populist leaders

In Brazil’s Politics, Populism and Religion Make Natural Bedfellows

The use of religion to buttress political ambition is nothing new. But research suggests recent years have seen religion being used as political capital in a distinct way among populists.

This autumn’s Brazilian presidential election offers a glimpse of how 21st century populist leaders are using religion to enthuse their support base. The incumbent, right-wing firebrand Jair Bolsonaro, rose to power in 2018 with support from evangelical Christian voters who warmed to his social conservatism.

And while some polls suggest this support may have eroded since, Bolsonaro continues to court evangelical support. He has framed the election as a battle between God-fearing “good” and opposition “evil”.

On August 13, 2022, he was being prayed over at the March for Jesus rally in Rio de Janeiro among thousands of his evangelical supporters. Opposition candidate and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is attempting to win those votes back by invoking religious language, reflecting how Bolsonaro has re-shaped the political landscape.

This is partly a matter of numbers – evangelical Protestants make up around a third of Brazil’s population (estimated at around 70 million people) – but it’s also a matter of political style.

Bolsonaro reaches out to the conservative evangelical voter because he needs their vote, but also because their language and values align well with his populist message. Central to Bolsonaro’s politics is a conservative pro-family agenda that includes negative views of homosexuality and abortion.

Also read: Self-Absorbed, Uncaring, Incompetent: COVID Has Exposed Populist Leaders for What They Are

Populist politicians adopt a distinct style. They are predominantly nationalist, claiming to represent the true will of the people, and yet do so by dividing society into binary camps: who belongs and who does not.

But this alignment of right-wing populism to a Christian base is not just restricted to Brazil. We see it in the bullish authoritarianism of leaders such as former US president Donald Trump, French far right leader Marine Le Pen and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.

According to sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, Trump’s rise to power coincided with an upsurge in Christian nationalism. They describe Christian nationalism as a “cultural framework – a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems – that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life”.

In their research, Whitehead and Perry find that those US citizens who were most supportive of Christian nationalism are more likely to support authoritarian kinds of leadership, “traditional” models of the family and an understanding of American identity that privileges those who are Christian, white and native-born. They were also most likely to vote for Trump in 2016.

Bolsonaro, known by some as the “Trump of the Tropics”, is an open admirer of the former US president. Narendra Modi has remained a strong supporter of Hindu nationalism during his tenure as prime minister of India.

In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, president or prime minister for most of the past 20 years, has rallied an Islamic populism. Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party claims to defend the values of Turkey’s Muslim majority against its secular elite.

Binary divisions

The link between religion and populism is, in part, a matter of rhetoric. Populism favours the language of binary distinctions – truth and falsehood, right and wrong, us and them, citizen and immigrant. Certain forms of religion organise the world into similarly dualistic categories, grounded in a belief that the universe is divinely ordained to be this way.

Populists also claim to appeal directly to the will of the people, rejecting the authority of “elites”, attacking the media, the political establishment, universities, the intelligentsia, or big business.

Populism is not always associated with religion and nor do populists always use religious language. But the connection is strong, even if it is not always simple. For example, religion is not universally adopted by populists as an ally.

Across Europe, anti-Islamic sentiment has long been invoked by right-wing nationalist movements. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party (formerly the Front National) now campaigns for the “de-Islamisation” of France, presenting Muslims as both a security threat and an alien cultural presence. Religion serves as a marker of who does not belong.

Coalitions of religious-populist movements have found common cause in their opposition to what is presented as a liberal, “woke” agenda. Orbán’s recent appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas provides a striking illustration. CPAC has become a major rallying point for Christian nationalists in the US, and this year’s gathering culminated in a closing speech by Trump.

Also read: When You Don’t Address the Deep Roots of Racism, You Get Orban’s Hungary

Like Trump, Orbán characterises his political ambitions as a fight against the “enemies of freedom”, a “culture war” with the forces of “woke” liberalism. Addressing CPAC delegates, he described Hungary as “an old, proud, but David-sized nation standing alone against the globalist Goliath”.

Use of religious images

Orbán’s use of biblical imagery is not unique among populist politicians. Trump has been compared by some supporters to King David: an imperfect but anointed leader.

Trump has advanced the evangelical Christian cause through his decisions as President. He used his executive power to court the conservative Christian vote, with monumental consequences for the American people.

During his four years in office, he appointed three justices to the US Supreme Court, tipping its balance in a conservative direction and reinforcing his standing with the Christian right. This led to the controversial overturning of Roe versus Wade, the ruling that had protected the right of American women to have access to abortions since 1973.

Also read: The Last Barrier Against Communalism in India

The use of religion to buttress political ambition is nothing new. But my research suggests recent years have seen religion being used as political capital in a distinct way among populists.

We are witnessing the strategic, cynical use of religion as a means of furthering nationalist, conservative agendas. It achieves momentum precisely because of the ideological similarities between populism and certain forms of religion that aspire to transform the social order.

How these changes influence religious communities at the grassroots level is not yet clear. But where alignments with religious traditions bear political fruit – as in Brazil, the US and Turkey – we can expect those seeking power to carry on trying to use it for their own ends.

Mathew Guest, Professor in the Sociology of Religion, Durham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

‘Open Societies’ and the Threat of Authoritarian Populism

With the G7 and outreach countries, including India, reiterating their commitment to human rights, a look at what threatens democracies.

The G7 along with the outreach countries – the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, India, the Republic of Korea, South Africa, the US and the European Union – issued an “Open Societies” statement on June 13, 2021, reiterating their commitment to human rights as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“We are at a critical juncture, facing threats to freedom and democracy from rising authoritarianism, electoral interference, corruption, economic coercion, manipulation of information, including disinformation, online harms and cyber attacks, politically motivated Internet shutdowns, human rights violations and abuses, terrorism and violent extremism. We also face threats to our social fabric from persistent inequalities and discrimination, including racism and resistance to gender equality. In the midst of these threats, we will work together to create an open and inclusive rules-based international order for the future that promotes universal human rights and equal opportunities for all,” the statement declared.

It emphasised the strengthening of open societies globally by protecting civic space and media freedom, promoting freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and association. The agenda of promoting the idea of an open society globally is a commendable initiative, indeed.

The concept of an open society was most notably elaborated by Karl Popper in his The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). He said that modern civilisation, which is still in its infancy, is perhaps aiming at humanness and reasonableness, and equality and freedom. “This civilisation has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth – the transition from the tribal or ‘closed society’, with its submission to magical forces, to the ‘open society’ which sets free the critical powers of man,” said Popper.

He observed that the shock of the transition is one of the factors that have made possible the rise of those reactionary movements which have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilisation and to return to tribalism. The origins of tribalism and totalitarianism are as old as human civilisation; it should be understood thoroughly and be fought against persistently.

Also read: G7: Language Diluted, India Signs Statement Condemning Internet Shutdowns

Populism as the new enemy

The greatest threat to open society in our times is posed by authoritarian populism. Jan-Werner Muller, in What is Populism? (2017), points out that populists are always anti-pluralist. Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent people.

Turkish populist President Recep Tayyib Erdogan, in the AK Party’s Congress, declared in defiance of his numerous critics, “We are the people, who are you?’’ This is the universal tune of populist politics. Populism is an exclusionary form of identity politics that poses a danger to democracy as democracy requires pluralism and the recognition that we need to find fair terms of living together as free, equal, but also irreducibly diverse citizens. The populist idea of homogeneous and authentic people is a dangerous and inhumane fantasy.

“Populist governance exhibits three features: attempts to hijack the state apparatus, corruption and ‘mass clientelism’ (trading material benefits or bureaucratic favours for political support by citizens who become the populists’ ‘clients’), and efforts systematically to suppress civil society’,” opined Jan-Werner Muller.

Francis Fukuyama in his The End of History (1992) thesis argued that there were no more rivals to liberal democracy at the level of ideas. He predicted that only religious fundamentalism, a fringe ideology, may challenge liberal democracy in future. Democracy will become more and more prevalent in the long term, although it may suffer “temporary” setbacks, he argued. Whether populism is merely a temporary setback to liberal democracy or a formidable rival is a debatable topic. Yet there is the likelihood of its frequent recurrence in the contemporary world.

“The danger to democracies today is not some comprehensive ideology that systematically denies democratic ideals. The danger is populism – a degraded form of democracy that promises to make good on democracy’s highest ideals (‘Let the people rule!’). The danger comes, in other words, from within the democratic world – the political actors posing danger speak the language of democratic values. That the end result is a form of politics that is blatantly antidemocratic should trouble us all – and demonstrate the need for nuanced political judgement to help us determine precisely where democracy ends and populist peril begins,” wrote Jan-Werner Muller.

Delineating democracy from populism is a precondition for fighting out the totalitarian tendencies of populism.

Also read: From Hope to Despair, Sixty Years of the Indian Society of International Law

Basharat Peer in A Question of Order: India, Turkey, and the Return of Strongmen (2017) examined what happens when a democratically elected leader evolves into an authoritarian ruler, limiting press freedom, civil liberties and religious and ethnic tolerance; comparing contemporary politics in India and Turkey, two of the world’s biggest democracies – multi-ethnic nations that rose from their imperial past to be founded on the values of modernity. They have fair elections, open markets and freedom of religion. Yet the charismatic populist strongmen – Narendra Modi in India and Erdogan in Turkey – used the power they had won as elected heads of state to push their countries toward authoritarian ways. This phenomenon amply demonstrates the danger that populism poses to liberal democracy in the contemporary world.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a news conference to present the outcome of the G20 leaders summit in Hamburg, Germany July 8, 2017. Credit: Reuters/Wolfgang Rattay

Robert Alan Dahl propounded the pluralist theory of democracy – in which political outcomes are enacted through competitive, if unequal, interest groups – and introduced “polyarchy” as a descriptor of actual democratic governance. Polyarchies have elected officials, free and fair elections, inclusive suffrage, and rights to run for office, freedom of expression, alternative information and associational autonomy. It is a sophisticated and advanced version of democracy. The effective participation of all citizens in public agenda setting, voting equality at the decisive stage, citizen’s enlightened understanding of public affairs, control of the agenda, inclusiveness in political process are the five elements of polyarchy. No modern country meets the ideal of polyarchy, which is a theoretical utopia. Yet it is a destination worth travelling to.

The agenda ahead of the G7 and its outreach allies, as the vanguards of liberal democracy, should be containing nascent populism and pursuing a long journey to polyarchy. The Open Societies statement by the G7 leaders would hopefully furnish a floor plan for such an agenda.

Faisal C.K. is an independent researcher.

Watch: Populist Leaders Keep Their Populations in Anxiety Which Helps Them Establish Power

In conversation with Homi K. Bhabha, professor of humanities at Harvard University.

The power elite is getting smaller and smaller, and decisions are no longer taken after democratic consultation, according to Homi K. Bhabha, professor of humanities at Harvard University. What we get is, therefore, the ‘Unprepared Citizen’, who is told about decisions at short notice, he says in this interview with The Wire, a sweeping look at the state of populist democracy all over the world.

Social Media and Populist Politicians are Natural Bedfellows

Right wing leaders around the world exploit a sense of victimhood among the population to consolidate their own vote bank.

Recently, a Wall Street Journal article claimed that Facebook India, under the stewardship of Ankhi Das, had demonstrated a clear bias towards the ruling BJP. Subsequently, news emerged that Das’ sister had been a member of the student wing of the Sang parivar affiliated ABVP while she was at JNU.

The role of individuals should and must be investigated, but just focusing on a few key players will prevent us from engaging with the broader political and indeed philosophical implications of social media as an inextricable part of what was earlier called the public sphere.

It is worth reflecting on the broad similarities between populist politicians and social media companies that make them such natural bedfellows. The former’s politics thrive on catalysing feelings of unfounded fear, anger, resentment and victimhood. The amplification of these emotions, amongst others, is precisely what social media thrives on.

Also Read: Afraid of Angering BJP, Facebook Ignored Hate Speech Rules for Party’s Anti-Muslim Posts: Report

The Internet has fundamentally reshaped the manner in which people engage with the world around them. In most parts of the world, a large percentage of the population enters the virtual world of the Internet without any tools to understand the nature of the beast. We quite literally ‘hold infinity in the palm of our hand’ but do we have the means to discern what is true from what is false or differentiate between what is beneficial and what is harmful?

The first and most important question that arises is whether people’s virtual identities can ever be a true reflection of who they really are. Rarely do we have the freedom, let alone the chance to build ‒ or to use that heavily overused term, ‘curate’ ‒ our own characters and personalities. Do we privilege certain aspects of our online identity to make us more popular? Public figures have always relied on moulding public perceptions of themselves but the means for mass dissemination are hitherto unprecedented. Perhaps the leading example of a person who harnessed the power of the image was Mahatma Gandhi. In one sense, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is just the latest in a long line of public figures who use the latest technology to carefully and painstakingly fashion a public profile of themselves.

PM Narendra Modi with a peacock. Photo: Instagram/@narendramodi

Tribal identities

Secondly, although social media is celebrated as connecting people in a hitherto unprecedented way, does this necessarily mean that the average person is becoming more broad-minded or cosmopolitan? Sadly, it seems that most social media actually thrives on entrenching ethnic, religious, nationalist, sectarian or other tribal identities. The people or organisations that define the measure of this tribalism ‒ what it means to “authentically” be Muslim, American or Indian ‒ are those with the means and money to influence social media. Thus, many people instinctively end up inhabiting echo chambers of their primary online identity. Clicks, likes, shares or retweets translate into little dopamine hits which inevitably, albeit unconsciously, push people towards holding views for which they will know they will receive appreciation.

Similarly, anger, fear and resentment give us an adrenalin rush as we leap to conclusions, lap up conspiracy theories and get furious about social, cultural, political or religious issues that we feel are under threat. Social media induces us into feeling we are permanently in a state of crisis.

Also Read: The Past and Future of Facebook and BJP’s Mutually Beneficial Relationship

Across the world, populist politicians, particularly those from the ‘right-wing’, seek to use this sense of victimhood amongst their voters in order to consolidate their vote bank. In one sense, victimhood is the glue that binds these constituencies to their political leaders. The politics of Benjamin Netanyahu and Alexsandar Vucic rest on portraying Israel and Serbia as perennial victims of unresolved conflicts. Donald Trump and Viktor Orban use anti-elite and anti-immigrant sentiment to amplify feelings of victimhood amongst their voters in the US and Hungary. Aside from anti-elite rhetoric, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsanaro and Reçep Erdogan use religious nationalism to consolidate their vote base in India, Brazil and Turkey respectively. Vladimir Putin paints Russia as the world’s underdog.

(L-R) Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orban, Jair Bolsonaro and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Photo: Reuters

Since social media is driven by individual personalities, all these leaders also portray themselves as victims, thus conflating ideology with their own persona. This is then used to instigate fear and anger amongst supporters. Fear and anger are neither good nor bad emotions. Anger against injustice has often led to deep social and political changes. However, this very anger can be weaponised when it stems from the fear of manufactured threats ‒ immigrants, minorities, elites, religious communities, political opponents, take your pick.

One instance of the weaponisation of anger is trolling. Trolling makes people even more intractable as battle lines are drawn without knowing whether the instigator is a bot, a paid operative or a normal person. What would be basic social etiquette in the real world breaks down. People parade their prejudice, abuse and issue threats without a second thought. As algorithms bombard us with information that reinforces our views, our tribal identities harden. Whether you believe in the racial or religious supremacy of a certain community or indeed believe Kermit the Frog controls that world, the ads on your profile will bring you news that will entrench this view.

We now live in times where we face “industrial levels of advertising, distraction and persuasion”, as James Wilson wrote in his book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in The Attention Economy. An illustration of just how powerful these forces are is evident from the hundreds of billions of dollars that companies and indeed political parties have been spending on digital advertising. At the end of 2019, the global digital advertising industry was reported to be worth half a trillion dollars. That money is being spent to capture and hold our attention, the most valuable commodity in the world today.

Monetising attention

The entire social media eco-system depends and indeed thrives on monetising attention. Every day, most people hand out a few hours of their time for free, little realising that our attention is the oxygen that social media companies need to survive. Albeit unconsciously, people spend time on social media in order to seek out those little dopamine hits or adrenalin rushes and this partly explains why Facebook and its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp can become and have become such potent weapons for populist politicians. It is not without reason that Amit Shah gloated a few years ago that he had the ability to spread any news, real or fake, negative or positive.

On the other hand, nuance, context, deep reflection and complexity are not rewarded online. This is precisely the reason why populist politicians, with their menacing and almost apocalyptic ‘black and white’ view of the world thrive on social media. With Facebook and Google acquiring a stake in Reliance’s communication business, Jio, this unholy partnership will also now include big business in India. Power and capital have always gone hand in hand, but now there is the added means of setting narratives and controlling or deflecting attention on a mass scale.

Also Read: We Are Witnessing the Revolt of the Elites

Just recently, the social media handles of Vikas Phatak aka Hindustani Bhau were removed for hate speech and instigation of violence. Saket Gokhale, an online activist, then claimed that Phatak, a former Big Boss contestant, was helped in building his online presence by Xovak Digital, a Gujarati company with deep links to the BJP. Of course, most people have no way of differentiating between the online profiles of someone who works independently as opposed to those who are supported by vast networks of power and capital.

For some time, across the world, we have been seeing what has been called ‘the gamification of politics.’ The distinction between reality and virtual reality is getting blurred. Recall the #MainBhiChowkidar campaign in the 2019 national elections which went from online to offline with #MainBhiChowkidar merchandise being sold at rallies. Remember when people could win a meeting with PM Modi if more than 100 people used their referral code to join BJP WhatsApp groups?

Social media platforms. Credit: Pixabay

Likes, shares and the number of followers become measures of popularity. Clickbait, powered by persuasive design, lures people into watching endless videos or buying into conspiracies. Truth and facts are manipulated in the name of freedom of opinion and free speech and fake news and hate speech reward people with 15 minutes of instant celebrity. It is, therefore, more important than ever to catalyse a public conversation about how our sense of self is undergoing a fundamental transformation and how political ideas are also being radically redefined.

Autonomy and choice can no longer be understood without taking into account the manner in which invisible algorithms bombard us with what they think we want or what they predict we should think and even feel. Citizenship and democracy have assumed more complex dimensions as the public sphere is now complemented by a virtual world in which targeted Facebook ads can shift a neutral person’s political views without them even being aware of it. New sets of laws and new institutions are now needed in order to redress the entirely unique challenges thrown up by social media. Indeed, a digital commons is needed in order to navigate a world where truth and fact have become contingent on one’s political leaning.

As James Williams argues, ‘the liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time.’

Ali Khan Mahmudabad teaches at Ashoka University and regularly writes for the Urdu and English press. He is the author of Poetry of Belonging: Muslim imaginings of India 1850-1950 (OUP). He is a member of the Samajwadi Party. Twitter @mahmudabad

Charisma is a Mysterious and Dangerous Gift

‘Charisma’, as an idea, spans 2,000 years. Is there a link between contemporary charisma – considered a special form of authority – and the religious charisma of Paul the Apostle’s time?

Mixed blessings. Credit: Paolo Sarteschi/Flickr

Charisma is easier to recognise than to define. Newspaper and magazine articles consistently identify charismatic leaders – such as John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama – but those same articles rarely describe exactly what charisma is. It is often debated whether charisma is necessary for a ‘transformational’ leader, while shelves of self-help books optimistically promise to impart the ‘secrets’ of charisma. Other people hold that charisma cannot be ‘unlocked’ or ‘discovered’ at all because it is innate and present only in the rarest of individuals. So, to ask anew, just what is charisma?

Charisma’s origins are found in the letters of Paul the Apostle, written from around 50 AD. This is the first written use of the word ‘charisma’, derived from the Greek ‘charis’ (grace). For Paul, charisma meant ‘the gift of God’s grace’ or ‘spiritual gift’. In Paul’s letters to the fledgling Christian communities spread around the Roman empire, he wrote of the ‘charismata’ or spiritual gifts available to each member of the community. He identified nine charismata, including prophecy, healing, speaking in tongues, interpreting that speech, teaching, and service – a range of gifts both supernatural and pragmatic.

For Paul, charisma was a mystical notion: the gifts were thought to alight on each individual without the need for church authority or institution. And there was no charisma of leadership: the interlocking charismata were meant to serve the community without the need for an imposed leader. By the fourth century, however, the Church had largely suppressed the notion of charisma deriving directly from the Holy Spirit. Conveniently, in its place was a hierarchy of Church leadership, with bishops at the top, interpreting the fixed religious laws inscribed in the newly authorised Bible. Charisma survived only in heretical outposts, such as prophets claiming direct inspiration without the mediations of bishop or scripture. Such heresies were forcibly repressed by the Church.

The idea of charisma then lay largely dormant for centuries. Only in the writings of the 20th-century German sociologist Max Weber was it reborn. In fact, we owe the contemporary meaning of ‘charisma’ to Weber, who took Paul’s religious idea and secularised it, placing charisma within a sociology of authority and leadership. For Weber, there were three types of authority: the rational-legal, the traditional, and the charismatic. Weber saw the charismatic form of authority as the revolutionary, even unstable, antidote to the ‘iron cage’ of rationalisation found in the contemporary ‘disenchanted’ world. He held that there was something heroic about the charismatic leader, who galvanised followers with great feats or with the ‘charisma of rhetoric’ found in inspiring speeches.

Weber defined charisma as ‘a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’. He traced charismatic leadership through history, in the person of great military or religious leaders – and also held out the hope that charismatic leadership would continue to emerge, even in the highly regulated bureaucracies of the modern world.

Weber died in 1920, and did not live to see the application of his idea to contemporary politics and culture. Perhaps that’s a good thing, since the first political leaders to be described as charismatic were Mussolini and Hitler. For many European intellectuals, this created the sense that charismatic authority had a sinister dimension. That same dark side of charismatic leadership long remained: 1960s cult leaders such as Charles Manson, with their spellbinding hold on followers, were readily termed charismatic. By this point, Weber’s works had been translated, so that ‘charisma’ was popular in the English-speaking world from about the 1950s.

The first politicians that the media identified as charismatic in a positive, rather than demagogic, sense were JFK, and his brother Robert F. Kennedy. After the 1960s, ‘charisma’ moved more into mainstream usage as it was applied to outstanding individuals other than political leaders: the late Muhammad Ali, for instance, was perhaps the most charismatic of all.

Today, charisma is used to describe a range of individuals: politicians, celebrities, business leaders. We understand charisma as a special, innate quality that sets certain individuals apart and draws others to them. It is considered a rare, specially endowed quality: in US politics, for instance, Bill Clinton was thought to have a charismatic presence, as is Obama – but nobody else in recent political memory earns the accolade. In business, Steve Jobs is the archetypal charismatic leader: visionary, driven, but also volatile and unstable. And in celebrity culture, charisma is regarded as a sign of rare authenticity when much of the entertainment industry is devoted to the plastic manufacture of fame in the manner of Idols or The Voice. Charisma cannot be created by reality TV.

Is charisma even desirable in contemporary politicians? The political biographer David Barnett has called charisma ‘one of the most dangerous concepts in a democracy that you can find’. Charismatic leaders can inspire followers with soaring rhetoric – which can also prove divisive and damaging to a party’s (or a nation’s) fortunes. Political parties are generally content with popular, unthreatening, folksy leaders who appeal to ordinary people. In Australia, Paul Keating was a charismatic, visionary prime minister, but also a schismatic leader who alienated much of the Labor Party’s traditional ‘heartland’ with his perceived arrogance. His successor, John Howard, was universally regarded as charisma-free, but his very ordinariness turned out to be his greatest asset: it was a reassuring rather than threatening style of leadership. Meanwhile in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi was a populist leader whose tenure as prime minister was deleterious for democracy. The charismatic leader might be thrilling, even captivating, but the success of that leader might not leave a political party, or a democracy, in a healthy state.

‘Charisma’, as an idea, spans 2,000 years. Is there a link between contemporary charisma – considered a special form of authority – and the religious charisma of Paul’s time? It lies in the notion of innateness, of the gift. Paul said that no bishop or Church required the blessing of charisma: it simply lighted on the individual, as a spiritual gift. Charisma today is enigmatic, an unknown or X factor, somehow irreducible. Nobody knows why rare individuals are blessed with charisma: it remains, as ever, a mysterious gift.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.