In a previous post, a reader asked about the reasons for Oprah’s staggering success. I gave a few superficial reasons, and discussion followed. But I did not probe a major factor in this success: Oprah’s role as spiritual leader. 

Oprah takes trivial matters, such as fashion, relationships, shopping and cooking, and skillfully blends them with issues of ultimate meaning and destiny. This deft combination of the small and the large, the high and the low, is at the heart of her ascendancy. Oprah is more than a talk show host. She is captain at the helm of a ship heading through the troubled waters of self discovery. The spiritual answers she provides deeply appeal to women today.

Oprah is not radically new in providing these answers and American women have been tending toward these beliefs for well over 150 years. Religion in America has been in the process of being feminized since at least the nineteenth century.  But Oprah is new in the extent of her cultural reach. No American minister ever had Oprah’s audience of more than 20 million viewers five days a week.

Rev. Oprah preaches a congenial New Age theology, advocating self-realization and pantheistic harmony as the highest spiritual goods. There is no Original Sin, no flames of hell, no divine judgment in the Word of Oprah. She preaches the innate goodness and divinity of man. Here is an excellent article on Oprah as minister to America’s spiritual yearnings. Her mentors include Eric Butterworth, author of Discover the Divinity Within You; Deepak Chopra, and Marianne Williamson.

Here is Chopra on the meaning of time in one Oprah episode:

Yet even the most orderly life hasn’t mastered time completely. If your body can run on dozens of clocks at the same time, each kept in perfect sync, that implies that there is a place to stand that is unaffected by time, just as someone sitting on the riverbank can watch the constantly changing motion of a river. How can we get to that timeless place? If it’s possible, as the world’s wisdom traditions say it is, then time will disappear. Once that happens, the whole issue of youth and age changes, because if you are in a state of permanent wonder, love and joy, nothing can threaten you, and that includes the ravages of time.

Elizabeth Lesser, co-founder of the Omega Institute and author of the Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow and A Seeker’s Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure, is another of Oprah’s gurus. On the subject of personal hardship, Lesser writes:

How do we use the forces of a difficult time to help us grow? There are many ways, but the first way, the gateway, is to know that we are not alone in these endeavors. One of the greatest enigmas of human behavior is the way we isolate ourselves from each other. In our misguided perception of separation we assume that others are not sharing a similar experience of life. We imagine that we are unique in our eccentricities or failures or longings. And so we try to appear as happy and consistent as we think others are, and we feel shame when we stumble and fall. When difficulties come our way, we don’t readily seek out help and compassion because we think others might not understand, or they would judge us harshly, or take advantage of our weakness. And so we hide out, and we miss out

Lesser’s counsel is not entirely devoid of sense, and much of Oprah’s spiritual guidance has some grain of truth. It is the feel-good truth of self-affirmation and of love and acceptance of others. There are no stern messages in the Word of Oprah. It fits perfectly well with the message of her advertisers: Realize yourself with this. Interestingly, as mentioned before by several commenters, Oprah was raised as  a Christian with a strong emphasis on the Bible. Would she have maintained her wide reach if she had used her show to preach these beliefs? It is highly doubtful.

Elizabeth Lesser

                                                                              —————–         Comments  ——————-

Lydia Sherman writes:

Regarding the childhood Christian training of celebrities who eventually embraced the self-actualizing religions of this world, a number of people in the public eye have done this. One that I can think of off-hand is Ted Turner. He was raised in a Bible-believing family with basic Bible values. For a time in his drive to success, he espoused these, even in public, sometimes quoting the BIble. As he grew richer and more famous, he railed against God. One excuse he used to reject his early faith, was the death of his little sister. He reasoned that God should not let such a sorrowful thing happen. 

How different than the words of Rose Kennedy, during a press conference after the death of her son, President John F. Kennedy: “Whatever happens, we should know that God is a loving God and that we should always do his will and praise him.” These gracious words are more or less the message she sent to a grieved nation, that might have been expecting words of bitterness and revenge. I saw this on a news reel and it stuck in my mind forever. 

This new bitterness that embraces the “stars” of this world could have something to do with their own success. Without a need to ask Him for our daily bread, some people forget God. There are other successful, famous people, who did not forget God, but the film industry is not hiring them.

Lydia adds:

Many celebrities and advertisers focus on Christian things in order to get the financial support of average people, and then abandon those values when they get to where they were going. I saw an investigative film many years ago that showed how advertising used Christian choirs to promote their products, singing little ditties about the dishwashing soap “Joy” or raising their hands as if to God, out in a field, to promote a garden product. Advertising uses Christian terms everywhere, if you will notice, just to bring in the “church people.”

There are some companies that forget that without the Christian base of support in this nation, they might not survive. One case in point is a ladies’ magazine that became so popular with Christian women because it was beautiful and embraced the values of femininity and the home. It soared in popularity until it began running ads showing immodest women, or alchohol and other things that did not quite jive with the theme of the magazine. When hundreds of women withdrew their subscriptions, the magazine folded. When asked through message boards or telephone what the reason for their decline was, they said things like, “People just lost interest,” or “It was not popular anymore.” They missed the point, even though many women actually WROTE the reasons to them. I have the first issues of this publication, called Victoria, in which there are quotes from the Bible, expressing the beauty of the earth and the glory of God. As it became more feminist in tone and in illustration, many women dropped their subscriptions. Without the Christian base of support, some products and services just cannot survive.

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