NEW Books: Excerpt The Gospel According to Oprah

Introduction: The Gospel According to Oprah

Introduction
Oprah on a mission

Twelve days after terrorists crashed into the World Trade Center and American invulnerability in September 2001, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani organized a service in Yankee Stadium. The service drew together ministers, rabbis, imams and priests and an audience of upwards of 20,000. This public memorial expression, intended to provide a sense of national unity and social consolation, featured as master of ceremonies Oprah Winfrey. A role that might have been filled 25 years ago by Billy Graham, spiritual adviser to six presidents, was played by an entertainer.

Oprah Winfrey, talk show host, film producer and philanthropist, is not ordained. She’s neither preacher nor religious professional. Yet her multimedia empire, built over two decades, has given her the scope and stature of a leader whose influence is well-known. Oprah has a prominent pulpit from which to preach. Her TV show has a worldwide audience in 108 countries ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The U.S. audience in 2004 is 10 million, according to Nielsen measurements. Her magazine, begun in 2000, has a readership of 2.7 million and is generally hefty with advertising. (Like Oprah, the issues come in different sizes, depending on advertising. The biggest top 300 pages.) Oprah’s whole enterprise, which includes many media that provide platforms for her gospel as well as sources of income, is vast. Between the movies she produces, books or products she’s recommended, her television show, website, magazine, her reach is positively tentacular – octopus-like, touching so many people about so many things in so many different ways over 20 years.

With her conversational ease and casual style, Oprah comes across on the TV screen as personal and personable, both pastor and best friend, authoritative yet approachable. “She is like a personal institution,” says Judith Martin, who teaches religious studies and women’s studies at the University of Dayton and has written on women and spirituality.

Oprah is, of course, speaking mostly to the nation’s women, especially the nation’s mothers. Oprah’s magazine and TV show advertise products for women. Her TV audience is overwhelmingly female. Most of her book club readers are women, as author Jonathan Franzen understood when he worried that her choice of The Corrections might shoo male readers away from the National Book Award–winning novel.

Oprah is primarily the voice of women in the middle: middle-class, middle-American and, like Oprah, middle-aged, or headed there in the next decade. They are people caught in the middle of families, too many good intentions, and an overlong to-do list. These women are trying to manage busy lives and households, address personal and social concerns, and maybe also lose some weight.

Oprah offers lots of things to help. She is an encourager. “Live your best life” is Oprah’s motto promoting and summarizing the good life. She offers tools for living your best life: books to read, people to emulate, material things to help (an eclectic assortment of personal or household goods that make up a monthly “O list” of recommendations). The magazine gives you “O to Go” paper goodies—note cards, postcards and bookplates, a little bonus feature that adds use value to the volume. The journal-like feature “Something to think about” is another tear-out page for jotting down reflections on questions related to the issue’s mission. “How would you create an ‘inner-strength’ team?” “How can you be forceful without using violence or harsh words?”

And then there are books. Oprah’s Book Club was paradise for publishers, sellers, and readers. Of the 48 books picked by Oprah for her book club in its first incarnation, when it selected contemporary fiction, sales averaged 1.5 million in 1999, the club’s biggest year. (The book club now picks classic works of fiction and made Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, originally published in 1877, a bestseller more than a century later.) In this arena, Oprah’s roles as saleswoman and guru blend. She prescribed edifying books, many of them by women, and many of those authors women of color. The stories were strong on plot, character and moral awareness.

Authors and publishers would certainly testify to her golden touch. Of the 48 books picked by Oprah for her book club in its first incarnation, when it selected contemporary fiction, sales averaged 1.5 million in 1999, the club’s biggest year. (The book club now picks classic works of fiction and made Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, originally published in 1877, a bestseller more than a century later.) In this arena, Oprah’s roles as saleswoman and guru blend. She prescribed edifying books, many of them by women, and many of those authors women of color. The stories were strong on plot, character and moral awareness.

Phyllis Tickle, who was editor of religion books for many years at the industry magazine Publishers Weekly and likes to describe religion books as “portable pastors,” characterizes the Oprah books as “morally sound material, by and large, that is credible and enriching . . . Like most of what she does, you’re the better for having read them. Her tastes are very pastoral as well as literary.”

“I have enormous respect for Oprah,” Tickle continues. “Anybody who can better the living experience of thousands of people has to be respected. She may not be ordained but she sure is pastoral, and pastoral at a level that has a vast impact.”

Although most of the country sees it in the afternoon, the timing of the TV show, at least in the Chicago area — Oprah’s television home turf —has a morning service feel to it. Go to this house of worship and sit down for an inspiring hour that will engage you and give you a lift. You can even bring coffee to this 9 a.m. ritual each weekday. Even though you’re only watching at home, you can feel a thrill of entering something. Cue Oprah, comes a voiceover on TV over shots of the studio’s control room and then down the studio aisle she is walking, shaking hands, the music of studio audience applause and shrieking accompanying her processional to the stage. An hour-long show five days a week adds up to a lot more pulpit time per week than the average pastor enjoys, and Oprah commands a lot bigger congregation. (Oprah herself used to attend a large Chicago church—Trinity United Church of Christ – but a staff member said she hasn’t attended in years.)

On Good Friday in 2002, Oprah’s topic is miracles. Her guest is Richard Thomas, the host of PAX-TV’s It’s a Miracle, which every week presents in re-created docudrama form “miracles”: incredible and inspirational real-life stories of odds beaten, quirky coincidences, triumph mined from defeat, unaccountable survival. A videotape unrolls the story of a baby born very prematurely, with no apparent signs of life, who despite all clinical signs and assessment begins to breathe on her own. Two years later, the same girl now toddles onto Oprah’s stage holding her mother’s hand, offering a flourish of dramatic proof for doubters. The obstetrician is in the audience to say authoritatively that the girl’s coming to life is wholly inexplicable from a medical point of view. The miracles show closes with three generations of the gospel-singing Winans family belting out hymns, exactly like a church service. (The Winans offer their own miraculous testimony—Ronald Winans survived a severe heart condition and is on stage to signal his return to the touring circuit.)

Another 2002 show features Gary Neuman, therapist and author of Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce. A divorced couple sits on stage with their two sons between them. Videotapes unfold the story of the parents’ divorce from different family members’ viewpoints. The mother and father watch a videotape of their sons talking to Neuman about how they feel confused and caught in the middle between the parents. Right on the televised spot, this situation is going to be fixed. Mom and dad pledge out loud that they will get along better and not place their sons in the middle again. “Now that,” says Oprah as the segment concludes, “is worth staying on the air for.”

She says this periodically. Oprah will be on the air until at least 2011. In 2004, she signed a contract that would extend her syndicated talk show into its 25th year. Tied as she is to changing cultural topics, fashions, and her own changes that have been among the show’s subjects, her persistence and longevity represent a successful balancing act of constancy and innovation. Some things change, but her core gospel – improve yourself, make a difference, life teaches lessons – hasn’t.

As Oprah has developed her television show over the years, her use of the medium establishes a sense of intimacy within a framework of advertisements. Amazing tales and amazing candor are punctuated by commercials. Confession is the show’s signature. Talk is crucial to air your mistakes, to amend your ways, says Oprah. “The expression of your feelings is like magic,” she says.

But expression isn’t the ultimate aim of the show. The aim is to make things better. Martin offers a feminist reading of Oprah’s mission. “I really think of Oprah as caring,” she says. “She has wealth and influence, but she uses it to empower others—and that’s a big feminist thing.”

When Oprah has a message she wants guests and the audience to grasp, she will ask fewer questions and give more advice. She tells divorced parents who are unable to get along to stop forcing their children to pick sides in parental disagreements. She will sometimes tell troubled guests: you need help. Tell the whole truth to your wives, she urges seven cheating husbands who have agreed to talk to Oprah about their infidelity as their wives listen offstage.

Oprah often talks about “light bulb” moments or “Aha!” moments (a recurring feature in the magazine also), moments of life-changing revelation. She’s explicit about wanting to provide help and resources, about lessons to be learned from her guests: “What I want everybody to get . . . ,” she says, referring to what she learned about managing her own health in a conversation with Dr. Christiane Northrup, author of The Wisdom of Menopause. When she questions pop star Brandy on a show about the young singer’s “spiritual journey,” which included an abusive relationship in her teenage years, Oprah observes, “You’re gonna save a lot of girls today.”

Oprah is a fixer. She has a whole team of fixers whose expertise addresses different aspects of women’s lives: “life coach” Martha Beck, personal trainer Bob Greene, psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw, decorator Nate Berkus, financial adviser Suze Orman are among those who have appeared regularly on the show or in her magazine. Whether it’s encouraging dieters or redecorating the world’s ugliest bedroom, Oprah offers solutions to nagging problems that are blocking someone from living her best life. She is a guide who is there for you, personal as a girlfriend.

“As a moderator of discussions and someone who can generate and respond to ideas, she does great work,” says William (Scotty) McLennan, dean of religious life at Stanford University and author of Finding Your Religion. “I think of Oprah as a very intelligent woman who is able to draw people out and engage people in a way that is educational and helpful.”

Oprah wants to fix communities as well as individuals and their families. She is a consistent philanthropist, with her own as well as other people’s money. Fortune reported in 2002 that Oprah has donated, mostly anonymously, at least 10 percent of her annual income to charity. In 2004 Oprah was listed by BusinessWeek as number 40 on the list of America’s most generous philanthropists. It reported she had given or pledged $175 million, estimating her lifetime giving as 13 percent of her net worth of $1.3 billion. She funds the private Oprah Winfrey Foundation. Her public charity, Oprah’s Angel Network, promoted on her show and Web site, raised $3.5 million in 1997, its first year of operation. The Angel Network, supported by viewers, has funded scholarships, Habitat for Humanity homes and grass-roots organizations assisting women, children, and families.

From 2000-2003, Oprah’s Angel Network also sponsored Use Your Life Awards – five and six-figure awards to those engaged in social change. (Use Your Life funds were also sponsored by actor Paul Newman, already renowned for the philanthropy from Newman’s Own, his food line, and Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com.) These awards showcase compelling stories and send out inspirational messages. Recipients include the Red Feather Development Corporation, founded by former clothing manufacturer Robert Young. He became interested in housing for Native Americans, and has built affordable housing on reservations in the northwestern U.S. Former prostitute and drug addict Norma Hotaling’s organization SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation) works with prostitutes in San Francisco, many of whom have been abused and are addicted to drugs.

Oprah wants to do fixing her way. She turned down President Bush’s request in 2002 to visit Afghanistan to help highlight some of the post-Taliban changes for women and children, refusing to let herself be used for someone else’s purpose. She has done shows before on the conditions of Afghan women, but she wants to teach on her own terms.

Some Oprah observers have called her shrewd; others have described her as a control freak. She would probably call it independence. In her April 2002 “What I Know for Sure” column in her magazine, she writes: “The irony of relationships is that you’re not usually ready for one until you can say from the deepest part of yourself, ‘I will never again give up my power to another person.’” Personal conviction shades into professional application. The empowered woman is likely to be confident and decisive in business and in personal life.

Self-disclosure as testimony
What has etched Oprah’s identity most clearly in the public mind is her readiness to draw on her own experience even while exposing others to public scrutiny. Just as she encourages confession from others, she is willing to engage in it herself. She has talked about being abused as a child, and her ongoing battle with weight amounts to a running storyline on the show.

“She brings a down-to-earth approach,” observes Wade Clark Roof, frequent commentator on American religious trends, author of Spiritual Marketplace, and a professor of religion and society at the University of California Santa Barbara. “I think she talks out of experience and relates to people talking out of experience. Spirituality talk is talk that arises out of experience.”

In other words, it is not just talk, but talk that’s been tested in life’s fires—talk as testimony. As Oprah would say, this is about getting real. This is the language of authenticity. A preference for the freshness and vividness of experience over what can seem like the dull dryness of institutional faith is hardly new, of course. Spiritual renewal has ever been thus. Quaker founder George Fox wrote in 1647 of the inadequacy of the teachings of established religion: “But as I had forsaken all the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most experienced; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. Oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition,’ and when I heard it my heart did leap. . . . And this I knew experimentally.” Buddha also told his followers not merely to accept his word, but test his teachings by experience. The experience of conversion – felt ecstatically and instantaneously, transforming sinner into believer – plays a significant role in African-American religious history.

Oprah’s show is founded on people testifying about their experience. In developing topics, Oprah and her staff routinely seek people whose experience fits a subject: celebrity fans, women with untidy houses, makeover candidates. People obligingly write, e-mail and call. Oprah’s Web site receives thousands of e-mails weekly.

The show doesn’t stop when the TV hour ends. Discussion and questions continue after the cameras have stopped rolling, and “After the Show” is available through the Oxygen cable network, which Oprah has part ownership of. “After the Show” is yet another medium providing resources to pursue the issue.

African-American spiritual roots
If Oprah’s spirituality is noninstitutional, pick-and-choose what works from the world’s religions, its roots are deep in African-American Christianity. Jamie T. Phelps, O.P., theology professor and director of the Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana, identifies significant elements of traditional black spirituality, as well as postmodern eclectic elements, in the Oprah phenomenon. African-American spirituality, says Phelps, “understands we are all human beings. If you’re generally into black spirituality as holistic you have to love everybody—that makes white people very comfortable.” Phelps suggests another reason for the comfort level of white viewers and fans with Oprah. The figure of the nurturing television personality echoes the historically and socially accepted figure of the nurturing black female. “She is the good black mama who takes care of white kids,” Phelps says.

L. Gregory Jones, dean at Duke Divinity School, agrees that Oprah’s roots in the black church experience lend the television personality some of her authority. “It enhances her credibility on issues of spirituality, given the prominence of the black church,” he says. “There is a cultural presumption of credibility that she can trade on.”

Oprah’s attempt to transform community by promoting individual transformation is also a way of placing individuals within a larger community. There can be no separation, no isolated search to individual perfection. The individual’s betterment leads to community betterment. Individual spiritual life, and renewed life, is expressed in community and community renewal. The traditional black church has always addressed community ills, expressed community cohesion and been a refuge of liberty that is personal, social and spiritual.

“There is a personal relationship to God that has to flow over to concern for community,” says Phelps. “It’s not a personal ‘getting holy’ but getting into right relationships with the community.”

If Oprah can be said to have a theology, it is the theology of story. Like religious teachers who used stories to make their points about how to live, Oprah also uses stories: the novels in her book club, the life stories of her guests, and her own life story. She uses these stories to teach values. They provide an opportunity to learn something, either from a book or from life’s book. Like a refrain, she asks guests: what did you learn from this? She also involves her audience, asking rhetorically: What would you do? Would you judge? Would you forgive? This helps to involve the one hearing the story, making it more personal. Story is memorable, it can be shown on TV, and it’s easy to understand. Storytelling is an ancient art, and book loving Oprah knows and takes advantage of its power.

A little list
Consider these ten reasons why Oprah is a compelling and successful spiritual teacher in spiritually eclectic and ever-practical America:
1. Oprah is very human. She admits to struggles with human temptations, like food. This distinguishes her from lots of other religious figures in the culture.

2. Oprah acknowledges the reality of suffering and wants to do something to relieve it. At her prompting, people regularly tell wrenching stories of being abused or victimized. Trisha Meili, the woman known for many years as the Central Park jogger and a symbol of urban crime after a savage attack on her in New York in 1989, broke her public silence for an interview with Oprah in 2002. Oprah followed the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks with an extensive series of shows emphasizing understanding, coping, healing. Her Sept. 11 six-month anniversary show in 2002 featured World Trade Center survivor Lauren Manning, a victim of serious burns. Suffering happens. Talking about it and exploring survivors’ resilience seems to help.

3. Oprah provides community. You can log on to her website www.oprah.com and pick from hundreds of support groups and message boards. You can go to a bookstore and look for a book with an Oprah Book Club logo. Lots of others are reading that very same book.

4. Oprah encourages self-examination. The traditionalists might call it examination of conscience. A daily examen is a technique for Christian spiritual development. Oprah would call it journaling or “something to think about,” her magazine’s feature that presents questions for reflection.

5. Oprah teaches gratitude. St. Paul says: “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Phil. 4:6). Write those requests in your gratitude journal. “The gratitude journal is a wonderful idea as a supplement to people’s already formed spiritual life,” says Jones at Duke Divinity.

6. Oprah is easy to understand. She keeps it simple. She uses little words. You’ll never hear “postdenominationalism” or “hermeneutics” or religious jargon on the show. Her regular magazine column, called “What I Know for Sure,” is simply written, and filled with her experience and reflections on that experience. Oprah keeps it simple, cutting through words, summarizing, highlighting, recommending, trading on the trust she has built up over the years, using what people who study influence might call moral capital. Simplicity is a virtue.

7. Oprah teaches generosity by highlighting and encouraging role models. Oprah profiles those who make a positive difference. She and her viewers also bankroll some of them, though Oprah’s Angel Network. The Angel Network makes it easy for viewers to do something about their charitable impulse. Send in a check. The website allows them to find information about volunteering. Oprah herself has given away millions.

8. Oprah listens. Being heard is good for well-being. Catholics put this to work institutionally in what is popularly called confession and formally known as the sacrament of reconciliation. This same principle is at work in the 12-step program, which requires confession of character defects as a foundation for responsible change. Confess, repent and be healed. As Dr. Phil McGraw might say, own it.

9. Oprah explores forgiveness, and tries to demonstrate that it is possible and how it is possible. She regards it as a tool for survival. She has regularly spoken with survivors of crime—people who lost loved ones or were themselves victimized—and returned years later to check on their progress.

10. Oprah is a reminder service: a reminder of what is good, what is important, what one person can do. In this info-glutted culture, the busy need reminders. Remember what’s important. My husband, a pediatric nurse in a suburban Chicago hospital, gets an occasional small dose of Oprah. In patients’ rooms during morning hours, the Oprah show will sometimes be playing, watched by moms sitting with their sick children. He recently asked one Oprah watcher what she liked. She watched, she told him, for the information: safety for children, decorating, etc. This information was not necessarily new, she explained, but she liked to be reminded.

This book elaborates these reasons in the chapters that follow. Before I paid close attention to her work, I would not have called myself a fan, mostly because I don’t think of myself as anybody’s fan. As a religion writer, I am uncomfortably aware of the relationship between the words fan and fanatic, so it’s a term I shy from. I wrote this book because I wanted to understand what Oprah was doing that so many people admired and responded to. I tried to discover that by watching her show for a season, reading her magazine, and talking to admirers as well as people who don’t particularly like her.

I wanted to understand what kind of role a famed talker might have in our American conversation about values. As a religion writer, I have listened over the years as values has become a popular political term in our culture wars: family values, moral values. As a person of faith, I tend to identify values with virtues. “Virtues” is a term that reminds me that this conversation about values is more than a contemporary political shouting match. It reminds me that there is a treasury of time-honored teachings about how we should live that religions at their best have provided. Virtues describe qualities of character seen in action: gratitude, generosity, compassion.

If the word “values” suffers from some imprecision in usage today, though, it does have one advantage. It’s not necessarily tied to religion. A growing number of people today say they are “spiritual but not religious” because organized religion has a dark side. History contains its track record of cruelty as well as compassion. So while “values” is often used today as a code word telegraphing conservative political views, it can also mean something more expansive: what somebody considers important whether they’re religiously observant or not.

Here is where Oprah fits in. She speaks about values: things that are important to her and things she wants to be important to all of us. They are rooted in religion, and she has been shaped by religion. But she is not a religious figure. Oprah has transformed herself and what she’s doing in a series of makeovers over time and yet there is a core of consistency in what she does. She has made herself into an exemplar of values, a shaper of tastes, and an entertainer. All three of those functions work together. People wouldn’t listen to her if she weren’t entertaining. Her influence would be smaller if she hadn’t ambitiously tackled basic issues of cultural values and tastes, offering some guidance. She translates what religions would term transcendent into something that is inspiring but secular. She would call it a vision of possibilities. She has tried to develop her own unique language, which means talking about values in a secular and inclusive sense in a religiously pluralistic country.

At their core, religions too offer a vision of possibilities; they are one established, systematic way to help people become their better angels. Some find this too sentimental or take routes other than religion to discover meaning, but for many people this vision provides a reason to get up in the morning.

Oprah was off-camera but on-pulpit at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church when she told 2,000 people gathered there in April 2005 that God helped her see the possibilities in her life. In her earliest teenage years, her future looked especially unpromising. At one point she was headed for a juvenile detention home. “ ‘The voices of the world told me I was poor, colored and female,’” she told the congregation. “But God had another vision for me.’”2 Her own belief in God offered Oprah a vision of her own possibilities. She evidently listened.

1 Eva Illouz, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2003), 5.

2 Margaret Bernstein, “Oprah Winfrey Tells Baptists to ‘Surrender All,’” Religion News Service, April 18, 2005.

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