{"id":47,"date":"2008-07-17T12:04:08","date_gmt":"2008-07-17T12:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/07\/the-gospel-of-saint-oprah.html"},"modified":"2008-07-17T12:04:08","modified_gmt":"2008-07-17T12:04:08","slug":"the-gospel-of-saint-oprah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/07\/the-gospel-of-saint-oprah.html","title":{"rendered":"The Gospel of Saint Oprah?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Oprah<\/span>Speaking of book clubs, Oprah Winfrey has not only inspired a cult-like following–and a book by my religion writing colleague Marcia Nelson, called “The Gospel According to Oprah”–but now she has the sort of Christian critics that real<\/u> cult leaders attract. According to this RNS story <\/a>by Adelle Banks…<\/p>\n

Some evangelical Christians have voiced alarm that Winfrey is introducing the 46 million viewers who watch her each week to nontraditional spirituality they don’t condone. In May, two dozen Christian newspapers pooled their resources to publish an article titled “Oprah’s `gospel'” that prompted higher readership and more letters to the editor than any story some of the individual papers had ever published.
\nIn a first-of-its-kind venture, the evangelical newspapers hired Colorado writer and editor Steve Rabey to write the story. “For some Christians who have considered themselves part of Oprah’s electronic family, her sins against evangelical orthodoxy have increased in number and seriousness,” Rabey said.
\nIn recent months, Southern Baptist newspaper editors also have written editorials declaring “It’s time for Christians to `just say no’ to the big ‘O'” and calling her a source of “foolish twitter and twaddle.” And Charisma, a prominent charismatic and Pentecostal magazine, ran a story in its July issue with the headline “Oprah’s Strange New Gospel.'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is this fair to a woman revered by plenty of good Christian folk, and someone who describes herself as a Baptist from her roots? My colleagues over at Beliefnet’s “Idol Chatter” blog on pop culture have more dirt here<\/a>…
\nThe best insight, for my money, is from Marcia Nelson, who traces the discomfort with Oprah’s popularity and influence back to the late 1980s and the heyday of the conservative Christian movement:<\/p>\n

“Back then she got pretty much lambasted the way she is being lambasted now, for telling us what to believe and telling us the wrong thing to believe in, according to conservative Christians,” said Nelson.
\nBut Nelson, who studied a year of Winfrey’s shows, differs with those who call Winfrey’s spiritual ideas “New Age.” She says Winfrey would be more related to the “New Thought” movement, which is more mainstream, focusing on positive thinking as a spiritual tool rather than crystals, for example. “I absolutely regard her as a Christian but … she’s one of those capacious Christians,” Nelson said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the end, I suspect this will be about as effective as boycotting Disney Land, or Harry Potter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaking of book clubs, Oprah Winfrey has not only inspired a cult-like following–and a book by my religion writing colleague Marcia Nelson, called “The Gospel According to Oprah”–but now she has the sort of Christian critics that real cult leaders attract. According to this RNS story by Adelle Banks… Some evangelical Christians have voiced alarm…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Gospel of Saint Oprah? - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/07\/the-gospel-of-saint-oprah.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Gospel of Saint Oprah? - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Speaking of book clubs, Oprah Winfrey has not only inspired a cult-like following–and a book by my religion writing colleague Marcia Nelson, called “The Gospel According to Oprah”–but now she has the sort of Christian critics that real cult leaders attract. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}