BEWAREofBigOchurch

Oprah! Old soul, glamorous earth mother, font of good intentions! Oh, shimmery-lipped, wisecracking, wise-speaking, humble-pie-eating mistress of your own fate! Won't you preach us your success story, chapter and verse?

Bathed in studio sunlight, swathed in peach and fresh as morning, Oprah orates her scripture of love. If you haven't seen ``The Oprah Winfrey Show'' in a while, you're missing something. This is the Word, people, wrapped in the advice of a ``spiritualist,'' a ``life strategist,'' a self-love guru and a host of other empowering experts -- disciples, if you will, of the Church of Oprah.

Last month Oprah Winfrey began a series of segments called ``Lifestyle Makeovers," devoted to you, you, you. She's touting it as ``a revolution of spirit.'' She also announced that this summer she'll lead ``personal growth summits'' across the country. With tickets starting at $20, salvation has never been cheaper.

Winfrey didn't earn the name ``Deepak Oprah'' for nothing. Since 1998 she has included in each show a segment called ``Remembering Your Spirit,'' which tends to feature serene scenes of once-harried women counseling children or meditating amid trees.

into $700 million by age 46, who turned excess poundage into a succession of dramatic weight losses? ``Oprah'' is the top-rated syndicated daytime talk show, with an average of 7.5 million viewers this season, holding steady from last year. The faithful have cried with her, shared her journal with her, witnessed her relationship with forever fianc� Stedman Graham. They've devoured her tale of misery and mastery.

``Dear Oprah, I want you to make over my whole life,'' one desperate woman read aloud from her own letter in a 1998 show. ``I want a new job in a new city, a new apartment, a new guy absolutely, as well as a new look . . . I can't shake this overwhelming feeling of hopelessness."

``Oh, absolutely not,'' the woman said. Then added, as if she wasn't quite convinced, ``I mean, it'd be great if you could. . . ."

Two years later, with the advent of ``Lifestyle Makeovers,'' Winfrey has apparently decided she can. With help from a slate of experts, she promises to improve guests' souls as well as their bodies and finances. From the first ``Lifestyle Makeover":

Life can be a ``magical journey,'' says ``life coach'' Cheryl Richardson --before teaching one woman to achieve bliss by, among other things, sewing a quilt and (in the next installment) cleaning her desk. This is part of what Richardson calls ``extreme self-care."

The experts are crucial to the crusade. They share tales of hard knocks and revelations and they have become trusted sources of wisdom. Their books skyrocket onto best-seller lists; they take mail from viewers and write columns for Oprah's magazine, O. They offer pearls like ``You've got to get real to heal!'' and Winfrey responds with her favorite affirmation: ``This is big!"

They don't, apparently, like to talk about the ``Oprah'' show. Winfrey herself was not available for comment on this story and one by one her gurus declined interviews. Harpo productions seems considerably invested in controlling boss Winfrey's public image -- Harpo employees sign agreements restricting them from talking or writing about Winfrey. Ever.

But the gurus' beliefs have already been made public -- in the testimony of their appearances, in the scripture of their best-selling books. Mind you, taken together they don't form one consistent theology. They connect spirituality with financial advice; therapy with digging down deep ``inside of your soul.'' But buffet-style belief is what the ravenous American appetite craves. So here goes. The gospel according to Oprah and the apostles:

Dr. Phil promises to Tell It Like It Is on ``Oprah,'' and he does so with confrontation and compassion. It's a tough love that Dr. Phil doles out -- advice for smart women who aren't acting smart. Wake up, woman! Treat yourself right!

``Do you know what you want? Do you know what healthy is?'' he asks a woman in the audience who recently broke off a three-year affair with a married man.

Tough, tough love. Difficult questions. Little time, alas, to dwell on the answers. One guest has hardly chastised the inner demons that have turned her off sex when we're off! Next dilemma!

Even in a quick-fix culture, the glibness of these solutions is startling. But they serve as a reminder of the vow that Winfrey made in 1994 -- to pick at wounds for therapeutic purposes only. Television critics remember that Oprah set the voyeuristic template for Jerry Springer in the late '80s and early '90s. In her much-publicized conversion, Winfrey declared she'd take the high road. No more baring of souls unless it could be used for good.

And that's what Dr. Phil is for. He turns lemons into lemonade. Lately his focus on the show has been romantic relationships, coinciding nicely with the release of his new book, ``Relationship Rescue."

Here is Oprah with Gary Zukav, a slight, 50-ish man with the perpetual closemouthed smile of a Buddha. Oprah has said that Zukav's 1989 book, ``The Seat of the Soul,'' is her second-favorite book, next to the Bible. That's mighty praise, and Zukav, whose latest book is ``Soul Stories,'' tries his darnedest to make his wisdom available; he's on her show about once a month. His purpose is to delve into audience members' souls, and he does this through patient repetition of certain basic principles.

Zukav talks slowly and stiffly, stressing ev-er-y syl-la-ble like a grade-school speech therapist. Except, with his strange pronunciation, his fixed smile and his slow response time, Zukav doesn't seem quite human. Oprah says he lives on a mountain. She says he just bought a TV for the first time. Zukav says when Oprah first called him, about 10 years ago, he didn't know who she was.

But we digress. Back on the show, Zukav encourages Carey, who fears abandonment and has spells of rage, to continue to look inside herself to examine her ``inner dynamics'' and perform ``significant inner work."

``When you really look at your fears and you heal them,'' Zukav explains to Oprah and the audience later, ``you can look at yourself, and you'll be beautiful."

All of this talk makes some students of more traditional religions uncomfortable. On ``Oprah,'' sex addicts, compulsive shoppers and rape victims are healed by soulwork. Therapy and spirituality have merged. This is religion as self-help. This is religion as ``What's best for me?"

A lot of this self-help business, says William Dinges, associate professor of religious studies at Catholic University, is the ``instrumentalizing of religion, of (people) using religion for their own therapeutic needs.'' It's ``a benign but nevertheless selfish form of introspection and spiritual self-absorption."

Maybe. But, hey, it feels good. Gary Zukav teaches that we must learn from this ``earth school.'' He cautions us not to be resentful of ``the universe.'' He and Oprah devoted one whole show to karma.

This is really the best part of all. If you didn't realize it before, you didn't have the courage to dream. You can be a fully actualized human being. Or, as Oprah put it once:

This is a good thing. Heck, even pop culture critic Joe Queenan thinks this is OK, and he's the guy who trashes just about anything with a soft underbelly. ``Anything that raises the human spirit is basically good, even if it's false,'' Queenan says. Oprah is ``sort of our era's version of Ozzie and Harriet."

Even Elizabeth Coady agrees that Winfrey taps into something. A former employee of Harpo, Coady butted against that lifetime confidentiality agreement when she attempted to write a book about Winfrey two years ago. ``She does do good,'' she says grudgingly. ``I saw people's lives affected. I saw people truly touched. She gives a lot of people the belief that there's some magic in the world."

So, for all the people who want magic, who are convinced that they were meant for a life that's better, happier, richer, there's Oprah favorite Suze Orman. Orman, a financial-advice author and up until recently a regular on the show, has a regular column in O.

Orman's idea is basically this: If you get yourself in order spiritually, you'll receive the money you richly deserve. (``Money is a living entity and responds to energy, including yours,'' she explains in ``The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom.") This is Norman Vincent Peale, plus. What's plus is the sense of entitlement. Chapter 7 of ``9 Steps": ``Being open to receive all that you are meant to have." The metaphysical merges with the unabashedly material.

This concept really bothers Vicki Abt. A Pennsylvania State University professor of sociology and American studies, Abt published a study on Oprah and other talk shows back when Winfrey was offering less empowering television in the early '90s. She wrote the book ``Coming After Oprah: Cultural Fallout in the Age of the TV Talk Show."

``We don't reach self-actualization, most of us,'' Abt says. ``America and Oprah Winfrey are popularizing this ridiculous, naive optimism that life isn't tough or that life can get better. . . .

``The fact is, we don't know how to fix the human dilemma. And this notion that there's an easy fix, or a fix at all, doesn't help Americans."

But Vicki Abt, isn't that what Americans are best at? Isn't it good to strive to be all we can be, to dream, to go for the gold? Shouldn't we visualize ourselves rid of fear and anger, creatures of love in touch with our souls and the metaphysical world, living richly -- but simply?

``Most of us are mediocre at best -- average by definition -- and being exposed to this nonsense makes us more mediocre,'' Abt says.

Posting Note: The inclusion of this Washington Post article on this web site is in no way an attempt to discredit, defame or slander the subject of the article or the "LifeStyle MakeOver" broadcast/seminar productions.� The language evidenced by the article's author is openly sarcastic and is not obvioulsy written from a Christian perspective.�� In that this web site considers the NewAge and non-Christain spiritual character of the Oprah Winfrey broadcasts and seminars to be 'spiritually' perilous in substance and nature, this article is presented as a comparative text to the other commentaries on Oxbows.com .

"For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine.� Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.� They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths." {2 Tim. 4:3-4}

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