Good and charisma should fit together like sock and shoe but somehow it isn’t that simple.  Charisma can mean charming, persuasive and compelling in the purely secular sense, but it is also a very close relative to charisma’s first meaning of one favored by God or grace filled.  This is concerning because all of sudden the sock might not fit inside the shoe rather it becomes the shoe, the foot and maybe the whole shooting match. 

Yes, perhaps we would love our God to be like the charming neighbor down the block but it simply doesn’t work that way.  Charisma tends to attach itself to power and power in the hands of a charismatic human who conflates spiritual grace with persuasive charm is a risky proposition.  The only litmus we have to sort out the charming pathological leader from the compelling true leader is the test of character. This project of The Good Decision suggests that the leader’s commitment to  factual truth, inconvenient as it may be, is one solid attribute of goodness and a potentially good leader.  To make mistakes is genuinely human, yet still requires sincere regret and atonement down the line by the one making the mistake.  Stone cold, unrepentant lying and manipulation of factual information to mislead is the surest symptom of charisma going to rot. 

Facts exist even if they evolve and change in nature as our understanding evolves.  Science is our formal discipline of factuality and even if science cannot quantify our God, science is often the only accurate finger pointing at the moon when the sun is up at high noon.  Faith comes in many forms, but what if the rational mind is one of our treasured gifts from this infinite God and with human discipline, facts, intuition and logic we can sort the truly charismatic from the clearly pathological?  Let us hope that is the case.