The Church of Oprah
Last week we examined how American religion has moved away from a belief in the Bible as objective truth and toward an inward, subjective, feelings-based spirituality. This inward move has affected many who attend church. It translates into a focus on the worship experience (which has more to do with an inward experience than worship) and a desire to hear emotionally charged, therapy laden, human-centered sermons. Many have abandoned organized religion to pursue their own feelings-based spirituality. There is no better example of this than Oprah Winfrey.Like many Americans, Oprah was raised in Christianity; she grew up attending a Baptist church. However, she departed from a strictly Christian faith in her late twenties after hearing a pastor proclaim from the Scripture that God was a jealous God. Rather than taking the time to explore what that meant, she said, “Something about that didn’t feel right in my spirit because I believe that God is love and that God is in all things, and so that’s when the search for something more than doctrine started to stir within me.” By rejecting God’s reveled word and looking to her own feelings, Oprah tapped in to the burgeoning American spirituality; she has now become its leading prophetess.
This new American religion is a mixture of Christian ethics (i.e. forgiveness, generosity, gratitude, and community), positive thinking, the pursuit of wealth and fame, and new age spirituality. The belief that the Bible is God’s self revelation is abandoned, and one’s own feelings become the primary source of authority. On her recent webcast Oprah said, “God is a feeling experience not a believing experience, and if your religion is a believing experience--if God for you is still about a belief--then it’s not truly God.” Evidently, Oprah and her listening fans did not ‘feel’ the contradiction; after all, Oprah was explaining her own ‘belief’ about God. Nevertheless, Oprah was clearly taking pot shots at biblical doctrine.
Oprah’s eclectic spirituality can be seen through the books she recommends and the guests she interviews, such as Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson. Recently, she has been promoting Eckhart Tolle and his new book, “A New Earth.” On March 3 Oprah began a web-based seminar featuring Tolle. That night, over 500,000 people tried to log in, which brought down the server. Since then, over 2 million people have downloaded that first class.
So what is Tolle’s teaching about which Oprah is so excited? In the spirit of American spirituality, Tolle teaches an eclectic combination of Hinduism, Buddhism, and pseudo Christianity; it is, in essence, New Age. This means he believes that we are all gods. Tolle writes in “The Power Now” that he doesn’t like to use the word ‘God,’ or talk about finding God, because it implies that God is something other than you, or me. Along with reincarnation, Tolle also teaches that truth is “inseparable from who you are…”
These are just the latest doctrines being taught from the church of Oprah, and because it fits within the scope of American spirituality, millions of Americans are buying into it.
a pdf version of this entry is available here
Labels: oprah
posted on Friday, May 02, 2008 |
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