What's Wrong With Oprah?

Frequently in my public and private speaking, I am prone to refer to those who are so outrageously wrong that they not only don't know the answer, but don't understand the question, as "Oprah."

I am also prone to refer to everything that is wrong with modern American culture as the "Oprahization of society," or to speak in term of "our Oprahized society."

Guys get it.

But women, and especially teenage women, are prone to look at me as if I am the proud possessor of three heads. After all, isn't Oprah Winfrey the epitome of everything that is good about America? A minority that "made it"? A progenitor of homespun common sense? Someone who is generous with her goods and who seems to be on the cutting edge of every significant issue?

All of that couldn't possibly be further from the truth, though admittedly, that is the carefully crafted image of Oprah that has been pushed upon an unwitting (witless?) public.

A host of articles, stretching back for years, has begun to ask the question, "What is wrong with Oprah Winfrey?" And various writers have stumbled upon the truth that she has far more affinity with a New Age cult leader than with a journalist or the modern Harriet Tubman.

A WAPT-TV16 (ABC, Jackson, MS) story touches several angles of this story: Oprah is often accused of starting her own religious movement, she is not a monotheist, she tends toward pantheism, and she even has promoted the idea that man made God. Oprah even went into business to promote the books of one Echart Tolle, a man said to have a "shady, uncheckable past" who writes books filled with "gobbledygook." She has also promoted the works of New Age gurus Marianne Williamson (author of the occult A Course in Miracles) and Rhonda Byrne (author of The Secret, based, knowingly or not, on the teachings of the Rosicrucian Order).





Southern Baptist leader Al Mohler summed it up best when he said that "Oprah has become a high priestess and icon of the psychologization of American society. When she features prominent New Age figures on her television show, she helps to mainstream New Age influences and philosophies among millions of Americans. Her substitution of spirituality for biblical Christianity, her promotion of forgiveness without atonement, and her references to a god 'without labels' puts her at the epicenter of a seismic cultural earthquake."

And that seismic cultural earthquake has essentially three prongs:

New Age Spirituality - Oprah Winfrey denies that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation. She states plainly, "there are diverse ways of being in the world" and "many ways of going toward God." "There couldn't possibly be just one way. What about Jesus?" Oprah favorite Marianne Williamson denies the reality of sin and calls clinging to the "old rugged cross" a "pathetic error."

Oprah Winfrey is consumed in complete moral and spiritual blindness. If she cannot master the basic point that there is one way to salvation, she is not qualified to lecture anybody on any moral point whatsoever. The Bible is clear: spiritual blindness always has moral and ethical implications (Eph. 4:18-19).

Beyond denial of Christ, Oprah pushes every newfangled spiritual fad that comes along - each newer than the last and each doomed to fail just as the last did. She promises fulfillment, success, wholeness with her New Age, quasi-occult philosophies, but if ever once she had stumbled onto the truth there would be no need for the continued introduction of new spiritualities. Like all false teachers, she is a "cloud without water, a tree without roots, a wandering star" (Jude 1:12-13).

Feminism Lite - Oprah Winfrey is perhaps the most devious and evil personality of modern American culture precisely because she dresses up America's most destructive and neurotic error in a cloak of respectability. Oprah is the primary peddler of feminism to the unthinking masses, who do not even recognize her as a feminist, and her daily doses of domestic violence mythology, cheating husbands, you-go-girl cheer sessions, new morality, and goddess exaltation makes the spurious claims and psychological orientation of feminism so familiar that the culture now accepts feminism implicitly - as unthinkingly as if it were part of the cultural furniture.

Yet it is undeniably true that every single assertion of modern feminism is 100% provably false - from the sexual violence mythology to the wage gap to the essential sameness of the sexes. And it is undeniably true that those who willingly accept error into their thinking - both Oprah and her audience - forsake the common grace of God for doing so (Jonah 2:8, KJV).

And do not think that Oprah is benignly mistaken. She is pushing an agenda that is occasionally revealed. A recent rhubarb exploded when Oprah began touting the idea that there is a new phenomenon involving women leaving their husbands for lesbian relationships. Based on the immorality of a few Hollyweirdos, Oprah declares that there is a trend "in the air" which will necessarily make men even more irrelevant than they are today (is that possible?). The only problem is that there is not only no evidence of such a trend, but there is a disclaimer contained within the article itself stating that statistics of this "trend" are "hard to come by."

But of course, given the so-called "Oprah effect," it is certain that the incidence of such behavior will now begin to increase among the witless wonders that read, believe, and do anything that Oprah requires. And that is the beauty of Oprah - she is no longer a commentator on the culture, she is a molder of the culture itself. The story of women leaving their husbands for lesbian relationships was an obvious attempt to move behavior in that direction. And she is quite effective in moving those witless wonders, as her endorsement of another empty suit, Barack Obama, is estimated to have benefited him to the tune of over 1 million votes.

Oprahmorality - Finally, Oprah Winfrey is dangerous because she furnishes a substitute ethical framework for the unthinking and immoral to strive to achieve in place of genuine morality. While she is implicitly encouraging women to mentally and emotionally divorce themselves from their husbands, she is assuring them that the "real" problem in the world is "sweat shop labor," American-ranched beef, vaccines, or something equally as banal. While she speaks of "God" and "spirituality," she flaunts and openly immoral lifestyle in her personal life.

A daily diet of fear-mongering, false doctrine, and implicit devaluation of the male and the family cannot but influence easily-led, hormonal women to forsake the hard work of faithfulness and responsibility in favor of some Neverland of "empowerment," "spirituality," and "self-esteem."

It is nor merely the denial of morality that defines the web of false doctrine that is Oprah; it is also the substitution of a false morality for the true. Oprah's constant irrational appeals, fear-mongering, and tweaking of the lowest-common-neurosis among the androids that make up her regular audience actually makes her listenership believe that they are, in fact, abused, and that the most important problems in the world today are racism, sexism, human trafficking, and self-esteem. Genuine morality, of course, is primarily concerned with transforming self, not society (Matt. 7:3-5, Rom. 12:1-3). But to insist that this is so would have the unfortunate effect of infringing upon the self-esteem of Oprah's audience....

When morality is reduced to wearing a ribbon or "raising awareness" or "taking a stand against human trafficking" (a dubious "problem" in the first place, and certainly not something that is solvable by Oprah's audience), then morality and ethics has indeed reached its nadir.

And of course, the wreckage is easily seen by those who are not blind: 67% of divorces each year are filed by women, the members of Oprah's flock, as they indulge themselves in the immoral pursuit of self.

Long ago, the Biblical prophets warned that the last days would be typified by false prophets who would "lead captive foolish women, laden with sins, and led away with diverse lusts" (II Tim. 3:6).

Those who love Christ cannot indulge themselves in the false prophet that is Oprah Winfrey.