On this season, we'll be covering our vehicles of hysteria, how pop culture and the media shape our psychology and society, and how our national mythologies manipulate the realities we share,

and sometimes the realities we don't. I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American

hysteria. I happen to be selected to be God. To me, he's God and he's God to the whole wide world.

If people would just recognize it. I am the chosen one.

If Jesus Christ gets down off the cross, I would tell him, hold on a second. I need a check with the president if it's true.

Maybe you've passed through a time in your life where you felt lost, rendered hopeless by the state of your life or the state of the world at large, untethered from a belief structure that gives you that vital foundation to stand on.

Maybe you've given in and watched a new age influencer online promising a personal, social, financial,

or political utopia, sometimes claiming to speak either directly for God or inhabited by some

all-knowing alien spirit with perfect knowledge of the universe. Maybe you've watched people you love disappear into the

alternate reality of an authoritarian commander-in-chief, 100% committed, not to any particular cause,

really, but to the whims and the ego of the man himself. Most likely, though, you've seen right through most of these

charlatans and thought, that dude is supremely gross, or that woman is bonked out beyond beyond.

Why would anyone listen to the bizarre things they have to say? To be clear, when we're talking about

the charismatic leader, we're not talking about charisma in the way that we traditionally think of

it. We're looking at the work of sociologist Matt Weber, who defined charismatic leaders

as figureheads offering absolute confidence in

their vision, someone who tells you that they alone can show you the way to whatever heaven they're

slinging. Instead of the heavy hitter cult leaders that we hear about time and time again,

we'll look at some of the lesser-known

examples who nonetheless changed our culture dramatically. Through the great awakenings of American

history, we'll see how changing ideas about spirituality opened up more and more space

for hundreds of second comings of God in all his changing forms.

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