Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention.

Can you digger?

Greetings to your listeners.

This is Jonah Goldberg, host to the Remnant podcast, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch

Media.

We have a fantastic guest today who has written a fascinating new book, which I will, I've confessed to her and I will confess to you.

I've only really just started digging into, but I'm very into it.

It covers a lot of the themes that we talk about on here.

Molly Worthen is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. And her new book is

Spellbound, How Charisma-shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump. Molly,

welcome to the remnant. Thank you for having me. Okay, so the rule here is when someone comes out

with a book, I ask the question I always want to get asked

when I'm on a book tour, which is simply, what's your book about?

My book is about how we make sense of the current political moment in the context of the

long deray of American history. And it's about where the abiding human impulse to connect our puny mortal suffering and chaos to a big transcendent

narrative goes as a culture secularizes and people are less frequently going to traditional

houses of worship.

And it's about how perhaps there's not as hard and fast a line between religion and political spheres as we sometimes think.

Since it's sort of at the center of your argument, we should probably take a minute and do the terminology here.

Charisma, I know charisma because I've read a good deal of Weber, and I know it means more than just being charming,

but you go back to the original meaning of the word. So what is charisma? Why is it more than just

being charming? Yes. Well, the book is about charisma in both

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