forthcoming book about the history of political and religious charisma in America. This episode was produced by Chris Wadzkow. Technical production, Danielle Duval.

Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.