Chattanooga Times Free Press

Oprah Winfrey: The prophet, priestess ... and queen?

- BY ROSS DOUTHAT NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

In the fall of 2014, Oprah Winfrey ran a “transforma­tive two-day live event,” a traveling roadshow that was held in eight cities around the country. For this interactiv­e revival-tent experience, she was joined by her “handpicked life trailblaze­rs,” authors and personalit­ies whose work she considered essential for the theme of the roadshow, “The Life You Want.”

The trailblaze­rs included, among others, Iyanla Vanzant, a spiritual teacher of New Thought, a 19th-century movement with links to Christian Science that emphasizes the idea of God as “infinite intelligen­ce” and the human capacity to think our way toward godlike power; Rob Bell, an erstwhile evangelica­l megachurch pastor who has reinvented himself as an itinerant preacher of the vaguest sort of Christiani­ty; Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat Pray Love,” the mega-selling memoir about finding religious ecstasy in India (as well as great pasta in Italy and a hot romance in Bali); Mark Nepo, the poet-philosophe­r author of “The Book of Awakening” and other tracts on the spirituali­ty of the everyday; and of course Deepak Chopra, the aging prince of the New Age. I list these figures and their theologies

because in all the thousands of words that the political press has written about Oprah since her Golden Globes speech on Sunday night invited 2020 presidenti­al speculatio­n, there has not been nearly enough focus on the most important aspect of Oprah’s public persona — the crucial and fascinatin­g role she really occupies in American life.

We’ve heard about Oprah the entreprene­ur, Oprah the celebrity, Oprah the champion of holistic medicine and the enabler of anti-vaccine paranoia, even Oprah the neoliberal (don’t ask). But though she is entreprene­urial and rich, Oprah is not Jeff Bezos; though she is famous, she is not the Rock; though she has elevated various dubious approaches to wellness, she is not Gwyneth Paltrow.

Instead, her essential celebrity is much closer to the celebrity of Pope Francis or Billy Graham. She is a preacher, a spiritual guru, a religious teacher, an apostle and a prophetess. Indeed, to the extent that there is a specifical­ly American religion, a faith tradition all our own, Oprah has made herself its pope.

In other columns I have suggested that American culture is divided between three broad approaches to religious questions: one traditiona­l, one spiritual and one secular. The traditiona­l approach takes various forms (Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Orthodox Jewish), but its instincts are creedal, confession­al, dogmatic; it believes in a specific revelation, a specific authority and a specific holy book and seeks to conform itself to teachings handed down from the religious past. The secular approach is post-religious, scientisti­c, convinced that the laboratory and the microscope will ultimately account for everything that matters, while hopefully justifying a liberal society’s still-somewhat-Christian moral commitment­s along the way.

But in between secularism and traditiona­lism lies the most American approach to matters of faith: a religious individual­ism that blurs the line between the God out there and the God Within, a gnostic spirituali­ty that constantly promises access to a secret and personaliz­ed wisdom, a gospel of health and wealth that insists that the true spiritual adept will find both happiness and money, a do-it-yourself form of faith that encourages syncretism and relativism and the pursuit of “your truth” (to borrow one of Oprah’s Golden Globes phrases) in defiance of the dogmatic and the skeptical alike.

Because this kind of faith is not particular­ly political, because it’s too individual­iswtic and personaliz­ed (and comfortabl­e with the post-Me Decade American status quo) to be partisan and programmat­ic, it doesn’t always get the attention it deserves from a press accustomed to analyzing everything in terms of the clash of left and right.

Not that it doesn’t have partisan tilts and coloration­s. Some of its manifestat­ions are more common in conservati­ve America — where they usually have an evangelica­l and commercial gloss, as with Joel Osteen and his epigones. (This red-state style of spirituali­ty was recently co-opted, with some success, by the prosperity preacher known as Donald Trump.) Others are more common in liberal communitie­s — where they emphasize Eastern wisdom and Lost Christiani­ties and the New Age and Esalen-style mystical humanism. Where the spiritual worldview blurs into secularism, it’s usually claiming scientific bona fides; where it blurs into traditiona­l religion it’s usually talking about Jesus. And Oprah herself, with her Obama-endorsing, #MeToo politics and her tendency to mix spirituali­ty with pseudoscie­nce, is clearly somewhat on the blue-state side of that divide …

… but only somewhat, because the divide between blue-state spirituali­ty and red-state spirituali­ty is much more porous than other divisions in our balkanized society, and the appeal of the spiritual worldview cuts across partisan lines and racial divides. (Health-and-wealth theology is a rare pan-ethnic religious movement, as popular among blacks and Hispanics as among Americans with Joel Osteen’s skin tone, and when Oprah touts something like “The Secret” — the power-of-spiritual-thinking tract from author Rhonda Byrne — she’s offering a theology that’s just Osteen without Jesus.) Indeed, it may be the strongest force holding our metaphysic­ally divided country together, the soft, squishy, unifying center that keeps secularist­s and traditiona­lists from replaying the Spanish Civil War.

Which is not to say that it’s a good force in its own right; you could fill a book (as I once tried to do) with theologica­l and sociologic­al arguments about what’s wrong with religious individual­ism, its false ideas and fatal consequenc­es. But it clearly holds the balance of power in our cultural conflicts, and it’s hard to imagine our civic peace surviving without the bipartisan influence of its soothing faux profunditi­es.

I know, I know: You’ve stuck around this long to find out what all this religious business means for an Oprah presidenti­al campaign. The disappoint­ing answer is that I have no definite idea. It could be that Oprah would cease to be a figure of the spiritual center the instant she assumed a partisan mantle, that in entering in the political fray she would automatica­lly lose her papal tiara. Or it could be that her religious authority would make the Democratic Party far more popular and powerful, more a pan-racial party of the cultural center and less a party defined by its secular and anti-clerical left wing.

It could be that she would be extremely effective in the increasing­ly imperial role that our presidency plays, effectivel­y uniting throne and altar and presiding over our divisions with a kind of spirituali­ty-drenched “mass empathy” (to quote Business Insider’s Josh Barro) that our current partisans conspicuou­sly lack. Or it could be that by turning the spiritual center to partisan ends she would hasten its collapse, heightenin­g polarizati­on and hustling us deeper into metaphysic­al civil war.

All of these scenarios seem possible, even as the most plausible scenario remains the one where she decides being a prophetess is better than being a president and declines to run at all. But either way, the Oprah boomlet is a chance to recognize her real importance in our culture — and the sheer unpredicta­ble weirdness, perhaps eclipsing even Trump’s ascent, that might follow if our most important religious leader tries to lay claim to temporal power as well.

 ?? JACQUELYN MARTIN/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ?? Oprah Winfrey has been speculated as a 2020 presidenti­al candidate after a rousing speech at Sunday’s Golden Globes.
JACQUELYN MARTIN/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Oprah Winfrey has been speculated as a 2020 presidenti­al candidate after a rousing speech at Sunday’s Golden Globes.
 ??  ?? Oprah Winfrey reacts during a musical tribute to Coretta Scott King in this 2006 photo. Oprah Winfrey poses with the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards.
Oprah Winfrey reacts during a musical tribute to Coretta Scott King in this 2006 photo. Oprah Winfrey poses with the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards.
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