Hi, I’m John Green, welcome  to Crash Course Religions.

So I’m a big Dungeons and Dragons  fan, and also a Christian, so naturally I occasionally wonder: If Jesus played Dungeons & Dragons, what class do you think he’d pick?

He was pretty big on turning the  other cheek, so Monk is in the mix.

But he also advocated for the last  to be first and the rich to be… well…let’s just say a Robin Hood-esque  Rogue might be his thing too.

But if I had to guess, he’d  probably go with Cleric.

Clerics get their authority  from the Charisma stat,  and Jesus had basically maxed that one out.

Though, you could make the argument that he’d maxed out all his stats, what with purportedly being God and everything.

But was it Jesus’ charisma that  made him such an effective leader?

And what about other religious leaders,  what gives anyone the right  to tell you how you should, or shouldn’t, live your  life or practice your faith?

[THEME MUSIC] So what is charisma exactly?

Well, in the absence of a Dungeon Master’s Guide,  most scholars use sociologist Max  Weber’s definition of charisma.

He called it “a certain quality  of an individual personality  by virtue of which he is set  apart from ordinary men.” Consider modern examples of “charismatic leaders”: like TikTok’s Christian influencers.

They’re compelling speakers.

They understand how to engage young audiences.

And their videos are getting billions of views.

But you won’t find sermons on their feeds.

Or the fire and brimstone I  remember from televangelists.

Instead, they’re using viral dances and trending memes to spread the word of God.

So, what’s happening there?

Well, Weber also distinguished between  varieties of charisma, referring  to “charisma of office,” which for example just comes with being pope or president or whatever, and “charisma of personality,” which a pope may  or may not have, but a TikTok  Influencer absolutely needs.

Take it from me, a middle-aged TikTok influencer.

The saddest phrase in the English language.

So you can either get your charisma from  pre-existing tradition or authority,  like popes and presidents, or  from a personal, like, vibe.

Now, of course, it’s easier to  become a pope or a president  if you already have lots  of charisma or personality– but it’s not a prerequisite for the job, like you can just ask Richard Nixon.

But of course, these TikTok stars are  far from the first people  without “official” recognition to speak with authority to  and for a religious group.

In fact, they're continuing a long tradition of visionaries, and prophets, and shamans who work outside of recognized  religious power structures.

But charismatic leaders, of course, have often appealed to a higher authority in order to make up for their  lack of official endorsements.

Some have claimed supernatural powers, the ability to speak directly to God, or even that they themselves were God.

I mean, Jesus certainly embodied Weber’s belief that someone with enough charisma could be seen as “apart from other men.” He addressed massive gatherings without ever being granted official authority from religious leaders.

He was, dare I say, Chaotic Good.

And he wasn’t the only one – from Muhammad, to the Buddha, to Guru Nanak, many religions owe much of their popularity today to early charismatic leaders.

And because of this, the boundary between an institutional religious leader and  a charismatic, “unofficial” one is often kind of blurry.

Let’s go to the Thought Bubble… She’s known by many names.

The Bony Lady.

The White Sister.

The Godmother.

But most call her simply  Santa Muerte – Saint Death.

Often represented as a female skeleton in a flowing robe gripping a scythe, Santa Muerte is what’s called a “folk saint,” a figure that the Catholic Church  doesn’t officially recognize.

In fact, the Church has  condemned her as blasphemous,  and yet she has millions of  followers, many of them Catholics.

Although this figure has  been around for centuries, it wasn’t until the early 2000s  that she began gaining popularity, largely due to the charismatic  leadership of the Vargas family, who founded The Temple of Santa  Muerte International in Mexico City, erected the world’s tallest statue of her,  and preached passionately  to a growing congregation.

Now despite the Catholic Church’s disavowal, or perhaps in some ways because of it, veneration of Saint Death is  one of the fastest-growing  religious movements across the Americas.

Tómas Prower, a practitioner who  wrote a book on Santa Muerte, described her as a “non-judgemental deity”  who provides comfort to  those cast out by the Church —and sometimes the law—like LGBTQ folks, undocumented immigrants, and sex workers.

She’s even been associated with drug traffickers,  who make appeals for the safe  arrival of their shipments — though most of her followers are ordinary folks,  asking for ordinary things we all  want, like health and prosperity.

Thanks, Thought Bubble.

So, the members of the Vargas  family who founded the temple  could be considered charismatic leaders, right?

Because they certainly weren’t given any official authority by the Catholic Church.

But, as the Temple of Santa Muerte International gained more and more followers, at some point the congregation  itself granted the family legitimacy.

The power of the growing collective  became its own form of authority.

And this is often how we see  religious leadership come into being.

Power doesn’t only emerge from above;  it can also flow up from below.

Because here’s the thing about established hierarchies – none of them are naturally occurring.

We humans create them.

And we see again and again  that when a new religious  movement grows big and complex  enough to require logistics, official power structures start  to emerge from the ground up.

But this ground-up story becomes less visible the longer a religion sticks around.

Like, many religions today have official leaders such as priests, rabbis, imams, or monks who get their legitimacy from what our friend Max Weber called Legal-Rational Authority.

Essentially, these folks are official  leaders because… the rules say they are.

They often undergo formal training to become the official representatives of their religion,  responsible for interpreting religious texts,  guiding spiritual practices,  and maintaining doctrine.

The power shifts to operate  in more of a top-down way.

The Catholic Church is a great example of this, with each level of leadership  passing down information  and granting authority to the lower levels in what’s essentially a priestly org chart that says who reports to whom – and who reports directly to God.

But the Catholic hierarchy  didn’t start out that way.

It took big plays by political  and religious leaders  and centuries of infighting  to become what it is today, complete with all the pointy  hats and a popemobile.

And of course, leadership isn’t  structured the same way in every religion.

Like in Hinduism, there’s no  ultimate authority at the top  the way the pope presides over all Catholics.

But there are plenty of social  hierarchies, like the caste system.

And within that system, the Brahmin,  or priestly caste, ranks highest.

They’re generally in charge of  leading important Hindu rituals  and serve as knowledge keepers by  reading and learning the Vedas.

Now, there are several ways  that official leaders are  granted legitimacy within these  religious power structures.

In some practices, this authority is  passed down like a baton hand-off,  with people who already have  authority deciding who inherits it.

Take the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, whose top authority is the Dalai Lama.

The next step down is the Panchen Lama, whose job,  among other things, is to seek out  and mentor the next Dalai Lama.

But Tibet is under the control  of the Chinese government,  which is currently challenging this tradition.

The Chinese government insists it alone has the right to decide the next Dalai Lama, and they’ve even written it into Chinese law.

So religious and political authority are  in conflict–as indeed they often are.

Some religions also grant authority  through special rituals and rites, often in the form of ordination ceremonies, where people who’ve undergone specific training and proven themselves to be particularly devout are bestowed with special titles.

In many Buddhist traditions, for example, monks and nuns are ordained twice – once when they commit themselves to the faith,  usually as young children, and  again when they become adults.

And after these transformations,  there are often ritualized ways  practitioners across religions  maintain their status.

One way is through self-discipline,  with intense fasts,  or vows of silence, poverty, or chastity.

And then there’s the question of how religious authority is enforced from the outside, which throughout history, has  often occurred through violence.

The sociologist Émile Durkheim  proposed that violence  could be made, quote, “sacred”  by religious authorities.

For example, during the Middle Ages,  an office within the Catholic  Church called the Inquisition was set up to sniff out and  punish people practicing  what they considered to be heresy,  or a deviation from Church dogma.

In reality, it led to the torture and execution of many tens of thousands of Jews and Muslims, in the name of protecting a  particular type of religious power.

And unfortunately, this kind of religious history continues to be made around the world, in a variety of contexts, as  different groups try to define  and enforce what counts as the “truth.” But if the rise of religious  TikTokers has taught us anything,  it’s that you don’t have to have  official authority to have influence.

In fact, everyday practitioners have long played  important roles in the  evolution of their religions.

After all, they’re the ones practicing what scholars call lived religion, or the ways people practice  religion in daily life,  beyond institutional and doctrinal policy.

People participate in religions  in all kinds of “unofficial” ways,  as we saw with the Catholic  practitioners who venerate Santa Muerte.

Swerving away from the norm in your private life can make a religion feel more real to some people, and over time, enough diversity in a religion  can lead to major changes that  work their way up from the masses, rather than down from the leaders.

And this type of divergence  can sometimes create new  openings in a religion for a wider  variety of folks to walk through.

For the last three decades,  for instance, a group of  Jewish women calling  themselves “Women of the Wall” have pushed for their right  to pray at the Western Wall  in Jerusalem using a Torah scroll, a right traditionally reserved  for men within Orthodox Judaism.

They’ve faced significant backlash among Orthodox leadership, who see it as blasphemy.

But the Women of the Wall argue that they have the right, by law, to be there.

So who has the authority?

We’ll have to wait and see how it plays out.

Lived religion can take  place in secular spaces, too.

Like, Buddhist meditation was originally practiced overwhelmingly by ordained monks and nuns until it took off as a practice for  lay people in the last hundred years.

And even more recently, it’s  been studied and verified  by research psychology as  having mental health benefits —which subtly shifts the authority structure from one of religion to one of science.

So now, something that was deeply embedded in a  religious context is practiced at  Silicon Valley workplace retreats …for better or worse.

To paraphrase religious scholar Bruce Lincoln, when we focus only on officially  sanctioned religious authority, we risk mistaking, “the ideological  positions favored and propagated  by the dominant fraction for  those of the group as a whole.” Religious leaders often explicitly try  to lock down their way of doing religion,  but lived religion continues to  pop up and complicate things.

Everyday practitioners are collectively  constructing religion each day: if they quietly change a  pattern or modify a design,  it might go unnoticed for a while but, over time, the religion  itself takes on a new texture.

So where does power come from?

Above or below?

Well, to return to an old theme here on Crash Course Religions: It’s complicated.

Just like the concept of  encumbrance in Dungeons and Dragons.

Sorry, I wanted one more D&D joke in this episode.

In our next episode, we’ll explain, in no  uncertain terms, what happens when you die.

That's right!

You come to Crash Course for answers  and we’re going to provide them!