Flocking to the Church of Oprah

A prophet walks among us and her name is Oprah. You know her as a television talk show host, one of the most popular, successful and recognizable women of our time. But make no mistake, she also is a teacher, sent to Earth to spread the word.

Perhaps it is only fitting that a 21st century wise man is a woman and that her chief medium is electronic. Buddha might have taken to the airwaves, had they been available. Gifted with profound moral insight and exceptional rapport with her followers, Oprah Winfrey has grown from a masterful communicator into an inspirational phenomenon. Even a cynic would have to acknowledge that she appears to be driven by a passion for the betterment of humanity.

She has come by her revelations, profound and otherwise, through the hard work of introspection. Her daily television program, the highest-rated talk show of all time, reaches 22 million American viewers and is seen in 160 foreign countries; her Web site, Oprah.com, is visited by 1.3 million users a day; and the premiere issue of O: the Oprah Magazine sold 1.6 million copies and more than half a million subscriptions. Still, she is using yet another venue to share her perceptions of the examined life. This month, she is bringing her Personal Growth Summit to 5,000-seat arenas in four cities, including Los Angeles, where she’ll speak at the Shrine Auditorium on Thursday.

The tour started Monday in Detroit at the Fox Theater, a rococo movie palace built in the 1920s. Two days before the summer solstice, it was still daylight as the audience began to arrive for the 8 p.m. seminar. They came from the inner city and the suburbs, were predominantly white, in their 30s and 40s, and female.

If it is true that women dress for other women, then they did so with care. There was no denim in sight, no outfits that looked like they’re usually worn to drive carpool, just women in pretty summer dresses and stylish separates. Their appearance signaled anticipation; they dressed for a special experience.

When Elaine Bennett crossed the border from her home in Windsor, Ontario, her makeup perfectly applied and every hair in place, the customs official took one look at her and said, “Let me guess. You’re going to see Oprah.”

She was, and to share the evening with her friend Janet Graham, a 36-year-old counselor of abused women and children. “Oprah is a good mentor for us as black women,” Graham said. “She’s been through a lot and nothing’s been handed to her. There are just more obstacles for a black woman to overcome and she’s used where she came from and all she’s experienced to help others. It’s inspiring. How big do you dream, especially if you’ve never seen anyone who looks like you reach that high? Because of her, other women will reach higher. She shows you how to be giving and loving to people in your life. Her message is, in essence, we’re all connected, and that has nothing to do with race.”

Her Social Agenda Is What Draws Them

Graham’s thoughtful explanation of why she follows Oprah is typical of many here. Forty women who hired a bus and driver to take them to Detroit from their hometown near Toronto, the 32-year-old student and part-time bartender who flew in from Minneapolis, and a group of 17 “girlfriends,” ages 25 to 75, who traveled from a Cleveland suburb in two vans and a car, all admit to some hero worship. But, when questioned, they speak more about the substance of Oprah’s social agenda and what it has meant to them than of how much they just love her. Ricky Martin or Britney Spears could undoubtedly sell 5,000 tickets as quickly (Detroit, Los Angeles and Atlanta all sold out less than a week after the summits were announced in O), but ask their fans why they came, and celebrity adoration probably would be paramount.

“We all raised our kids watching Oprah, admired her and wanted to be like her,” said Anne Cole, one of those from Ohio. “We’re all into personal growth. Being a better mother, person, friend, those are things that are important to all of us.”

Her friend Nancy Van Ness, a high school English teacher, added, “I like the fact that she encourages women to search for the best they can be.”

That is the theme of the evening, as well as the mission of the bimonthly magazine, which was launched with a May-June issue, a co-venture of Winfrey’s Harpo Entertainment Group and Hearst Magazines, the publisher of Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan. A quote from Oprah runs across the top of O’s first table of contents page: “I believe you’re here to become more of yourself, to live your best life.” (That’s here, as in here on Earth.)

In her debut column, titled Let’s Talk, she defined her mission again: “How do you use your life to best serve yourself and extend that to the world? How far can you grow? What will it take for you to fulfill your potential? My hope is that this magazine will help you lead a more productive life, one in which you feel a sense of vitality, cooperation, harmony, balance and reverence within yourself and in all your encounters.”

So if Winfrey’s worldview is so clearly stated in the magazine and if her show and her Web site regularly feature information that manifests it, why say the same thing, again, in person? The Personal Growth Summits are a promotional vehicle for a magazine that, admittedly, doesn’t need any. The summits are comparable to Vanity Fair’s star-studded Oscar fetes or the elaborate launch party Talk magazine held on the Statue of Liberty’s island in New York harbor--events staged to garner publicity.

‘She’s Always Wanted to Be a Teacher’

And yet, Winfrey doesn’t seem to want much of that. She didn’t make herself available for interviews. Alyce Alston, the publisher of O, spoke for her, saying Winfrey wanted to do something that would give her the opportunity to practice the personal growth message that’s at the magazine’s core. “She’s always wanted to be a teacher. This is her way of doing that, which is what she does best. I think it’s her way of supporting the magazine and showing her commitment to it. I think she wants to try doing this, see how it feels. Then she’ll decide if it will become a part of her mission.”

Winfrey knows one false move would make her the target of criticism, so she’s careful not to flog the magazine or the summits on her TV show. With tickets priced from $20 to $30, the Personal Growth Summits don’t seem designed to make money either. All profits will go to Oprah’s Angel Network, a charity that has raised $3.5 million to fund college scholarships for needy students by pooling spare change that her viewers leave at collection points throughout the country. In partnership with Paul Newman’s Newman’s Own food business and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, the Angel Network has begun granting $50,000 “Use Your Life Awards” on every Monday’s show to a person who tries to improve the lives of others.

Her disciples certainly don’t think the Personal Growth Summits are overkill. Michelle Gannon, a 46-year-old Michigan homemaker who came to the Fox with her sister, said, “We connect with her spiritual quest. I think she’s on a mission from God.”

Is this to be a religious experience? Have these women come to the church of Oprah?

Tina Turner thunders over the theater’s sound system, singing “Simply the Best,” as women forage in gift bags placed at every seat. Winfrey has given them a beige and green canvas tote stuffed with a copy of the magazine; a scented candle; a pen provided by one of the evening’s corporate sponsors, Microsoft; a brochure from Ford, another sponsor; a cotton jersey nightshirt with the magazine’s logo “West of the Heart” and a blank notebook, which everyone familiar with the Oprah canon knows is meant to be used as a personal journal.

These aren’t items a man would likely treasure, but no one pretends that this evening is designed to appeal to both genders. Some men have been brought along but they are greatly outnumbered by middle-aged mothers with their grown daughters and groups of women who have made this a girls’ night out. Nothing Winfrey will say in a program that focuses on self-actualization is delivered at a pitch only the feminine ear detects. But she is unapologetic about wanting to empower American women. In fact, she has given them a new vocabulary, one in which soul, spirit, journey, gratitude, inner strength and belief system reign as buzzwords.

A male voice introduces her and, suddenly, Winfrey strides onstage, dressed in a brilliant coral shirt, matching trousers and a flowing coat, her image mirrored on three large video screens. In one spontaneous move, the crowd rises to its feet, applauding. She welcomes them with her familiar, high-wattage smile, then, after a brief greeting, gets right down to business, instructing the audience to use the notebook and pen. “Write down your top three beliefs about yourself,” she orders. “What is true about you?”

The purpose of the exercise is to illustrate the first life lesson Winfrey has come to impart: You become what you believe.

“If you want to be bigger, change your belief. What is possible for me in my life is also possible for you in your life. That doesn’t mean you’ll wind up with a talk show. But you need to figure out what you should be doing.”

And so it goes. One life lesson after another--rules to live by, to grow by. Winfrey has the theatrical know-how and charisma to stage a revival meeting, to whip the crowd into a frenzy Elmer Gantry would envy. She doesn’t do that. She is deliberately low-key. She wanders into places that are just this side of religious: “I’m defined by my spirit, which comes from a greater spirit,” but she stops short of proselytizing.

“I’m not here to preach to anyone about how to run your life,” she says. “I just know what worked for me and I’m here to share it. I’m not here for ego purposes. I feel the calling to share what I know and I hope it will be well-received. I’m hoping that you leave this place feeling a sense of empowerment that comes from inside. It doesn’t come from me, because I don’t have any power over your life. But you do.”

She Strives to Make the World Better

She’s ingested this human-potential seed so completely that she can easily spit it out, in full bloom. She doesn’t claim her message is new, only that it may heal the heart-sickness so many of her fans write her about in the 10,000 letters and 4,000 e-mails she receives a week. She’s synthesized from the best, from Eastern and Western philosophy and the gurus of New Age enlightenment.

It’s easy to believe that, one day, Winfrey woke up and said to herself, “OK, I’m richer than God, as influential as Walt Disney, but what’s the point?” So she began a sincere quest for meaning. Having concluded that making the planet a better place was her reason for being, she has assumed that such a path would be rewarding for everyone.

It’s hard to believe, when surrounded by Oprah’s acolytes, but some women don’t want to take a spiritual journey to create their best selves. The Oprah backlash is nothing like the enmity Martha Stewart inspires among women who have no interest in making pies of organic apples grown on their own compost-nurtured trees, but there are women who are happy just doing their jobs well, raising their kids and reading trashy novels in bed on Sunday morning. Must they seek “a sense of balance and wholeness” too? To them, this relentless march of self-discovery sounds exhausting. Yet anyone who’s already satisfied in life, who doesn’t share Oprah’s search for purpose, can (and probably does) change the channel.

For others, it is obvious that Winfrey has tapped that spiritual hunger that makes people ask, “Is this all there is?” Women who have the husband, the house, the children, the career, sometimes do feel empty, and she has let them know they’re not alone. She introduces another level of thought, one that human beings have sought since they got up off all fours.

She Doesn’t Equate Money With Happiness

So much of the human-potential movement has used the promise of economic prosperity as bait. That has been integral to the presentations of Tony Robbins, Marianne Williamson and Terry Cole-Whittaker. In recent years, the most inviolable standards in America have been essentially marketplace values. Is it making any money? Are you making any money? In that climate, all sorts of cynical, hedonistic and nihilistic behavior flourishes.

Winfrey asks, Are you happy? Do you have peace of mind? Is your life worthwhile? Who else in the public eye poses these questions? Her competitors’ shows revolve around such revelations as, “Honey, I know you thought I was just a defrocked nun with a testosterone problem, but I’m actually a man and I’m sleeping with your grandmother.” Winfrey didn’t know what the effect on her ratings would be, but a couple of years ago she went ahead with what she called “Change Your Life TV,” telling people that their lives are what they make of them. She shouts and screams from every rooftop, “Be better! Make a difference!” That challenge, coupled with large doses of common sense, is hard to disdain.

Having risen above childhood poverty and abuse, Winfrey regularly tells her audience that if she’d listened to all the people who told her she couldn’t be a success on television because she was female, black or fat, she’d never have gotten anywhere. Her ability to inspire isn’t lessened by her continuing struggles with the weight demon.

Nor does her wealth, reported to be $725 million, make her inaccessible. She’s more likely than anyone else to mention it, as a sort of reality check. She’s been successful as a talk show host partially because she projects a perfect best-friend quality. Open, self-revelatory, funny and warm, she’s just folks. But she doesn’t hide that she’s folks with four homes and her own Gulfstream IV. “I am so rich, I cannot believe it,” she says in Detroit, adding, “Every issue y’all have had, I’ve had it too. That’s what money does, it magnifies everything.”

In a long question-and-answer period following her lecture, questions repeatedly come from women who feel their friends and family are taking advantage of them. Winfrey knows all about that, since relatives she never knew she had suddenly materialized, suggesting that she could now afford to, and should, support them.

The amazing thing is that the women who are asked to watch their neighbors’ children or to drive their widowed father to the supermarket after work believe Winfrey understands exactly how put-upon they feel. And if the answer they’re looking for wasn’t about becoming their best selves or developing a vision for their lives, they’ll listen anyway and they’ll try to understand.

After all, she’s Oprah.