Oprah’s message makes spiritual impact

Posted: 2/3/06

Oprah’s message makes spiritual impact

By Rachel Pomerance

Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS)—For millions of people struggling with their daily woes, there is a lifeline. Her name is Oprah Winfrey.

Despite a recent on-air admission that she “made a mistake” in promoting a discredited book about addiction recovery, Oprah is a spiritual force.

In telling stories of hard-won triumph, including her own, Oprah is known for a piercing optimism twinned with a you-can-do-it toolkit for improving one’s lot. She also gives her face to her mantra—“Live Your Best Life”—radiating an exuberant smile and winning gestures on the cover of each issue of her best-selling O magazine.

But Oprah is even more than a trusted fountain of helpful hints on everything from relationships to shoes. In her book, The Gospel According to Oprah, Marcia Nelson compares Winfrey to evangelical icon Billy Graham. The book is the latest in a series that have explored the spiritual components of pop icons, beginning in 1965 with The Gospel According to Peanuts.

Nelson writes that Oprah “is not really in the business of pastoring, but she can be described as pastoral. A good deal of what she is about is edifying, uplifting and wholesome. She complements rather than rivals those institutions that promote spirituality.”

Indeed, Oprah’s message of empowerment resonates with viewers seeking answers and encouragement amid the tension in their personal lives and a world in turmoil. Preaching that message, Oprah recently found herself in trouble regarding A Million Little Pieces, a book by James Frey, a recovered drug addict whose memoir she promoted, pushing it to best-seller status.

The book’s claims later were discredited by The Smoking Gun, an investigative website. During a Larry King interview with Frey on CNN, Oprah called in to defend the maligned author and urge readers who had found hope in his tale of addiction to redemption to “keep holding on.”

But later, with Frey as a guest on her show, Oprah reversed course.

“I made a mistake,” she told her viewers, “I left the impression that the truth does not matter, and I am deeply sorry about that because that is not what I believe.”

In publicly admitting her wrong, Oprah follows a long line of television preachers who confess, inevitably receiving forgiveness from loyal followers.

According to an unscientific poll last year by Beliefnet, a website that explores religion and spirituality, 33 percent of some 6,000 people said Oprah has a greater “spiritual impact” on them than their clergyperson. “People find in Oprah what they can’t find in other religious or spiritual leaders,” Nelson said. “People relate to Oprah because Oprah has paraded her problems on stage for 20 years.”

At the same time, Oprah is no stranger to God-talk, drawing on the power of faith easily and frequently. “God uses good people to do great things,” she said last year at the Washington, D.C., memorial service for Rosa Parks.

Speaking last April at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, Oprah began by describing herself as a child in segregated Mississippi, finding in church the encouragement and attention that she found nowhere else. She recalled her grandmother showing her how to wash clothes by hand and telling her to watch carefully because she’d be doing the same kind of work some day.

“The voices of the world told me I was poor, colored and female” and therefore not worthy of a glorious future, Winfrey said. “But God had another vision for me.” Despite her appeal, comparing Oprah to an ordained spiritual leader is problematic, said Steve Salerno, author of SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless.

People are putting their faith in a business, motivated by ratings and earnings, and not necessarily someone’s best interests, he said.

Salerno said of Oprah’s company, “Harpo Productions is very much a billion-dollar profit-making company, and if you start talking about spirituality in that context, I worry about the sincerity of it all.”

Others say the industry Oprah peddles, while making her one of the world’s richest women, also has done a lot of good.

“Oprah embodies hope,” said Steven Tipton, who teaches sociology and ethics at Emory University and its Candler School of Theology in Atlanta. “Not only for success in work, love and weight loss. But hope for living a life of loving, giving care that extends from friends and family to the larger community.

“She exemplifies the ideal of being a person who does well and does good, of being seen and accepted for who you are, not what you are, across the dividing lines of caste, class and gender.”