Oprah Winfrey has spent roughly four decades helping Americans discover who they really are. Apparently, the job isn't finished.
Next April, the 72-year-old former talk-show queen will descend on the Las Vegas Sphere for "AHA," a four-performance extravaganza featuring music, poetry, storytelling, and what its promoters call the ultimate “aha” moment.
What happens when you look inside and don't find any light? What happens when your 'authentic self' turns out to be selfish, foolish, or cruel?
Winfrey calls the production the culmination of her life's work.
Culmination is an interesting word.
After 25 seasons of "The Oprah Winfrey Show," a magazine, a book club, her own television network, countless spiritual teachers, wellness programs, podcasts, and several decades of encouraging Americans to discover their authentic selves, one wonders what remains to be discovered.
Have Winfrey's followers finally accumulated enough wisdom? Will the great journey toward self-actualization at last be complete? Or is there another missing piece of the human soul that requires an enormous LED screen to locate?
Sphere of influence
This is familiar territory for Winfrey. As early as 2001, she was charging $185 for all-day Live Your Best Life workshops. Two years later, she brought the program to Seattle, where 2,700 admirers assembled for seven hours of inspirational instruction.
A reporter covering a 2003 session in Seattle described a spiritual revival, complete with a congregation and a preacher wearing diamonds and high heels.
In 2014 came an eight-city arena tour called "The Life You Want Weekend," with spiritual advisers, exercises in self-discovery, and corporate sponsors. Another arena wellness tour followed in 2020.
So there is nothing particularly surprising about Winfrey selling enlightenment in Las Vegas. The Sphere is a perfectly plausible venue for her particular brand of uplift.
Nor is there anything inherently hypocritical about charging people to help them improve themselves. The more interesting question is what Winfrey has been teaching all these years and whether her extraordinary life actually supports it.
The preacher girl
Oprah Winfrey is a remarkable American success story.
Born in rural Mississippi in 1954, she endured poverty, instability, and sexual abuse before becoming one of the most successful broadcasters in television history. Her rise required tremendous determination, but determination alone doesn't explain it.
Winfrey possessed an extraordinary gift for communication. She could listen to a stranger with such apparent concentration that millions of people watching at home felt included in the conversation. She understood instinctively where the emotional center of a story lay. She could coax a confession, recognize a moment of vulnerability, or make a famous person seem briefly ordinary.
The origins of that talent are worth examining.
Oprah grew up in the Baptist church. Her grandmother taught her to read, using the Bible among other texts. By the age of 3, Oprah was standing before congregations reciting verses about the Resurrection.
The women in the front pews told her grandmother that the little girl was gifted. Winfrey heard this often enough that she began to believe it.
Her Christianity was no casual inheritance. In a 2015 interview with AARP, Winfrey recalled being baptized around 8 years old, after agonizing for days over whether she was prepared to renounce sin.
"And, my God, did I take it seriously!" she recalled.
Indeed, she described herself as "a zealot who irritated every one of my third-grade friends." Her classmates had a nickname for her: "the preacher girl."
Soon she was performing poetry and sermons in churches around Nashville. In an interview with the Academy of Achievement, Winfrey traced her broadcasting career directly to those childhood performances.
But Christianity gave Winfrey more than her first audience.
A child of God
By her own account, Christianity gave Winfrey the confidence to imagine a future radically different from the one her circumstances seemed to promise.
At 14, after years of sexual abuse, Winfrey became pregnant. She has spoken about the shame and despair she experienced, including thoughts of ending her life. In that same AARP interview, she recalled turning to God in her desperation. If she was going to die, she reasoned, God would have to take her life. Otherwise, she would live and somehow find a way through.
She survived. Her baby, born prematurely, did not.
What stands out in her account is that she didn't describe suddenly discovering some unsuspected reservoir of inner strength. She described appealing to God.
Growing up without a father had made the preacher's assurance that God was her Father especially powerful. She took it literally. Jesus, she reasoned, was her brother.
In a 2015 podcast appearance, Winfrey explained that believing she was a child of God, and that she could do all things through Christ, gave her confidence even when she felt alone and unloved. She credited that relationship with God for helping make her the person she became.
From Christ to 'Christ consciousness'
Winfrey has never disavowed the Christian faith of her childhood. When explaining how she survived those early years and became who she is, she continues to credit the old-fashioned Christianity she grew up with.
But the eclectic, New Age-inflected spirituality of higher consciousness, personal truth, and divinity within the self that she has since built into a billion-dollar empire represents a very different theology from the one expressed in Philippians 4:13.
Perhaps its clearest expression came in 2008, when Winfrey hosted a series of online seminars with spiritual writer Eckhart Tolle, whose book "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose" she had selected for her book club.
During the seminars, Winfrey recalled hearing a preacher describe God as jealous when she was in her late 20s. The idea troubled her. How could an all-loving, omnipresent God also be jealous? She said the experience began a search for something beyond doctrine. She had finally come to understand Jesus as a teacher of "Christ consciousness," a way of awakening to a divine presence within.
It's easy to see the appeal of this more accommodating Jesus. But one wonders how well such a theology would have served that desperate, lost 14-year-old.
RELATED: Your body isn’t God: Jen Hatmaker’s New Age lies exposed
Emma McIntyre | Getty Images
The gift of self
Transformation in Christ famously requires a kind of death. The ultimate victory comes at the price of surrender.
The gospel according to Oprah offers an altogether different revelation: You already possess everything you need to become your best self.
Winfrey was unusually well equipped to preach it. She knew the power of personal testimony and understood how a painful experience could become a story of transformation. Her television program had long featured confessions, reconciliations, and dramatic changes of heart. Increasingly, these became lessons in how to live.
And there is much to admire in her message. Self-examination, gratitude, and the effort to overcome destructive habits are worthwhile pursuits. Nor is there anything dishonest about charging for guidance.
But the promise of self-discovery has a peculiar problem: How do you know when you've discovered enough?
Somewhere within you is a truer, better, more fulfilled version of yourself. A book helps you glimpse it. A guru reveals another obstacle. A workshop uncovers another wound. You experience an awakening, only to discover that another breakthrough awaits.
There is always another aha moment.
The way and the truth
Christianity's central revelation, by contrast, concerns something that has already happened: Christ came, died, and rose. Believers may spend their lives struggling to understand and live according to it, but they aren't waiting for Christianity's next installment.
And Christianity makes demands that Winfrey's therapeutic spirituality tends to soften. It insists that truth exists independently of our preferences, and that some of our desires may be wrong.
What happens when you look inside and don't find any light? What happens when your "authentic self" turns out to be selfish, foolish, or cruel?
These questions are particularly awkward in Winfrey's case.
She knows where she found the strength to survive. What is less clear is whether the spirituality she now offers millions could have provided the same strength.
Perhaps Winfrey is a prophet who misunderstands herself.
She preaches the dignity of the individual, the possibility of redemption, the power of hope, and the conviction that suffering need not determine one's future. Her own life is persuasive evidence for these truths. Yet the faith she credits with making that life possible located its source outside herself.
For decades, Winfrey has told Americans that the answers are already inside them. Next April, they can finally discover those answers on one of the world's largest LED screens.
Tickets start at $145.