An important part of Max Weber's sociological work was devoted to the religious origins of human society. Overarching the creative human enterprise, in Weber's view, is the tendency toward making the universe increasingly thinkable, or as he characterized it, rational. Religious practice was one mechanism for this. Even belief that touches upon magic as much as it does on practical responses to the challenge of environmental survival presupposes the presence of the rational faculty. Rationality, also rationalism, helps Weber explain how virtually all social structures have developed. For Weber, rationality is that invisible force, process, and (most important) attitude whereby a society moves away from impulses, superstition, and emotion that probably cannot be controlled by mankind and toward social structure and organization that can be controlled by man (Gerth and Mills 51). That trend is secular, but there is a definite place for religious development. In that connection, Weber discusses the role of charismatic leadership. Leaders with charisma have unique attributes: "specific and exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him" (charismatic authority) (Weber 46).
Weber's idea of charismatic domination is that "a leader rules by virtue of his or her personal qualities. Legitimacy of rule is grounded in the faith that the ruled vest in the leader, e.g., as a prophet, hero, heroine, or demagogue" (Morgan 277). Charismatic leadership surfaces in "periods of social distress among groups of people who need to . . . transcend things human and temporal" (Simmons 57). That helps explain the attribution to the leaders of such behavior as "performing miracles, receiving revelations, performing heroic feats, experiencing baffling success" (Simmons 57). Charismatic leaders at the height of their appeal may be arrayed against established "ration...