The Church of Oprah Exposed

Oprah's remarks rile some evangelical Christians

By HELEN T. GRAY
The Kansas City Star

Oprah Winfrey has offended evangelical Christians, and they are fighting back.

For the first time, 23 Christian newspapers across the country united for a joint investigative project. Their aim was to explore the spiritual beliefs of the popular entertainment mogul.

An article titled “Oprah’s God” ran in all the papers’ May or June issues, along with each one’s local input. Among the papers was Kansas City’s Metro Voice.

“The issue has produced the most feedback of anything we have run,” said Dwight Widaman, Metro Voice publisher and editor.

The effort is a result of mounting discontent over statements Oprah has made. Evangelicals believe her remarks are not in line with biblical Christianity.

Some of these statements were shown on a widely circulated YouTube video called “The Church of Oprah Exposed.” This came to the attention of Lamar Keener, a Christian newspaper publisher and president of the Evangelical Press Association.

“Personally, not being a viewer of any daytime television, I was unaware of both the magnitude of Oprah’s audience and the influence as well as the full nature of her message that is decidedly New Age and very much in conflict with biblical Christianity,” he said in a Christian Newswire report.

This came at a time when Oprah’s loyal fans were reading her latest book club selection, Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. Also, the May issue of O: The Oprah Magazine focused on spirituality. The first feature set the tone for the many articles that followed: “Welcome to the Banquet” was the headline.

Oprah’s empire also was the subject of a recent New York Times article that examined various reasons for an apparent dwindling in her appeal.

It noted that while Tolle’s book “sold faster than any of the previous 60 selections of Oprah’s Book Club, it also has attracted some criticism for Ms. Winfrey on her Web site, where some of her fans have said that the book’s spiritual leanings go against Christian doctrine.”

One segment of the YouTube video, taken from Oprah’s show, is a prime example of what angers many evangelical or traditional Christians.

“There are many paths to what you call God,” Oprah says.

When someone in the audience challenges that Jesus said he was the only way, Oprah retorts, “There couldn’t possibly be just one way.”

Widaman said the beliefs of other entertainers, such as Tom Cruise and Madonna, have come under quite a bit of scrutiny.

“But because Oprah is who she is, the media is much less willing to tackle her strange beliefs because of the power she holds through her production company, television show and magazine,” he said.

“We thought her views warranted examination as anyone who is using their power to spread them,” he said. “She really is using her television show as a pulpit for her gospel.”

In his investigative article, Steve Rabey gives further reasons for Christian discontent.

“Oprah speaks less about salvation through Christ than she does Christ-consciousness,” he writes. “Likewise, she describes heaven not as an eternal destination but an inner realm of consciousness.”

He quotes Larry Eskredge, associate director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College in Illinois: “Oprah’s theology seems to be a version of America’s secular theology of self-improvement, doing good to others and the prosperity gospel.

“She is also able to foster a tremendous sense of community around her TV show. People who watch feel they are involved in a great quest to improve society and improve themselves.”

Rabey says Oprah was raised in a Baptist church and frequently uses Christian language. She also uses her show’s influence to promote Christian projects.

Among Oprah’s supporters are people associated with Unity School of Christianity near Lee’s Summit, where Tolle spoke last month.

“Oprah has made a courageous commitment to raising the level of consciousness on this planet, and we at Unity applaud her for that,” said Paula Coppel, vice president of communications. “Her Web series with Eckhart Tolle was a phenomenal gift to the world and life-changing for many people.

“I have to wonder if Oprah’s critics have read Tolle’s book or watched any of the Web series beyond the inflammatory clips on YouTube.”

Coppel said Unity is “very much aligned” with the principles that Oprah and Tolle have been presenting.

“Unity teaches that there are many paths to God, that no one path is right or wrong,” Coppel said. “For fundamentalists who are happy with their beliefs, that is fine. We would never call them wrong.

“But we also know there are many Christians with questions who are looking for another way of relating to Jesus and his teachings that is progressive and empowering. We offer that alternative, and Oprah is doing the same thing.”

Coppel said Unity is “quite in sync with Oprah’s focus on the Christ-consciousness within each of us.” She said Unity defines “Christ-consciousness” as “the perfect mind that was in Christ Jesus.” It results from a process of self-mastery and “spiritual unfoldment,” she said.

Loyal and occasional viewers and former fans are divided on Oprah’s spirituality.

“I used to watch her all the time, but for the most part, I don’t even turn her on anymore,” said Bernice McKinney of Kansas City, Kan. “She lost me as an audience.”

McKinney said that if at one time Oprah accepted Christ as her Savior, then she needs to repent and get back to the teachings of the Bible.

“Otherwise, she is going to be held accountable for leading thousands of people astray,” she said. “I’m fearful for her. I just pray for her.”

Meg Shipley of Gardner agrees that Oprah’s spiritual views contradict the Bible.

One example, Shipley said, is Oprah has said that God is a feeling experience and “if God for you is still about a belief, then it’s not truly God.”

Shipley said she also has heard Oprah speak of teachings that God is a jealous God and how that didn’t seem right.

“At first I thought, wow, Oprah sure thinks highly of herself to assume that God is jealous of her,” Shipley said. “But then I began thinking, the verse she references means that God detests idol worship, and since Oprah now has such a huge spiritual following, it could easily be thought that she has followers who worship her, and it may very well be that God is now ‘jealous’ of her, but not in a flattering way.”

But Jessica Mellinger of Olathe praises Oprah for promoting spirituality instead of religion.

“It seems like a lot of people my age (26) are very intimidated by a lot of religion,” she said. “I was not brought up in a strict religious household. Oprah promotes spirituality.

“With spirituality there is a higher power, and you are connecting with your inner self. Oprah is not pushing a religion. She has said numerous times, ‘I believe in God, and whatever you believe in is your choice.’ Her audience is across the world, not just traditional Christians.”

Mellinger said she wants to be more open to other beliefs, and Oprah has shown her how to do that.

Widaman said feedback from the Oprah piece in papers across the country has been mostly positive. But some people have asked why they were picking on Oprah.

“We just wanted to shed light on her beliefs,” he said. “One result we are hoping for is that people would be more cautious in being influenced by her beliefs, especially Christians.”

Arrogance, Dogma and Why Science - Not Faith - Is the New Enemy of Reason

By Melanie Phillips, In the Daily Mail

Our most celebrated atheist, the biologist Professor Richard Dawkins, has briefly turned his attention away from bashing people who believe in God. Instead, he is about to bash people who subscribe to ‘new age’ therapies which he says are based on ‘irrational superstition’.

In a TV programme to be shown later this month, Dawkins looks at a range of ludicrous therapies and gurus, including faith healers, psychic mediums, ‘angel therapists’, ‘aura photographers’, astrologers and others. Not surprisingly, he is horrified by such widespread irrationality, not to mention an exploitative industry that fleeces people while encouraging them to run away from reality.

He is right to be alarmed. What previously belonged to the province of the quack and the charlatan has become mainstream. The NHS provides funding for shamans, while the NHS Directory for Alternative and Complementary Medicine promotes ‘dowsers’, ‘flower therapists’ and ‘crystal healers’.

Indeed, such therapies aren’t the half of it. Millions of us are now eager to believe that the world is controlled by conspiracies of covert forces, for which there is not one shred of evidence because such theories are simply bonkers.

Thus press articles and TV documentaries seriously advance the belief that the 9/11 attacks on America were orchestrated by the U.S. government itself. Similarly, thousands believe that Princess Diana was murdered at the hands of a conspiracy composed of the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and MI5.

Bestselling books by the former TV sports presenter David Icke, who has announced he is ‘the son of God’, argue that Britain will be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes, and that the world is ruled by a secret group called the ‘Global Elite’ or ‘Illuminati’ which was responsible for the Holocaust, the Oklahoma city bombing and 9/11.

These trends are not just nutty but sinister. Thousands of cults now combine similar crazy beliefs with programmes to control people’s minds and behaviour. Their techniques include food and sleep deprivation; trance induction through hypnosis or prolonged rhythmical chanting; and ‘love bombing’, where cult members are bombarded with conditional love which is removed whenever there is a deviation from the dictates of the leader.

Disturbing indeed. But where Dawkins goes wrong is to assume this is all as irrational as believing in God. The truth is that it is the collapse of religious faith that has prompted the rise of such irrationality.

We are living in a scientific, largely postreligious age in which faith is presented as unscientific superstition. Yet paradoxically, we have replaced such faith by belief in demonstrable nonsense. It was GK Chesterton who famously quipped that ‘when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.’ So it has proved. But how did it happen?

The big mistake is to see religion and reason as polar opposites. They are not. In fact, reason is intrinsic to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The Bible provides a picture of a rational Creator and an orderly universe — which, accordingly, provided the template for the exercise of reason and the development of science.

Dawkins pours particular scorn on the Biblical miracles which don’t correspond to scientific reality. But religious believers have different ways of regarding those events, with many seeing them as either metaphors or as natural occurrences which were invested with a greater significance.

The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief in the concept of truth, which gives rise to reason. But our postreligious age has proclaimed that there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is ‘true for me’.

That is because our society won’t put up with anything which gets in the way of ‘what I want’. How we feel about things has become all-important. So reason has been knocked off its perch by emotion, and thinking has been replaced by feelings.

This has meant our society can no longer distinguish between truth and lies by using evidence and logic. And this collapse of objective truth has, in turn, come to undermine science itself which is playing a role for which it is not fitted.

When science first developed in the West, it thought of itself merely as a tool to explore the natural world. It did not pour scorn upon religion; indeed, scientists were overwhelmingly religious believers (as many still are).

In modern times, however, science has given rise to ’scientism’, the belief that science can answer all the questions of human existence. This is not so. Science cannot explain the origin of the universe. Yet it now presumes to do so and as a result it has descended into irrationality.

The most conspicuous example of this is provided by Dawkins himself, who breaks the rules of scientific evidence by seeking to claim that Darwin’s theory of evolution — which sought to explain how complex organisms evolved through random natural selection — also accounts for the origin of life itself.

There is no evidence for this whatever and no logic to it. After all, if people say God could not have created the universe because this gives rise to the question ‘Who created God?’, it follows that if scientists say the universe started with a big bang, this prompts the further question ‘What created the bang?’ Indeed, if the origin of life were truly spontaneous, this would constitute what religious people would call a miracle. Accordingly, this claim in itself resembles not so much science as the superstition that Dawkins derides.

Moreover, since science essentially takes us wherever the evidence leads, the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research — which have revealed the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life — have thrown into doubt the theory that life emerged spontaneously in a random universe.

These findings have given rise to a school of scientists promoting the theory of Intelligent Design, which suggests that some force embodying purpose and foresight lay behind the origin of the universe.

While this theory is, of course, open to vigorous counter-argument, people such as Prof Dawkins and others have gone to great lengths to stop it being advanced at all, on the grounds that it denies scientific evidence such as the fossil record and is therefore worthless.

Yet distinguished scientists have been hounded and their careers jeopardised for arguing that the fossil record has got a giant hole in it. Some 570 million years ago, in a period known as the Cambrian Explosion, most forms of complex animal life emerged seemingly without any evolutionary trail. These scientists argue that only ‘rational agents’ could have possessed the ability to design and organise such complex systems.

Whether or not they are right (and I don’t know), their scientific argument about the absence of evidence to support the claim that life spontaneously created itself is being stifled — on the totally perverse grounds that this argument does not conform to the rules of science which require evidence to support a theory.

As a result of such arrogance, the West — the crucible of reason — is turning the clock back to a pre-modern age of obscurantism, dogma and secular witch-hunts. Far from upholding reason, science itself has become unreasonable. So when Prof Dawkins fulminates against ‘new age’ irrationality, it is the image of pots and kettles that comes irresistibly to mind.