Oprah 2020 talk spotlights her real role in U.S. society
In all the thousands of words written about Oprah since her Golden Globes speech 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 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, Oprah has made herself its pope.
The most American approach to matters of faith is 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 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, 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. Others are more common in liberal communities — where they emphasize Eastern wisdom and Lost Christianities and New Age mystical humanism.
Oprah herself, with her Obama-endorsing, #MeToo politics, 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. Indeed, it may be the strongest force holding our metaphysically divided country together.
What all this religious business means for an Oprah presidential campaign, 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. Or her religious authority could make the Democratic Party far more popular and powerful, more a pan-racial party of the cultural center.
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.” Or by turning the spiritual center to partisan ends she could hasten its collapse, hustling us deeper into metaphysical civil war.
Either way, the Oprah boomlet is a chance to recognize her real importance in our culture — and the sheer unpredictable weirdness, perhaps eclipsing even Donald Trump’s ascent, that might follow if our most important religious leader tries to lay claim to temporal power as well.