Praxis Circle’s May 2025 Book of the Month is Molly Worthen’s Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump (2025, 374 pages).
Spellbound is a masterpiece of American history written for scholars and regular history lovers alike. It’s about how the Holy Spirit, charisma, and enthusiasm for Christian, other religious, and secular purposes shaped the history of the United States like no other nation on earth. Its insights and themes offer a glimpse of American history simply not available elsewhere.
Molly is a Tar Heel professor at my alma mater, 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’s one of the world’s leading scholars of Spellbound’s subject matter, global and American evangelical Christianity, and related secular movements. Spellbound is the result of an eight-year project involving love of God and people.
I’ve gotten to know Molly: first, through her very special and entertaining Great Courses lectures, The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (36 total lectures), second, from reading her books and opinions, and, third, through various enjoyable conversations over the last four years at public events on the UNC campus. It’s easy to see why she’s one of UNC’s most popular teachers, now really hitting her professional stride. I look forward to Molly becoming a Praxis Circle Contributor with an interview scheduled for August.
After many years studying Christianity as an agnostic, Molly became a Christian in 2022 when she was baptized in a large Southern Baptist church. I know from learning about her conversion journey that the great, recently deceased Reformed theologian and founder of Redeemer Presbyterian megachurch in Manhattan, Tim Keller, talked with her on several occasions before she committed to Christ.
I hope she won’t mind that I begin this review with a long quote from Tim Keller’s Daily Reader, Go Forth in Love (2024), published after his death, taken from his book, Generous Justice:
“When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place . . . All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.” – Acts 2: 1, 4
In Acts 2, when the Holy Spirit descends on the church on the day of Pentecost, another miracle occurs. While at Babel people who spoke the same language couldn’t understand each other, at Pentecost, everyone who spoke different languages could nonetheless all understand preaching of the gospel by the apostles. It was a reversing of the curse of Babel. It was a declaration that the grace of Jesus can heal the wounds of racism. At Pentecost the first gospel preaching was in every language, showing that no one culture is the “right” culture, and that in the Spirit we can have a unity that transcends all national, religious, and cultural barriers. The result, according to Ephesians 2:11 – 22, is a community of equal “fellow-citizens” from all races. (May 31, page 151).
If you aren’t a Marxist, classical or cultural, or a “power only” postmodernist, you will see that Molly’s approach explains the growth, progress, and global leadership America generated over the last 400 years.
America is not first about economics or military superiority. At the risk of sounding enthusiastically woke (to my knowledge, no one’s ever mistaken me thusly), Tim Keller’s quote offers an intersectional summary of some of Molly’s key themes and historical principles.
Charisma in America over Time
Clearly, charisma is an extremely difficult historical phenomenon to capture. It cannot be seen, measured, or surveyed. Charisma is like “the mind,” consciousness, or gravity: most of us through intuition or logic believe there’s something there called divine or personal spirit, but we can’t prove it in a laboratory.
As Molly explains, the ancient Greeks believed charis is the gift of a powerful force binding lucky individuals to the gods. St. Paul added the Greek suffix –ma to indicate an action by God to provide an uncontrollable power to ordinary Christians to enact God’s plan. She says, “Christians still use the word ‘charisma’ in the way Paul did, but it has migrated into everyday, non-theological speech. In secular contexts, we use it to mean the irresistible and sometimes dangerous allure that gives a leader the power to move the multitude.” (page xvii)
In the early 20th century, the sociologist Max Weber (of the Protestant Work Ethic fame) borrowed the term from religious history and applied it to any type of authority relying on extraordinary traits or reputation, apart from ordinary persons, that propels change or revolution broadly, often being at odds with authorities, systems, or institutions. A magnetic relationship develops between leader and followers often devoted to a common cause or story. Early on, Molly offers her own definition:
Charisma is a relationship between leader and follower. It reflects the human need to explain and control unseen forces, and the power of an all-encompassing, empowering story to make people do things for the storyteller. (page xxii)
Other important comments nearby: “I was surprised to discover how little charisma has to do with physical attractiveness or oratorical skills . . . it is a force that lifts the charismatic person—and the followers—toward a higher dimension . . . the chief paradox: the persistent human desire to feel free and important while someone else is in charge.” (pages xxii and xxiii)
Make no mistake, Molly’s account of charisma from the Puritans to today offers plenty of evidence that the Holy Spirit is real and capable of many miracles. This we can know from the recorded personal experience. You will leave Spellbound with an enchanted feeling there’s probably something going on here on planet earth. In other words, Acts continues as never before.
Molly organizes a 400-year account into five historical epochs named after the type of charismatic leadership driving each historical trend. In other words, each epoch has needs, divine or human, shaping the type of charismatic leaders who surface, though every type of leader and follower exists in each age.
The five periods are: The Prophets (from the Middle Ages to the late 1700s in America; they shaped America), The Conquerors (the 1800s, who grew and expanded America), The Agitators (from the early 1900s until approximately World War II, who set America squarely on the course of “modern” and civil rights reform), The Experts (from World War II until approximately 1975—an age also including an explosion of religious revival—who shaped America’s political, economic, and technical strength), and the Gurus (from 1975 until today, who with special talents and interests reacted generally against elitism across social sectors).
The Prophets included the First Great Awakening and The Conquerors the Second Great Awakening. In the book’s final pages, Molly speculates that we’ve entered a post-secular phase. Yes, regular church attendance is declining and morphing, but, as we have noted in these pages many times before, Peter Berger’s secularization thesis is dead. He admitted it himself. Indeed, America’s participating now in an old-fashioned American religious revival with new characteristics that’s gone wholly global on nearly every continent (but Europe, and they’re likely not far behind).
Molly has a passionate gift for summarizing biography in fun and engaging ways. This skill surfaces in all her lectures and writing. Because there’s no “charisma meter” or Gallup Poll following most charismatic movements, Molly must describe her subject matter in anecdotal biography, placing heroes, saints, and followers into reliable historic times and places. She is extremely good at that, too. I know she had to be quite selective in what made it into print, and I’m sure it was painful to exclude many favorite stories. Along the way in Spellbound, she uses her extensive knowledge of theology, philosophy, ideology, worldview, and history to describe the relevance of each new character to his or her age.
In any case, Spellbound gives the reader a rich walk through American history including such well-recognized charismatics as Anne Hutchinson, George Whitefield, George Washington, Tecumseh, Andrew Jackson, Joseph Smith, Abraham Lincoln, Marcus Garvey, Einstein, Adlai Stevenson, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Angela Davis, Oprah, and Donald Trump.
Additionally, Molly explores a whole slew of lesser-known but also critical characters like Donna Beatriiz (from West Africa), Benjamin Lay (hermit and early abolitionist), Jemima Wilkinson (the androgynous evangelist, known as the Public Universal Friend), Cora Scott (beautiful spiritualist), Maria Woodworth-Etter, William Seymour (Azusa Street in Los Angeles), Aimee Semple McPherson (the last four being spiritualists of various types with certifiable powers), and Kwame Nkrumah (from Ghana, an acquaintance of JFK). There are many, many more.
Charismatic, somehow holy-rollers all.
A Spellbinding Nation
In essence, Spellbound refutes the idea that a power-hungry colonialism and imperialism explains America. Human beings are attracted to much higher meaning and purpose, which most commonly attaches to a connection to God and other persons. Humans yearn for God. Without question, the United States was founded on Reformation Protestantism involving a perceived connection to the Holy Spirit via charismatic leaders and ordinary, talented followers. This combination has delivered; it remains radical and world changing.
“Enthusiasm” includes all the elements needed to bring together individuals in community, on the one hand, and to foster continuous change or revolution, as needed, on the other. This restless and paradoxical spirit propelled America over hundreds of years into our current age of relative status or rights equality that Tim Keller’s quote concerning the Pentecost above envisions. Secular ideologies most certainly become religions, too. In all its current diversity, I hope our national community is destined for still increasing equality and justice among men, women, races, ethnicities, and cultures.
Furthermore, Molly proves America is a decidedly anti-elitist nation, where every person should have free access to God and to other fellow countrymen. People want to be free, they want their lives to be their idea, and they want to be connected to a higher purpose and power with others at the same time. This is necessary for love and virtue. Molly describes a form of the Shane Principle we’ve written about extensively before. In my opinion, today’s Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christianities allow and even encourage this direct access and freedom to choose to become one.
In a similar vein, America dislikes aristocracy and its modern “expert” or “bureaucratic” equivalent (while appreciating the importance of technical competence). Personal experience with common sense is the most desired pathway to God and the most reliable source of truth and knowledge. America loves its leaders, but no one is indispensable to the whole.
What brings us together is the power of God working through us and our ability to connect via God-assisted and natural human magnetism (possibly soul-related), unified by a powerful story that grips the heart and mind. We are a City on a Hill, we do have a Manifest Destiny, and we are the Last Best Hope on Earth. While we are incomplete and have failed in many ways to date, we are much further along than when “the day of Pentecost came.”
After I finished Spellbound last week, when I closed the book and placed it down on the sofa next to me, I felt a warm feeling of joy descend.
I wanted to tell you all about the world afire in Upstate New York in the early 1800s with Charles Finney, Lorenzo Dow, and the Prophet Matthias as the Erie Canal transformed American commerce, or all about the boy Guru Maharaj Ji who in the early 1970s convinced thousands of reputable Americans he was the Lord of the Universe and the reincarnation of Krishna, Buddha, Christ, and Muhammad, or all about the Donald and how such an unlikely politician, repulsive to many, could galvanize millions to understand America remains the most amazing nation on earth.
I wanted to quote you Molly’s terrific final line in her concluding “Afterword” that’s one of the most insightful statements about human nature read in many moons—but, sad to say, now you’re going to have to fork out some cash and buy this highly recommended book.
With Molly’s insights and presentation, you can believe again. You do not have to be afraid to make the leap of faith. There’s nothing strange or unusual about you. It’s what normal human beings do.
In fact, we can walk away spellbound, together with all the hope we need to finish the journey (and have some more fun along the way).
