Charisma

Charisma in the study of religion is a technical term from Max Weber, who took the Greek word for a gift of grace, used by Paul for the gifts of the Spirit, and made it one of his three ideal types of legitimate authority.

Weber distinguished traditional authority, resting on custom and inherited status; legal-rational authority, resting on impersonal rules and offices; and charismatic authority, resting on a particular person's perceived extraordinary qualities and on the devotion those qualities inspire. The crucial point of the analysis is that charisma is a relationship rather than a property. It exists only so long as followers recognise it, and it must be continually validated by success, which makes it inherently unstable, a prophet whose predictions fail loses it.

That instability produces the concept's most useful application, the routinisation of charisma. A movement founded on personal authority faces a crisis when the founder dies, and it must convert charisma into something transmissible or dissolve. The available routes are few and they recur: designation of a successor, hereditary succession, election by a body, an office to which charisma attaches independently of its holder, or a text. Weber's analysis maps directly onto actual religious history. The Sunni-Shia division over the succession to Muhammad is at bottom a dispute over which route is legitimate. The development of episcopacy and apostolic succession converts personal authority into office. The Sikh vesting of guruship in scripture and community is an explicit and unusually deliberate resolution of the problem. And the histories of new religious movements after a founder's death follow the same limited set of paths with striking regularity.

The concept has limits and has been criticised. It can be applied circularly, since charisma is identified by the devotion it produces and then used to explain that devotion. It concentrates attention on the leader rather than on the social conditions that make a following possible, and later scholarship has emphasised that charisma is attributed rather than possessed and requires a receptive audience with its own needs. And in ordinary usage the word has drifted to mean personal magnetism, which is much weaker and more individual than Weber's sense.

The original theological sense remains in use and should not be confused with the sociological one. In Christian usage the charismata are the gifts of the Spirit listed in 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12, and the Charismatic movement takes its name from them, being concerned with prophecy, healing and tongues rather than with the authority of leaders, though in practice the two senses meet more often than either would prefer.

The main entry lists the available routes by which charismatic authority is routinized, successor, heredity, election, office, text, but does not describe what happens when a movement's followers cannot agree which route applies, and the Latter Day Saint succession crisis following Joseph Smith's murder in 1844 is one of the best-documented cases of exactly this failure to converge.

Smith's assassination left no universally accepted mechanism for succession, and multiple claimants emerged simultaneously: Brigham Young, president of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, argued leadership properly passed to that body collectively, an appeal to existing office, and led the largest faction west to Utah, eventually becoming the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sidney Rigdon, Smith's former counselor, claimed a personal prophetic mandate as Smith's guardian, closer to direct charismatic inheritance, but attracted a small following. James Strang produced a letter he claimed Smith had written naming him successor, along with his own revelations and a claimed coronation on Beaver Island, Michigan, combining textual authorization with ongoing charismatic claims, and built a substantial following before his own assassination in 1856. A further body of followers eventually coalesced around Smith's own son, Joseph Smith III, as hereditary successor, forming what became the Community of Christ.

The case is instructive because it shows several of the routes the main entry lists invoked simultaneously by different factions drawing on the same founding authority, with no single outcome determined in advance by the theory itself, and the movement's permanent fragmentation into several enduring, doctrinally distinct denominations is the direct result.