Apocalyptic Rhetoric on the American Religious Right: Quasi-Charisma and Anti-Charisma

Abstract

This piece extends Green's (2008) account of mediatized 'quasi-charisma' with a theoretical model of 'anti-charisma'. The model is illustrated with reference to rhetoric about Barack Obama by potential republican presidential candidates associated with the religious right. Both the model and the empirical analysis serve to explain the persistence of Christian apocalyptic themes in American political discourse. The piece argues that Obama's anti-charisma is grounded in religious protest against modernization, that evangelical deployments of such rhetoric are likely to be ineffectual and that the case as a whole confirms Weber's (1948a, 1948b) argument about the paradoxical nature of political action in Modernity.