Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon is a work, first and foremost, of cultural anthropology. The back cover confirms this fact. Yes, the book is about the incorporations of Oprah. But more significantly, it is an ethnography of “American astonishment,” of what it feels like to live before screens that enlighten and advertise and encompass (the virtual counterpart of living within the effervescent glare of studio lights and perpetual applause). Lofton captures, as few writers can, the everyday magic of our viral time—what, in the ritual grammar of Oprah, are referred to as “Aha! Moments.”

Caroline, for example, witnessed Oprah’s immanence by way of Skype, beamed up and in from a remote location. This forty-one-year-old from Pacific Grove, California, who had once made a decision to be a stay-at-home mother, spoke of her spiritual struggle during the “Best Life Week” that inaugurated The Oprah Winfrey Show in January 2009:

Hi. Twelve years ago I decided to give up my career and stay home with my kids, and I feel very blessed to do that, but there are times when I’m doing laundry and chauffeuring them around that I don’t always feel appreciated. And what I realized after reading the Eckhart Tolle book [is] that I am identifying with being a mother. That was a big aha moment for me. And I would like to create a larger space between realizing when I’m in ego and identifying with the role of being a mother, so that I can be in the present moment and find the peace and the happiness that I would like to be able to attain while I’m doing laundry or having to clean the bathroom and that type of stuff.

Caroline is a sophisticated analyst of her own identity, reading the push and pulls of her own psyche against a structural backdrop of gender and class formation. She is not bitter or resentful over her decision to be a stay-at-home mom as much as she longs to make the decision again, more decisively. After different layers of self-interest have been acknowledged, Caroline seeks to reconcile these differences by integrating them from afar. She is looking for that space that is both inside and outside simultaneously, performing her life but also directing the performance. This is the deferred sense of control that ‘spirituality’ has promised since the antebellum period, born aside the genre of the novel.

The sense I get from Caroline and Lofton’s other informants is that they take a certain pleasure in feeling out of sorts or misplaced or altogether some place else. For this combination of heightened consciousness and soft alienation is both strange and potent. It turns on a dime. It drags down even as it makes way for a transcendental perspective. For whether on stage with Oprah, in the studio with Oprah, or doing any manner of things—from a distance—with Oprah, these individuals receive a narrative gift that perfectly frames their sense of their own individuality.

And this is what I take to be the object of Lofton’s ethnography—the “Aha Moment,” the sense of being part (or is it a part?) of the time of the now. Such absorption, of course, is not new. Dare I say, rather, that such absorption is universal, is the very premise of being a subject in the world. We all gotta serve somebody. And so it is with a million screens of “Change Your Life TV” (and its consummation in OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network). There is both wonder and sanity to all of this enclosure. There is also a powerful congruence of structural possibilities. There is safety and security in Oprah’s sway. For it—Oprahfication—keeps the swift jig of subjectivity from spinning out of control.

What is so incisive about Oprah is its account of onto-commodification and the work involved in “being possessed by possessions.” As Lofton writes, “Oprah offers to us a way to see a mechanism, up close, strings demonstratively exposed, of how contemporary mass culture convinces us of its conveyances.” The mechanism of this particularly virulent strain of biopower is seemingly simple: show, tell, idealize, and sell the spectrum of individuations. A gateway drug that is all but given away. Yet there is always a debt. For, in her “spirit-filled capacity,” writes Lofton, “Oprah supplies an array of products connecting you to the life you want and, more specifically, to the self you need to become to create the life you want.” Spirit, here, refers as much to an impersonal moral force as it does to a vehicle of the will and attendant self-knowledge. This is not so much a point of theological contention for Lofton as an operating assumption that allows her to spin a rather disturbing tale about our late, great secular modernity.

The spirit of the O generates the Emersonian desire of our time: You want to feel that nothing can befall you in life—no disgrace, no calamity—that Oprah could not repair. Standing on the bare ground, your head bathed by blithe light and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism will vanish. You will become transparent to yourself and the world. You will see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulating through you. You are nothing. You are part and particle of Oprah.

This enclosure of the O is a moment of transcendence shared by Oprah, her guests, and her studio and worldwide audiences. It may never really happen. But it doesn’t matter. For what does happen is the overwhelming promise of mediation, the moment when something else will pulse through you and all of you will pulse through it. Complicity, yes, but also the potential for precision and the renewed struggle for leverage.

Over the system the studio announcer announces to the studio audience: “the grim business of your audience lives” is about to end. “I summon you to a hyperlife of laughter and tears and tenderness and rocking socking sensation. Note well. Delfina draws literal life from her audience.” This is Delfina Treadwell, the not-unlike-Oprah talk-show host from Don DeLillo’s Valparaiso (1999). Delfina is a subject who is also a commodity, who gives life to others in order to satiate herself. Delfina understands intuitively, as does Oprah, this cycle of life, referring to her live performances as “my private moments.” “The studio audience restores my life force,” she confesses. “You have to understand. I live in a box in a state of endless replication.”

It would be comforting to know that Oprah, in her Delfina-like knowingness, was in charge. But she is not. She determines us only insofar as we determine her ratings. Her omnipotence feeds upon our improvisation; her cultural agency is not an either/or proposition, and neither is the freedom of those who watch or do not watch her. Whatever Oprah is depends, absolutely, on the freedom of each of her audience members. The self-consciousness of her subjects is Lofton’s working assumption. “Aha!” she exclaims, he exclaims, you exclaim, they exclaim. For Oprah’s audience demands the demonstration, the exposure, and the strings. These are complicated people, epistemologically speaking, as are we all.

Consequently, a necessary exactitude pervades the pages of Oprah, on each a clinical dissection of what Jenny Franchot once called “the interior life.” For everything pivots on the intimacy involved in the rituals of exposure and response. Oprah winks. She nods approvingly. “Aha!” she exclaims, over and over again, looking deep into the camera each and every time. Oprah is in on the joke. Oprah’s audience is in on the joke. We are all in on the joke. And yet we continue to buy.

There is a negativity in all of this Oprahfication, though it is no via negativa but something else—familiar and phantasmagoric. For Oprahfication is, among other things, the shadow cast by centuries of religious history and therapeutic culture, a point deftly made by Lofton in her discussion of such things as the anxious bench of Charles Finney and the World’s Parliament of Religions, New Thought, the Black church, and Protestant journal keeping. Lofton’s analogies between Oprah and American “patterns of religious productivity” are born of a sense of analytic implosion. Acknowledging that Oprah exists in the “excessive specifics” of her “vagaries,” Lofton has no choice but to dwell within her shadow. Oprah, here, is neither liturgical referent nor doctrinal vessel. For this is no mere “metaphoric transference,” David Chidester’s phrase for the fraught act of pulling the so-called secular into the light of religious meaning. On the contrary, Lofton insists upon the impossibility of ever resting easy with either the metaphors or their transference.

Whatever is religious about Oprah, then, is fleetingly glimpsed, seen only when she appears in drag, a preacher queen whose Whitmanic largesse and benevolent hand secure the diversity of (and circulations within) an American order.

In Oprah, Lofton is practicing cultural criticism in a world that does not (and never did) fit into the neat boxes of profane and sacred, lifestyle and liturgy. At a time when “truth” and “cute” serve increasingly similar functions and amount to increasingly similar things, Lofton’s is no mere examination but a relentless documentation of the conceptual vortex from which new categories of thought emanate, new styles of reasoning emerge, and new gods are born.

From a 2003 studio encounter:

Winfrey: It is all yours, Fannie. God bless you.

Fannie: God bless you.

Winfrey: God bless you.

Fannie: God bless you.

Winfrey: God is blessing me right now. He’s blessing me right now. It is a blessing to be able to do this for you.

Fannie: God bless you. Oh, my God. My God, this is unreal, Oh, my God.

Winfrey: I know. But you have the tape. See, you can play it back. It’s really happening.

Whatever is really happening, here and elsewhere, is preserved in Lofton’s kinetic wordy precision—but also resisted, of course, which I take to be at the heart of her discussion of the ‘us’ who live in Oprah’s post-Empire. For it is in and through the line-to-line delight of these pages that an argument is forged. Lofton’s is not a voice crying in the wilderness but one that speaks of and from the mesh of the O. It is representative rather than authoritative, offering neither comfort nor clarity but, in the end, leverage. Words accumulate, circulate, and forge strange ontic indices—supply chain of self, smothered in sale, possessed by its own plurality. But such jest, energy, and unexpected sentence structure offer insight into living after the ruse of privacy has been exposed, self-consciously and celebratorily. For in the course of our modernity, Oprah—herself, her wares, her minions, and the connections between—has come to inhabit, if not altogether suffuse, the space of our psyche. This psyche, of course, does not refer simply to what is going on inside your head, or even to the reality that you posit outside.

Cut to The Delfina Treadwell Show. The studio announcer beckons:

The cameras will swing toward the audience in the course of the show. Not once but many times. Point to yourselves on the giant monitors. I understand the need for this. I encourage this. Wave to yourselves. See yourselves cross that critical divide into some plane of transcendence.

Lofton tells me she shares with Jonathan Z. Smith the view that difference is the beginning of any good conversation. I am going to take her up on that notion and dwell here on a point of disagreement rather than those points, about the wild commingling of religion and consumption, upon which we agree. (Full disclosure:  she and I have been involved in two collaborative projects as well as a handful of other professional ventures together, so we have discussed Oprah, among other subjects, quite a bit already.) The difference here, while an issue of significance, is only a matter of collegial counterpoint. Given the respect I have for Lofton’s interpretive skills, I place my remarks in the category of friendly banter or yakking, not criticism.

Lofton has a grand sense of Oprah’s power. At one point early on she remarks that her gaze is fixed upon the mass media’s “omnipotence”—Oprah’s especially—not on the trivialities of personal idiosyncrasy or the illusions of consumer improvisation. Even those who claim no affinity with Oprah—those who never watched an episode of her talk-show, never followed her book recommendations, never felt compelled to pick up a copy of her magazine for makeover advice, never imagined a celebrity to be a particularly reliable authority on the good life, let alone the “best life”—all remain in her thrall. “Even if you want to avoid her, even if you have avoided her, you have not (you cannot),” Lofton writes. Big Sister Oprah “looms”—not exactly as a panoptic warden, but as a pervading presence and power. She is among the great puppet-masters of American consumers; she formats their desires, hopes, tastes, and feelings; she determines them; she occupies them. Oprah is our Zeitgeist, the very Spirit of the Age. That all certainly sounds portentous. It also sounds, I think, like a rhetorical splurge in excess of Lofton’s otherwise nuanced argument.

To be fair, this Foucault-derived vision of the “discursive production” of a disciplinary system is not Lofton’s main point, which consists far more in a fine-grained analysis of the persistent tropes of Oprah’s media empire. Still, it is the scaffolding, and that scaffolding allows her to censure certain historians, ethnographers, and qualitative sociologists as pointillists, dot-dot-dot empathizers with their subjects, unaware of the powerlessness of those they imbue with such quaintly romantic attributes as creativity, individuality, or agency. These scholars are up so close to the canvas that they cannot see the big picture of determining structures. I find the options so presented to be artificial; one can surely attend to both structure and agency at the same time, to the mindless predictability of consumer behavior as well as its annoying unpredictability to its corporate managers. I agree with Lofton that there is all too much about Oprah’s world and her devotees to make one wonder—at least from a certain highbrow academic standpoint—about “the intensity of their shallowness.” Call me an unreconstructed humanist, an overly hopeful liberal, but I doubt that banality is the sum of the matter, even for Oprah’s most frivolous (or lighthearted) fans. I am all the more hesitant to accept that judgment when it is derived from a methodological stance that finds it unnecessary—even sycophantic—to attend to the devotees themselves, to their yawns and misgivings as much as their amens and hallelujahs. Do we want to swing in pendulous fashion away from reception history and ethnographic intimacy to an all-knowing scholarly view of what social determinants and discursive formations really count? That would be quite a makeover, perhaps one worthy of Oprah’s “transformation circus.”

I happen to be writing away—yakking, confabulating, whatever—on Lofton’s Oprah on the day after Mother’s Day. Now, if there was ever a merchandized ritual, this American-made holiday would be it. In all kinds of ways, it was scripted for us by American florists and greeting-card manufacturers. No doubt we have been formatted to observe the holiday in very particular ways, which serve the interests of quite particular industries. That said, I have never been able to convince myself that this commercial trap is the only story—or even the primary story—to be told about the ritual cycle in which so many Americans gladly participate. Our three-year-old came home from his preschool with a craft project for the holiday this year. The teachers had provided this line:  “My mommy is special because . . . .” Our preschooler had provided the finishing phrase: “she tickles me.” Anna Jarvis, the syrupy yet somber Methodist inventor of the holiday, would have been proud. That’s banal sentiment for you, but even puppets (to borrow a titular phrase from Victoria Nelson) have secret lives. Even the ventriloquist’s dummy is not quite as dumb as it seems (hence the recurrent nightmare of the puppeteer’s mouthpiece turning on its master).

Lofton has incisively depicted the ways in which Oprah imagines freedom for her viewers—as a facility they gain from her to choose among handbags, seasonal colors, shoes, books, spiritual paths, and the like. Yet, it is telling that one of Lofton’s best examples of what it means to acquiesce to Oprah as an arbiter of fashions, relationships, and spiritual well-being is a performance artist who decides to play at submission and blog about it. An artist (with an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago) cannily letting Oprah’s prescriptions dominate her is camp, a theatrics of irony, not one more sign of Oprah’s omnipotence. In short, where I look for signs of resilience, if not resistance, Lofton sees signs of docility, if not surrender. That’s a difference worth some banter, but not worth depreciating Lofton’s achievement. Oprah is one shrewd remapping of where we need to look for religion in contemporary American culture.

After hours of watching and reading, Lofton knows the answer. Oprah is a walking vowel, one that promises to encircle America with a message of hope, consumerism, and personal transformation.

Daring to tell a big story, Lofton uses Oprah to draw a map of popular religion in America. Criticizing the “pointillist profusions” that divide “our sects by geography,” she compares North American religion scholars to Borges’ cartographers “who, in their effort to map accurately the crevice of every mountain, created a map the size of the territory.”

Lofton’s Americanists sound a lot like the scholars in Ozarks Studies, a tiny subfield focused on a region straddling the South and the Midwest. Instead of mapping the American empire, we focus on 93 counties in Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. In an effort to chart the cultural geography and social history of every hill and valley, we sometimes forget that “map is not territory.” Asking “Is the Ozarks is, or are the Ozarks are?” we share her love of word play.

O is for Oprah. O is for Ozarks. Can the second embrace the first? Though Lofton stays away from the issue of audience reactions, it is an intriguing question.

Dubbed an “Evangelical Epicenter” by the Patchwork Nation project, my Ozarks county is a long way from Oprah’s Chicago studio. Seventy percent Republican, it is more likely to identify with Sarah Palin. During Palin’s 2009 book tour, the local Borders turned her S into a dollar sign, registering some of the best advance sales in the chain. As fate would have it, Palin was fresh from an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Comparing her Ozarks audience with the citizens of Wasilla, Alaska, she announced, “They are me.” One year earlier, a columnist for the Ozarks Christian News proclaimed, “I am Sarah Palin.”

And yet there is much in Winfrey’s background that resonates with Ozarkers. For starters, she grew up Baptist. In an area with nearly 150 Baptist congregations, that counts for something. Part of Oprah’s “Christian preamble,” this “previously Protestant” identity seeps into the content of her media persona. According to Lofton, “Despite the sense of some that she may indeed be the Antichrist, the work of Oprah and the work of an evangelical in the last decades of the twentieth century are not so dissimilar.”

Many Ozarkers are not so sure. Criticizing Winfrey’s association with the New Age movement, an article in the Ozarks Christian News concludes with a quote from Chuck Norris: “Every time I see her on TV, I think of how the devil disguises himself as an angel of light.”

Norris may be on to something. In “The Social History of Satan,” religion scholar Elaine Pagels traces the origins of Christian demonology to conflicts within first and second century Judaism. Breaking away from the wider Jewish community, some early Christians used Satan to mark the boundary between us and them. According to Pagels, the devil symbolized the “intimate enemy.”

By simultaneously drawing on and departing from American evangelicalism, Oprah has become the intimate enemy, entering the home through the electronic hearth. According to Lofton, “Oprah is all of it and none of it: celebrity and everywoman, corporate chairwoman and smart shopper, black woman and white woman, straight and queer, religious and spiritual, megachurch and shopping mall, seminarian and psychologist.”

To be sure, Ozarkers identify with many of these Oprahs. In an ethnographic study of a local megachurch, Missouri State graduate student Joseph Dutko uncovered a recurring catch phrase: “the best is yet to come.” Echoing Winfrey’s “Live Your Best Life,” this Pentecostal congregation is not far from the kingdom of Oprah. Likewise, Gannett-owned Ozarks Mom Like Me includes a “my favorite stuff” page modeled after The Oprah Magazine’s list of “things we think are just great.”

Lofton notes the genealogy of Winfrey’s spirituality in the nineteenth-century metaphysical movement. This tradition is alive and well in the “holy hills of the Ozarks.” In his chronicle of religion and tourism, Aaron Ketchell documents the presence of nature spirituality in early twentieth-century Branson. While the proprietors of Marvel Cave (now the site of a theme park) articulated a mystical view of the physical world, Kewpie doll creator Rose O’Neill told tales of fairies and fauns. More recently, groups like Unity and the School of Metaphysics have flourished in the area. According to the Springfield News-Leader, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret flew off the shelves of the local Barnes & Noble, thanks in no small part to Oprah’s endorsement. In 2007, Christ Church Unity screened the film version of the book.

Will Oprah’s O come to encircle the Evangelical Ozarks? It is hard to say.

Trafficking in stereotypes, a local blogger detects a “fear of Oprah” among white, middle-aged “talk radio guys,” noting that “some have even said she has scary beliefs.” In an effort to taunt such Oprahphobic men, she has composed a song: “Oprah is gonna get you, get you, Oprah is gonna get you, you’ll wet yourself in a fright.”

Not surprisingly, serious reservations accompanied Oprah’s involvement in presidential politics. Despite the existence of the Missouri-based “Rednecks for Obama” (a duo that actively subverted a stereotype), McCain/Palin had no trouble winning the region. Oprah’s chosen one was not the choice of the Ozarks.

On the other hand, Oprah has been embraced in some unlikely quarters. First, the Ozarks’ number one tourist attraction has trumpeted an endorsement from Oprah.com: “Smack dab in the middle of the country, this 1880s theme park offers world-class festivals, live shows and thrilling rides for all ages.” It also features Southern Gospel music and the Veggie Tales.

Second, Oprah’s vision of consumerist multiculturalism may have found a home in Northwest Arkansas, where Wal-Mart has embraced the rhetoric of diversity. As Marjorie Rosen argues in Boom Town, a once “tiny Bible Belt community” is changing “into a diverse society like that which we find in our big cities.”

Last but not least, Oprah has become “the other woman” for at least one Ozarks male: Larry Van Ness, of Springfield, Missouri. According to Oprah’s web site, “Every afternoon, Larry settles into a barber chair in his garage and watches the show.” In 2010, Oprah invited him to the premier of her final season, using NASCAR driver Jimmie Johnson to deliver the message.

Though Lofton did not focus on the reception of Oprah’s gospel, it is a fruitful area for future research. Big enough to encompass the Charlotte Motor Speedway and the MO-Kan Dragway, the O has a future in Red State America. As Lofton is eager to point out, there is a wideness in Oprah’s mercy.

Affable Stranger, nodding warmly toward my book: You’re an Oprah fan.

Me: I’m a fan of the author’s, actually. Kathryn Lofton. She’s a friend. She’s brilliant. She teaches at Yale. It’s a book about religion, partly, and consumer culture, and—

A.S: You don’t like Oprah?

From which point I was outmaneuvered.

It’s striking to me how often, with what little resistance, the many scholarly forums this book has now generated have likewise settled into for-and-against discussions of Oprah. This no doubt is tribute to Lofton’s remarkable creation of what Daphne Brooks calls a “self-help meta-empire of scholars trying to come to terms with their own Oprah addictions.” It’s also, perhaps unavoidably, an Oprah effect: What other books have so readily pressed scholars into sharing our experiences, our feelings, about the subjects they engage? (Could we imagine Born Again Bodies prompting a gabfest on our struggles with weight loss and gain? The Mormon Question drawing out our deepest thoughts on monogamy alternatives? The New Metaphysicals eliciting a coming-clean on the checks we wrote to the astrologer?) There’s a terrific aliveness in much of this commentary, variously wicked, righteous, nostalgic, surrendered, charmed—the “awed, orgasmic, thrilled, worried, and converted” oh in O. I wonder, though, whether our eagerness to make discussions of Lofton’s book into referenda on Oprah Winfrey isn’t also an attempt to skirt some of the challenges Lofton so dexterously poses.

Lofton’s book is part self-described “dorky parlor trick,” part social critique, part nineties cult-stud homage, less perhaps to Oprah than to the kinds of media (game shows, tabloids, Victoria’s Secret catalogs) to which that pre-9/11 era loved to respond with analyses both earnest and knowing, the moral of each usually being some version of go with it, though Lofton doesn’t let us off the hook quite as easily. It is also, the author spells out, an intervention on the academic study of religion, an effort to help an evidently somewhat lame discipline find its “stride again within and through studies of the secular that made the ‘agent’ its hero and ‘choice’ its credal cry.” Each of these is a virtuosic performance, served up in as intimate and incandescent prose as one could hope to find in any genre. And each is lined with some honest ambivalence and prudent caginess that do nothing, in the end, to keep them from bleeding into one another or working at cross-purposes. This is to say that Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon is more than the sum of its parts.

The “dorky parlor trick” is Lofton’s ability, as she puts it, “to connect Oprah with almost any aspect of U.S. religious history, from Wovoka to Carrie Nation.” This, I suspect, is the larger part of the project whose ideal audience Lofton imagines to be made up of her graduate and undergraduate mentors—the book Lofton wrote for her teachers. It is also the book’s most teachable aspect: “a great way to test theories of myth, ideology, and ritual for students new to religious studies abstractions” and as great a way to illustrate dynamic moments and signal motifs of American religious history through the focusing lens and gathering telos of Oprah Winfrey. The Puritan spiritual relation, the slave testimony, the anxious bench, the emergence of the evangelical woman preacher, the feminization of American culture, the businessman’s revival: You, and Oprah, are there. Order your classroom copies now.

The path on which Lofton aims to set our Oprah-rehabbed and -retrofitted discipline of religious studies is a bit harder to discern than this remarkable refraction of American Religion 101, but the message seems to be: Get over the pastoral training model, stop assuming that the religious and the secular can be so neatly cordoned off from one another, and show a little less tenderness toward the religious subjects who’re going to get bullied on the intellectual playground whether we try to shelter them from abuse or not. Stop defending, stop caretaking. “If there is a critical edge to the book,” Lofton explains in an interview, “it is to goad us to be less worried about explaining our subjects to their cultured despisers, and instead to pursue the mediations of their belief systems, the multiple functions of their ritual reiterations, and the social systems to which they reply and in which they participate.”

What this translates into is a kind of knowing objectivity, a passionate disinterestedness. It makes for a far edgier critical edge than Lofton here lets on, and one that she herself seems always at the point of disowning. On being asked repeatedly in earlier presentations of her material 1) whether she likes Oprah, and 2), the more panicky question, what is she doing to Oprah, Lofton states calmly: “My reply to these two inquiries has been the same: I am studying what we’re watching and what it consistently conveys.” With this explanation, Lofton notes, listener dissatisfaction abounds, and its tough-love targets pointedly include the weak-kneed among us in religious studies who may have genuflected too long at the altars of the guild. “For the field of religious studies, such critical attention is one way we sidestep the pieties of our objects in order to discern patterns in those traditions, sects, scriptures, and rites that correlate to other cultural objects.” This is the less antic side to the parlor trick of teaching what we do. To the Oprah acolyte, the Bible-believer, the twice-born soul in our classes who asks why we had to bring cold, critical scrutiny to bear on “the one thing, the one thing that helps me, hugs me, returns to me and sees me,” we say, I’m only doing my job.

But that is not all. This Zen-like explanation of her project—I study what we watch and what it says—is insufficient also for Lofton, who adds more in a circuitous footnote: “In her examination of [French literary historian] Alice Kaplan, Laura Levitt puts well my own resistance to naming first-person feelings within a text so obviously devotional to its object. Channeling Kaplan’s perspective, Levitt writes, ‘She is fully absorbed in this work. Given this, she seems to choose not to talk back.’” Lofton, we infer from the note, chooses similarly not to talk back. Levitt expands on Kaplan’s “cho[ice] not to talk back” to her subject, which for Lofton captures something important about her own authorial position. “She is not only a full-fledged scholarly prosecutor, but also defense attorney, judge, and jury all in one.” Knowledge-production, Lofton reminds us, is trickster work.

The Kaplan book to which Levitt refers is The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach, an account of the charismatic and widely read French novelist and editor who sided with Germany during the Occupation. Brasillach’s case is compelling because he was convicted for “intellectual crimes”—for his media celebrity, as it were—and not for the more direct involvements for which others in the Vichy regime were tried. Many French luminaries who deplored his politics nevertheless appealed for Brasillach’s release on the grounds of intellectual freedom; many others did not. Kaplan explains her project in an interview: “There aren’t many intellectuals today—and certainly not many literary intellectuals—who have the political influence and power that [Brasillach] had in France in a moment of national crisis. What power do we want intellectuals to have in our society, and what do we trust them to do with it? Do we even have intellectuals anymore?”

Do we have intellectuals of consequence anymore? Maybe not. We have Oprah. What is this power Oprah has? What collective ideations does it nurture? On what investments in the national imaginary does it draw? What do we want, or trust, her to do with it? “Why do we need her so much?” It is in sorting out these kinds of questions that Lofton plays prosecutor, defense attorney, judge, and jury all in one: courtroom drama as one-woman play. “The question for cultural critics,” says Lofton, “is whether Oprah’s progress is a sort of progress to endorse or decry.” Lofton endorses, she decries, she refuses either to endorse or decry. Thus a fellow scholar who remarks on the “thinness” of much of what passes today for spirituality meets a defense attorney’s question: Against what religious baseline might “thickness” be measured? Another who laments Oprah’s Book Club’s “focus on the therapeutic and relentlessly self-improving” for deflecting the power of great literature to “derange” and “disturb” is gently chided for missing “places of conversation not necessarily encompassed by some impossibly ‘pure’ concept of literary production.” Oprah’s ministry, Lofton insists, is “not hoodwink.” Even so, Lofton deftly exposes Oprah’s own literary and pastoral practice as, for lack of a word, thin.  “Winfrey never admits to a personal recalibration through reading,” Lofton observes; reading for Oprah is instead “always reconfirmation of what she knew and what others need to learn.” In Lofton’s rendering of their encounter, Ted Haggard, on Oprah’s couch, comes across as the more sympathetic and theologically subtle of the two.

Contributing to the frequent tonal shifts is Lofton’s stylistic decision at times to incorporate others’ phrases and sentences into her own prose, duly marked off in quotes and footnoted but otherwise without introduction or inflection. This makes for a more seamless read when there are a lot of names on every page to begin with, and perhaps a generous, gang’s-all-here kind of scholarly inclusiveness. But I found the choice initially puzzling on two counts: one, because Lofton is in every instance the better writer; and two, because it matters whether you’re channeling, say, Lauren Berlant or Leonard Sweet. Unless, maybe, it doesn’t: unless one suggestion being communicated here is that, in the same measure that the “long story of free markets in the West deposits us at the door of Oprah Winfrey,” so this spectacular embodiment of the female complaint (the “naturalized logic of women’s suffering,” of women’s endlessly deferred and disappointed need) is where the evangelical tradition in America has been leading us all along. How has the trajectory of American religious history brought us to this place, this Oprah?

A thumbnail history might go like this: The Protestant sanctification of the commonplace, the discovery of divine light in the mundane array of objects and acts taken up by a priesthood of believers, proves a boon to American merchants and clerics alike. As Protestantism finds itself more and more at home in the New World, its religious dispositions and their modes of production become less separable from everyday life—indeed, they come to make up the fabric of everyday life. This means your life. The erstwhile Puritan discipline of self-scrutiny brings the things of the world increasingly into its purview, reading them for the shimmering glint of spiritual favor. Advertising, the most aspiring of evangelical preaching’s bastard offspring, offers the promise of entry into a more charismatic life in exchange for the dissipation of spiritual and economic capital: buy, believe, buy and believe more. Consumer choice and religious option open along the same paths, obscuring relational possibilities and imperatives that might bind you to a particular past, a more circumscribed future, to anything that might constrain the unfolding of your own best life. Women gain ground in the commercial revolution faster and more easily than they wrest standing from church authorities, leaving the latter to play catch-up with the consumer culture they helped to foster. Buy and believe. Find what works for you. Purveyors of spirituals and temporals alike ratchet up the “imperatives of comfort nestling modern women in a language of self-service.” “Self-service,” here, is pitch-perfect: Because you’re worth it. And by the way, you’re on your own.  We’re now in Oprah’s world—“a world in which we find alluring the templates to which we are fitted,” as Jason Bivins gorgeously puts it, “a melancholy whose song of empowerment sells us resignation as the hope we know will be dashed.”

After learning that Oprah would be the subject of Lofton’s first book, I bought an issue of O Magazine for a train trip but ended up swapping it, gratefully, for my seatmate’s copy of Vogue. (Both magazines, granted, might be said to bank on whatever lack I bring to them; both feature glossy spreads of women who have more shoes, more shine, more things, and in O’s case, more serenely ordered closets and inner lives than I have. But Vogue foregoes the stealth jeremiads that present this gulf as one I must desire to close and can, starting now, with a chastened and redoubled commitment to living by truths I know by heart but have somehow let slide.) More surprising and satisfying, at least at first, was my one deliberate encounter with Oprah’s Book Club.  In September 2009, Oprah christened as her book club selection a short story collection I’d just finished reading, Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan. Like Oprah, I had found the book stunning, in as literal a sense as the word allows—after reading the final story, “My Parent’s Bedroom,” I don’t think I could talk. Set in ravaged stretches of various African nations, Say You’re One of Them shows violence, want, and depravity at their most harrowing and deeply entrenched, and religion and politics at the limits of the good and evil each can effect, all through the impossibly clear eyes of narrating children. (Akpan, a Nigerian Jesuit priest, turned to fiction after being unable to find a publisher for the newspaper editorials he wanted to write.) Say You’re One of Them is as powerful an example of literature’s power to “disturb” and “derange” as one is likely to find anywhere and, I subsequently learned from reading Lofton, a most unusual choice for an Oprah’s Book Club selection.

As Lofton tells us, the kind of book Oprah endorses is one that either “prescribes a better reality [or] posits an alternative reality to which you could escape.” Say You’re One of Them profoundly does neither, as the strong showing of readers’ remorse in postings to the book’s Amazon reviews page attests. (A sampling: “I had faith in Oprah’s selection and figured that each story would be better than the last. That never happened; instead each story was more horrific that the last.” “I feel the same way! I thought I was missing something! I STRUGGLED to finish the book. I am so relieved I can now move on to more enjoyable reads.” “I wanted a respite from my own life and this was not it. . . . Save your money and buy a happy book, even if it is not a literary masterpiece.” “I didn’t care for it and think Oprah might have missed the mark on this one.”) What was Oprah thinking?  What did Say You’re One of Them confirm for Oprah that she already knew, that her audiences needed to hear?

Perhaps, as Lofton’s chapter on Oprah’s lavish philanthropy suggests, that she herself was already busy supplying the happy ending on which her readers were counting.  “We are going to change the face of Africa,” Oprah announces in her 2007 prime-time special Building a Dream, which documents the construction of The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy near Johannesburg, South Africa. Where existing schools in the district were overcrowded and bare of comforts, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy would accommodate its hand-picked scholarship girls on a sprawling campus that included a yoga studio, two theaters, a beauty salon, oversized classrooms, and tastefully decorated living and dining spaces. Every detail, from the high-thread-count sheets to the O-embroidered backpacks, would be lovingly chosen for the girls by Oprah. “‘Some cups feel better in your hand than others. . . I love this one for them,’ [Oprah] says, holding it.” To cautions that the Academy’s operation introduces potentially destabilizing disparities into a setting where administrators’ salaries may exceed the income of local families a thousand times, and where many of the boarders return home to sleep on dirt floors, Oprah bristles against the implication that her pupils deserve less than the bounty she supplies for their betterment. The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy, concludes Lofton drily, “is a forty-million dollar exhibition of accessories.”

Let desperate families, ambitious religious leaders, and propped-up regimes do their best and worst: what Africa really needs, the deferred moral of Say You’re One of Them may turn out to be, is a daily dose of Oprah. And if that doesn’t work? Before embarking on the Africa makeover, we learn from Lofton, Oprah shared with audiences her failed experiment with the Cabrini-Green apartments in Chicago some years earlier. Her intervention there began with the extraordinarily generous, but, she says, “misguided idea of moving the families out of the projects and into new homes”; it ended with the sullen ingratitude of her beneficiaries, sunk blankly in their “rooms full of things.” The painful experience, Oprah reflected, instilled a valuable lesson: “What I now know for sure is that a gift isn’t a gift unless it has meaning.” If the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy, since beset by a challenge or two, goes the way of Cabrini-Green, we can still be confident, under Oprah’s direction, of learning something important about ourselves.

Katherine Pratt Ewing finds the ambivalence Lofton sustains throughout much of the book to reproduce a “classic highbrow-lowbrow debate” among academic elites, a tired nexus of “old political ideologies and dichotomies” we keep in circulation to confirm our own exceptionalism. Whether we lament the shallowness of popular culture or admit to liking it on the down low, we show ourselves to be driven, says Ewing, by “class anxieties surrounding taste and the discernment of quality as manifest in our ability to interpret . . . ‘deeply.’” Lofton’s (and my) “uneasiness” with Oprah’s self-help commodity fetishism, Ewing charges, “arises precisely at those moments when we draw the line and pass judgment on her appeals to the lowbrow middle-American consumer,” thus disavowing our own “commodified selves as a mark of class status and taste.”

But Lofton brilliantly helps us to see that Oprah’s world is one in which, for better or worse, such discriminations no longer serve. David Foster Wallace’s personal library, it turns out, was crammed with carefully annotated self-help books of what an unfazed devotee calls “the best-sellingest, Oprah-level cheesiness.” In All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly find the value of truly great literature to reside, not in “depth,” but in its openness to the shining moment that skims past all irresolution and perplexity, the existential morass in which “deep” thinkers want fatally to bog us down. (Dreyfus and Kelly, of Berkeley and Harvard respectively, sportily call these “whoosh” moments; Oprah, more confident of controlling the religious associations she puts into play, names them simply “Spirit.”) This is how we survive the secular, the anxiety of choosing. In addition to the beatific whoosh, Dreyfus and Kelley also commend the power of ritual to bump us through the everyday:

If it is the warmth of [a cup of] coffee on a winter’s day that you like, then drinking it in a cozy corner of the house, perhaps by a fire with a blanket, in a cup that transmits the warmth to your hands might well help to bring out the best in this ritual. If it is the striking black color of the coffee that attracts your eye and enhances the aroma, then perhaps a cup with a shiny white ceramic interior will bring this out. But there is no single answer to the question of what makes the ritual appealing, and it takes experimentation and observation, with its risks and rewards, to discover the meaningful distinctions yourself. . . . When one has learned these skills and cultivated one’s environment so that it is precisely suited to them, then one has a ritual rather than a routine, a meaningful celebration of oneself[.]

The difference between Oprah and these distinguished philosophers is that Oprah would have told us where to buy the cup.

Is Oprah inescapable? Lofton suggests as much. “Even if you want to avoid her, even if you have avoided her, you have not (you cannot) . . . . It is Oprah’s world. We’re just buying in it, buying into it, and believing it.” A quotation Lofton drops in from de Certeau on resistance—“If it is true that the grid of ‘discipline’ is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it”—serves in this context more as credo for Oprah’s program of “revolutionary self-improvement, first-person fable, and consumer choice” than as salvo to any who would circumvent it. Daphne Brooks’s moving and lovely account of how Oprah fit into the days she spent seeing her mother through illness—“Chemo in the mornings, lunch in the early afternoons, a nap, a run to the pharmacy, Oprah, and the shift into dinner and bedtime”—provides welcome proof that not all in Oprah’s world ends in a spiral of unsated hungers, depleted connections, and compensatory assertions (“celebrations”) of self. For Brooks and her mother, Oprah “was the voice of frivolity and quotidian delight in the midst of anxiety . . . . She was affective energy—faith, comfort, joy, Aretha-charged ‘spirit in the dark’ release in the face of the unknown.” Where a Kathryn Lofton or I see giftiness, Brooks finds a genuine gift.

To note this, though, is still to be toting up what works or doesn’t work for us about Oprah, where perhaps what’s called for is no longer a tally but a disaggregation of what Lofton has so richly contextualized as Oprah’s place in the history of American religion.  What kinds of books might this one foster? Lofton sets an extraordinarily high bar, but she alludes to a few possibilities. “Each of these assistant pastors deserves book-length treatment of his or her own,” she suggests of Oprah’s lifestyle gurus, “since each of them has cultivated an elaborate online, televised, and textual empire of his or her own as a result of the association with Winfrey.” Or again, the kind of critical iconography Lofton undertakes in relation to Oprah “is worthy of many books—from books speaking to the difference between cotton swabs and Angela Jolie, from Ford Sedans to Cheerios, the iconic brand subjects are infinite.” Lofton, I’m confident, isn’t suggesting that these are the books most worth writing, or that the most fitting objects of scholars’ attention are forms of cultural production whose media saturation aspires to Oprah-level. But if Oprah is truly everywhere and all, if she is “no less than the culmination of the religious now,” as Lofton avers, then where else is there for scholars of American religion to go?  Surely the history that begins in the Reformation and culminates in our restless makeover dreams is but one ending, one point of departure, one story of many that might be told. The books that end up doing justice to the rigors and beauty of this one, I’m betting, won’t be celebrity biographies of Dr. Phil or semiotic studies of cereal boxes. Rather, they’ll be books that somehow manage, with all of Lofton’s probity and care, to sift again through the makings of Oprah’s world—the accretions of history and fantasy, the “determined contingency and incurable excess” that go to its relentless aspiration to totality, its seemingly inevitable sway—and then to decide what other worlds might be made of them.

Pervasive presence—or just ordinary ubiquity—is one of the main strategies in Oprah’s attempt to serve as a guide through the jumble of consumer choices, spiritual makeovers, and “original individuality” that is “secular” living in contemporary North America. Reading The Gospel of an Icon gave me a heightened awareness of this ubiquity, a new recognition of the way in which Oprah really is everywhere. As Lofton puts it in one of her clarifying turns of phrase: “She is the divine pervasion.” Some have mused about and imagined what this divine pervasion might entail—Oprah as Messiah, or as saviour of Chicago. Others have pointed to Lofton’s impressive analytical insights: how thinking with Oprah allows her to brilliantly juxtapose “religion,” commodification, and mediation, while also thinking carefully and creatively about how this African-American woman has become so remarkably successful by drawing from, while transforming, Christian testimonial genres and emotional practices.

My own “public” reading of the book is, like those of other contributors, part confession and part analysis—one small step away from Oprahfication itself, perhaps? According to Lofton, when Oprah encourages her viewers and readers to embark on a perpetual “journey” of self-improvement through self-examination, she also counsels them that to make such change happen, they need to surround themselves with the right goods and services. To best participate in the “rituals of reading” prescribed by her Book Club, for example, readers need to create their own private libraries-cum-“sanctuaries” filled with stuff they love: candles, scented oils, bound copies of O Magazine. Reading the Book Club book, like watching the TV show, is supposed to “change your life,” but that can’t happen without the properly decorated “ceremonial space.”

Keeping in mind Oprah’s eye for detail and Lofton’s thesis of divine pervasion, I started thinking about the various environments of my own reading of The Gospel of an Icon—a book that sticks with you even when you’re not turning its pages in a comfy chair with a hot cup of pomegranate green tea at your side. While reading Lofton’s conclusion and epilogue in my favorite, resolutely independent, non-franchised coffee shop, the grey-haired man sitting next to me told his friend of a recent trip to Chicago to visit his new girlfriend. Amid other details that I tried to block out with one finger in my ear, he told his friend about driving along the parkway and hearing the drone of a helicopter overhead as it circled in the sky. There were only two options as to who the passenger might be, the man said with a laugh: Oprah or Obama. This overlap of Os was uncannily—or maybe just coincidentally—the very subject of Lofton’s concluding words, which I was reading at that moment.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been listening so closely to another’s conversation, you might suggest. But isn’t the coffee shop the alternative confessional, where we tell our companions our latest troubles, regardless of who can hear? Baring your soul over a latte in a cheek-by-jowl café is perhaps not quite the same thing as what Lofton calls “Oprahfication,” namely, “the makeover that happens when individuals agree to subject their private selves to public display.” But the coffee shop confessional (along with streetcar cell-phone tell-alls) is a remarkable testimony to how comfortable people are with revealing the details of their personal relationships, medical procedures, and workplace conflicts to both friends and complete strangers. The difference perhaps lies in what you hope to get out of a coffee shop confession in contrast to submission to Oprahfication: a jolt of high quality caffeine, the understanding of a friend, the prurient interest of a woman reading a yellow book, or abundant gifts of cars and iPods, along with a new and better you.

But Oprah was not only in the coffee shop. Earlier in my reading, at a point when I was about midway through the book, I cycled down a neighborhood street to find a watchful Oprah beaming at me from a billboard high above. “OWN TV,” the message trumpeted, is now available in Canada. Having once been one of those smug people proud to say that they do not even “own” a television, and remaining someone who denies her children the joys of cable, the message didn’t have its full effect on me. But then I realized that, despite never having watched an episode of Oprah from start to finish, I felt a familiarity with Lofton’s descriptions of the narrative arc of Oprah’s version of televised “confessional production”: the extraction of a secret, weakness, or insecurity, the revelation that change is possible, and then the consumer goods that provide the path to realize that change. “At every turn,” Lofton reveals, “there is a hug of self-love and the slap of self-scrutiny.”

Inevitably, it might seem, even reading Lofton’s book did the work of effecting Oprah’s pervasion. Not only did I notice her on the streetscape or in the coffee shop, but I also found her, channeled so convincingly by Lofton, turning up in that running inner dialogue that comes along with reading. Maybe a footstool of just the right height, in a pleasing color would actually help me to concentrate more fully on my reading; maybe a better closet solution would help me de-clutter, or even change, my life. Even with the distancing aid of theoretical scrutiny to hand—the frame of Foucault’s “pastoral practice,” or the revealing but maybe not entirely true insight of Erving Goffman that “a coerced show of feeling is only a show”—Lofton never quite exempts her reader, or herself, from being implicated in the confessional production that is Oprah’s work. Though Oprah as a subject of scholarly analysis may be both a sitting duck and a curiously “profane” choice of focus, Lofton shows us that Oprah’s “spiritual revolution” is part of a larger shift that most North Americans have bought into, to varying degrees: “one of the great success stories of Oprah’s years has been the complete conversion—the conversion of a nation—to consumption as the adjudicating determinant of our relative freedom.”

There are, however, limits to Oprah’s O. I saw them when I raised her as an example while teaching an anthropology course in Germany this past winter. None of my students had heard of her. She was a complete unknown. Recalling this, I realized that The Gospel of an Icon, is a continental, American story, not a fully globalized one, despite the global aspirations of Oprah’s “missionary gifts.” Maybe Oprah really is “provincial.”

Writing from and within a collective “we” that she both scrutinizes and calls to account, Kathryn Lofton offers her book as scholarly analysis and humble jeremiad (if such a genre is possible). The Gospel of an Icon is a historically learned account of how and why Oprah has resonated with Christian traditions of self-improvement, at the same time that she has entertained a diverse public, encouraging them to achieve more with more. She is, as Jason Bivins already intimated, an anti-Nietzsche, who declared in his own autobiography, “I do not want in the least that anything should become different than it is; I myself do not want to become different.”

But then again, in that same book, Nietzsche, in a spirit that Oprah could recognize, also gave a great deal of morally intentional diet advice, such as: “No meals between meals; no coffee, coffee spreads darkness.” Who is the prophet and who is the charlatan? How to speak from the self and of the self? These too are circling questions that none of us can ever entirely escape.

And yet, while Lofton is very skillful at contextualizing, she rightly refuses to reduce Oprah to a mere fetish, a mere epiphenomenal expression of social realities. The causal arrows do not point in a single direction, from base to superstructure, as the geological model of society that modernist social scientists persistently use when dealing with religion. As Lofton writes, “Oprah encompasses more than a therapist’s couch, or a woman’s purse, or the revival preacher’s bench.” If there is anything that names the surplus that Oprah’s “flexodoxy” entails, it is the intra-activity between the materiality of the spirit and the spirituality of materiality in late, thoroughly-mediatized capitalism. Through her careful product recommendations or her selection of particular books for her reading club, Oprah spiritualizes materiality, saving us from drowning in the seemingly inexhaustible profane sea of commodities and images that assault us virtually 24-7. In Lofton’s words, “[i]n the loneliness of daily disconnection and the paralysis of abundance, Oprah pervades with selective, incorporated, reliable, ritual regularity. She soothes and she sifts.” The purchase and consumption of these products, in turn, allow for the materialization of spirituality, whether in the achievement of financial success or a good sex life, as befit a fully realized self.  This is precisely what Lofton aptly calls a “spiritual capitalism.”

Here Lofton takes us beyond Weber and his notions of disenchantment and elective affinity that are still predicated on a dualistic understanding of spirit and matter, religion and society, and the sacred and the secular. Again, Lofton puts it well: “Oprah offers to us a way to see a mechanism, up close, strings demonstrably exposed, of how contemporary mass culture convinces us of its conveyances. Is it a religious culture? A mass consumer culture?  Simmering beneath the particulars of this study is the proposition that to force a difference between the two is to compel a false distillation from a quagmire of commingling processes.” Or, more dramatically, “I have found that whatever distinguishing marks we make between commodities and religion, they are, for all practical purposes, arbitrary.”

This insight into the intense and extensive contemporary intra-activity of materiality and spirituality is a powerful explanatory tool. For example, it helps explain the explosive growth of global Neo-Pentecostal networks and cultures, which operate through mass media and popular culture to spread a gospel of health and wealth based on the notion that spiritual salvation, economic success, and physical well-being are mutually implicative. In my work on Brazilian transnational Neo-Pentecostal churches, which—along with Nigerian and Ghanaian churches—are spearheading the growth of the gospel of health and wealth, I have referred to this spirit-matter nexus as “pneumatic materialism.” It is a non-reductive materialism that has emerged through an intense cross-fertilization of non-dualistic autochthonous traditions and a global postmodern re-enchantment of the world, most dramatically expressed by the challenge to the “metaphysics of presence” posed by rapid changes in communications and transportation technologies.  I use the term pneumatic, which comes from the Greek word pneuma, meaning literally “breath,” the spiritual force that animates matter, not only to characterize forms of Christianity that make the Holy Spirit central to the experience of the sacred, but also a diversity of global religions, ranging from Spiritism and Santería to Neo-Shamanism and Neo-Animism, which deal with a variety of seen and unseen agents that are not reducible to narrow parameters of rational naturalism.

Latin American and African Pentecostalisms are not only pneumatic but thoroughly materialist, in the sense that they reject the European (Cartesian) dichotomy between soul and body and its denigration of the latter. Drawing from indigenous traditions that link natural forces with the spirits of ancestors, these Pentecostalisms see the world in non-dualistic terms: the “supernatural” realm of the spirits is not other-worldly; it does not stand separate from or above the natural world. Rather, spirit and flesh are constitutively intertwined, as are transcendence and immanence. For these non-dualistic vernacular Pentecostalisms, individual salvation operates through a personal relation with God and is manifested in this-worldly health and wealth. Conversion entails a new, highly malleable “spirit-matter” nexus, a holistic re-articulation of the self and its surroundings. This new pneumatic materialism is able to bridge, in multiple contexts, the tension between the seen and the unseen, among the personal, the local, the transnational, and the cosmic. This accounts for the great portability of Latin American and African Pentecostalisms.

The notion of pneumatic materialism has obvious connections with Lofton’s spiritual capitalism. Both terms seek to express complex, fluid, power-laden-yet-open-ended relations that constitute practices and discourses that have come to be constructed as religious and/or spiritual in our present age. But what does it mean that Brazilian or Nigerian Neo-Pentecostalism share a common epistemology and modus operandi with Oprah and Harpo Inc.?  While Oprah provides a particularly striking example of the spiritualization of materiality and the materialization of spirituality, she is but one expression of a global polymorphous hyper-animism that is emerging out of the ruins of Western modernity, particularly out of the crisis of overproduction and overconsumption in contemporary “casino capitalism,” as Jean and John Comaroff term it.

I would thus argue for the need to de-provincialize the U.S., to rephrase Dipesh Chakrabarty. We need to resist the trap of American exceptionalism that has dominated the study of American religious history. Lofton takes an important step in this direction with a perceptive chapter on Oprah’s missionary forays into Africa. Lofton is mindful that Harpo Inc. is a global player, “superseding the provincial borders of Winfrey’s native nation-state, foisting the O brand as a circulating object of the new international economy.” This is surely a good starting point, but it is not enough. In order to understand the specificity of Oprah’s iconicity, it is necessary to place her within global religioscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes, ethnoscapes, and financescapes (to draw from Arjun Appadurai), alongside other pneumatically materialistic phenomena. Otherwise, we risk replaying the old provincial narrative of “only in America,” a narrative that, with the rise of alternative poles of economic, cultural, and religious production, such as Brazil, India, China, and Nigeria, has become increasingly myopic. The great virtue of Lofton’s book is to give us tools and insights to study the intra-activity of religion, popular culture, media, entertainment, and economics, not only in the U.S., but in this new polycentric cartography.

But the scene that stands out in my memory, and the scene that crystallizes the arguments of Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, Kathryn Lofton’s arresting new study of “the good news” delivered and commodified by the “symbolic figure” that is Winfrey, is one in which the talk show host looked out tearfully across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia and registered her awe at seeing a garnet red “O” emblazoned in lights at the center of that country’s national landmark. O-vercome with emotion, Winfrey turned the magnitude of that gesture into a teachable moment with her audience the following day, by describing how this was the symbol of what it means to work hard and dream big.

And so O goes. As Lofton brilliantly observes (and I quote at length here, as it is my favorite passage in the book),

She is capitalist and capital; she is a commodity and consumer. Oprah is a product, but Oprah’s product is not individual objects. Her patents are not mechanical innovations or engineering improvements. She does not design fabric or copyright personal recipes. Rather, her taste is her product. Her O is what sells. The O is her signature, her initial, and her trademark. It is a sound, a reminder of her televised exclaimations: “Oh, no.” “Oh, yes.” “Oh, please.” “Oh, I never.” “Oh!” “Oh?” “Oh.” Awed, orgasmic, thrilled, worried and converted, an O is the noise of emotional presence and ready delight (what I feel right now, right here, before this new thing, new experience, or new encounter—Oh!) should not confuse the consumer with its earthy sheen. The O is never unscheduled or chaotic. It is cadence. For every girly (womanly, interviewing, ministerial, listening, awakening) “oh,” there is a corporate O labeling a magazine, a book, a bracelet, or a piece of stereo equipment. The O circles her consumer selections with her emboss, bequeathing her halo upon her beloved choices. The O envelops the commodities that she has chosen expressly for herself and now, expressly for you. She is a pitchwoman of her own consumption; her consumption is her commodity.

I have been enveloped by the O for some twenty-five years now, at once seduced, delighted, and irritated by—and yet drawn to—the image of a profoundly self-assured, brash, and at times entertainingly ego-driven baby-boomer African American woman who climbed the ladder of extreme wealth, fame, and social and cultural power in the post-Civil Rights era just as I was coming into intellectual and political consciousness as a black feminist scholar in the 1980s and ’90s. For me, Oprah Winfrey took the “temple of my familiar” (to borrow a line from brilliant novelist Alice Walker, a Winfrey “legend,” whose Color Purple opened a key chapter in her own self-professed spiritual awakening odyssey)—multicultural, middle-class woman-centered popular culture—and transformed that experience into universalized self-reckoning and a mega-million dollar empire. She invented, as Lofton’s book suggests, her own late-twentieth-century, commodity-driven version of a Great Awakening, and then rode it hard all the way into the new millennium.

My fascination with Lofton’s book, then, sits at the intersections of the personal and the professional, a uniquely liminal position that Oprah herself has turned into an artful and profoundly profitable state of being. And so, in the spirit of the confessional and the performative, and in a bid to pay homage to the porous boundaries between the personal and the communal that Oprahfication celebrates, endorses, and demands, I begin, then, with a few points about my own engagement with this phenomenon.

I have been—and perhaps in some ways will always be—one of the denizens, the followers, the 100% skeptical and yet 100% “true believers” of and in the Oprah Nation. I have been both captivated by her programs about white supremacy in all-white Forsyth County, Georgia (which aired in 1986, my freshman year in college) and the Little Rock Nine’s steely and yet graceful fortitude (which aired in 1996, when I was in graduate school) and embarrassed by her ostentatious obsession with the material (see the “My Favorite Things” episodes from any year). Still I can’t deny that O’s consistent engagement with the cultural memory of the Civil Rights movement and her equally consistent obsession with spectacular consumerism are somehow entwined. These two sides of Winfrey and, by extension, her entire empire articulate the imbricated legacies of black historical trauma and the access to quotidian privileges that define my own intersecting racial, class, gender, and generational identifications. Lofton’s book makes this clear: an Oprah can and did emerge out of the chrysalis of this late-capitalist moment—the summation of multiple liberation movements, globalized economic shifts, and media technology booms. O is the sum of all of these parts, the answer to an equation, and the promise of a new beginning for all who believe and have hOpe.

I first made the “Oprah connection” during my mother’s ultimately—thankfully—triumphant journey through battling breast cancer in the winter and spring of 2006. We were both drawn to the comfort of the ritual of watching “Lady O” every weekday, and we structured our days around that 4pm release. Chemo in the mornings, lunch in the early afternoons, a nap, a run to the pharmacy, Oprah, and the shift into dinner and bedtime. She was the voice of frivolity and quotidian delight in the midst of anxiety about my mother’s condition. She was affective energy—faith, comfort, joy, Aretha-charged “spirit in the dark” release in the face of the unknown.

For the first time in my life, I couldn’t get enough of Oprah, and thankfully that season marked the release of the twentieth anniversary DVD collection of the show—seventeen hours and six DVDs worth of footage from The Oprah Show—endless footage of car giveaways, South African girls school specials about the wall color and linen in their dormitories, Tom Cruise hallucinating on a couch, and Sidney Poitier tributes. Oprah began to bleed into our evenings and weekends. I carried her with me back and forth between California and New Jersey and watched her on my laptop in lonely airport terminals.

I stopped making the connection with O once my mother had come through her treatment. But there was one other moment when her empire drew me in—when I sought solace and relief from my personal pain.

Spring 2008: I had been numb for many months from a nasty break up with my partner and was trying to find my way again. And there in the pages of O: “A Bicycle Built for You.” I had to get it, and only the shiny mint green model—O’s favorite color—would do. It was my own path out of “the darkness,” a new lease on life. And it remains my prized possession, one that I became obsessed with buying as a result of (whether I’d like to admit it or not) O’s encouragement and the way that I’ve enjoyed the pleasures of depending on Oprah to “light my way” and make me feel good—especially through the pleasures of consumption.

What to do with all of this? To be sure, Lofton’s scholarship is—whether she knows it or not—forging its own self-help meta-empire of scholars trying to come to terms with their own Oprah addictions in this, her first book. And what a tremendous study she has produced: ambitious and imaginative, critically cogent and rigorous, and yet (and quite delightfully) as quirky and unpredictable as popular culture itself. This book is in and of itself a pleasure to read, and clearly pleasure is a concept that lies at the heart of this study. Lofton consistently gives her readers new ways of considering the intersecting spiritual, cultural, and social politics of pleasure that dominate Oprah’s universe and that sustain and nurture her legions of followers.

More than anything, this fascinating book inspired me to keep asking questions of the Oprah phenomenon and its relationship to spirituality. As a scholar of literary studies, I am particularly fascinated by the role of the literary in Oprah’s brand of religiosity, and thus I was drawn to Lofton’s lively chapter on the book club phenomenon. Given the fact that Winfrey has maintained a well-publicized and in some ways career-altering connection to Toni Morrison’s work and consistently refers to Maya Angelou as “her mentor,” I’m continually interested in the significance of literary tropes and narrative symbolism in Oprah’s religious aesthetics.

Indeed, Lofton’s study makes me think of the ways that Winfrey’s film adaptation of Beloved itself operate as a spiritually redemptive tool in the transformations that the program underwent as it evolved into “Change Your Life TV.” As fans of the show may recall, it was after the summer that Oprah shot the film adaptation of Morrison’s classic meditation on slavery and cultural memory that she returned to her program and began proselytizing about the changes that she aimed to make to mark how she had distinctly “reformed” her show and re-defined her brand of programming as distinct from that of “trash talk TV.” One wonders to what extent a postmodern, magical realist text like Beloved operates at the level of religious conversion in the form and content of Winfrey’s program. In Oprah’s universe, how is the literary configured as a kind of spiritual experience in the pursuit of self-knowledge? (Just as well, serious fans may recall how her post-Beloved era leads to the moment when our host tries on her hat singing a new theme song backed by a choir—a version of a gospel song entitled “I Believe I’ll Run On.”)

The Beloved connection to Oprah’s spiritual politics is a powerful one, in my opinion, for one other key reason, and that is this: There are ways in which we might read the religious iconicity of the Oprah that Lofton details with great care as perhaps in some ways analogous to her role as an actor and her longtime interest in acting. In the introduction to the book, Lofton argues that an “Oprah is that which stands in, filling a space where before there was something missing or something needed.” This sort of a claim beautifully overlaps with the landmark arguments made by Lofton’s Yale colleague and performance studies scholar Joseph Roach, who argued influentially, in his work Cities of the Dead, that the figure of the actor operates as a “surrogate” and an effigy: a figure that stands in for the hopes, fears, and desires of a community, a figure that “evokes an absence,” bodies something forth, and “carries within [it] the memory of otherwise forgotten substitutions.”

These sorts of comparisons between the actor, the talk show host, and the religious icon might also force us to think in new ways about the always present place of the body in Oprah’s religious culture. Clearly her own corporeality is the site of fan identification, the expression of her imperfections, as well as the key symbol of the all-important makeover, and Lofton’s study encourages readers to think more about the spiritual relationship Oprah is forging (or not forging) with the body.

The Gospel of an Icon also got me to wondering if we can draw any connections between Oprah’s brand of spirituality and nineteenth-century spiritualist practices. Works like Molly McGarry’s really fine book Ghosts of Futures Past and P. Gabrielle Foreman’s groundbreaking research on the black spiritualist medium Hattie Wilson (known by literary scholars as Harriet Wilson, author of Our Nig) challenge readers to consider the intersecting politics of celebrity and women spiritualist leaders (from Wilson to someone like the Anglo trance medium Cora L.V. Scott). Given the ways that spiritualism plays with the boundaries of the religious and the secular, and given the ways that Lofton alludes to Oprah’s ability to appeal to cross-racial audiences (as did Wilson, in particular), it would be fascinating to consider how O’s performative aesthetics tap into this cultural tradition.

Most people who read Lofton’s study will, however, probably be most intrigued by the ways in which she grapples with the spiritual politics of Oprah’s material world, a world in which spectacular scenes of mass audience hysteria (fainting! sobbing! dancing!) generated by gift giveaways have become something of a seasonal pop culture tradition. Lofton suggests that we might read the material world of Oprah as a portal through which to best understand her spiritual ethos. As she argues, “we must agree that one of the great success stories of Oprah’s years has been the complete conversion—the conversion of a nation—to consumption as the adjudicating determinant of our relative freedom.” One of my dear friends and colleagues and I have had many a conversation about Oprah, and she has stated that she can’t reconcile Oprah’s deep obsession with materialism and her putatively altruistic philosophies—and this is something that she’s struggled with (as in, “Why don’t I like Oprah more? Maybe it’s because of what seems like a conflict in ideals”). For me, her question led to more questions. For instance, are there particular types of marketplace objects (like bicycles!) that are particularly spiritually resonant? Readers will find themselves engrossed by the ways that Lofton traces the dialectic between materialism and Oprah’s religiosity.

This material world, Lofton suggests, is one that is deeply entangled with gender politics. As she contends, “this book addresses imperatives applied outside the realm of the sect, into the imperatives of comfort nestling modern women in a language of self-service. That language (‘I just like to feel good, I just want to feel safe, I just deserve to be whole’) is the secular an Oprah creates.” Lofton’s book is seemingly unique to religious studies in that it addresses a gendered religious space that is interracial, inter-class, and transregional, and it is provocative to consider how O’s world compares to other American religious subcultures and the ways in which they do or do not encourage woman-centered desires and identifications.

Lofton concludes her study with a provocative wink by asserting that “an Oprah never says you HAVE to do anything. What you do, and who you follow is your choice.” I was struck by this assertion and wondered whether Lofton might be nudging her readers to think more about Oprah’s deep investment in celebrity culture and her personal tension between embracing her own exceptionalism and encouraging others to follow the path that she has taken. (And I’m thinking here of Oprah’s deep determination to get The Color Purple gig, and how she loves repeating the line about how she was going to have to “let go and let God” finally make the decision about whether she would win the part.) Lofton’s book thus ends on a note that urges us—however obliquely—to consider Oprah’s own very public obsessions with celebrity and the cult of celebrity as it relates to religious culture.

At the heart of this imaginative, daringly whimsical, and critically persuasive study, though, is Lofton’s magnificent style as a writer and the form that her work inhabits. In many ways, the form of Lofton’s prose manifests the object of her inquiry. Throughout The Gospel of An Icon, her prose resonates with a kind of playfulness and a spirited engagement with “the collective.” But however ludic the “we” in her study may seem, this strategic invocation of the first person plural allows Lofton to perform a style of writing that, like her perpetually alluring object of inquiry, pulls her audience into the realm of contemplating their own collective desires.

Clearly, Oprah’s product endorsements have had a huge impact on sales, which is no doubt galling for us critics of neoliberal capitalism, who are often ashamed to admit how much we ourselves buy and consume in the privacy of our own lives. Most of us are not strangers to the act of buying to help us feel good, but members of the intellectual elite disavow their commodified selves as a mark of class status and taste.  Watching Oprah, we enact this disavowal, and Lofton herself performs it when she writes: “We’re happy for the woman and glad for her good tidings, but we are left with the itching uncertainty that we don’t feel very good at all about all this commodity fetishism.” Criticizing Oprah’s blatant embrace of shopping performs a deeply entrenched scholarly identity that has its roots in Marxist intellectualism. It thus reproduces old political ideologies and dichotomies, such as the (often implicit) idea that political action to create a better world requires personal austerity and social upheaval.

Oprah makes people feel good. Scholarly critics fear that Oprah is anaesthetizing the masses. Lofton asks us to be surprised at how Oprah blends spirituality with the real world of commodities, but she does not as readily examine or challenge the common assumption that spirituality-cum-commodified self-improvement is antithetical to social/political action. In fact, the criticism of Oprah’s political effects seems oddly misplaced. There are at least three arenas that Lofton discusses in which Oprah’s acts have had significant social and political effects that go well beyond passive self-improvement: the election of Obama; transformation of the reading practices of the wide public that participates in the Oprah Winfrey Book Club; and the refashioning of gender. Within these three arenas, Oprah has arguably contributed significantly to the fashioning of a new middle-class subject and made it a performative possibility for millions of viewers. Oprah’s iconic performances have had important political and social effects that most liberal academics would be expected to applaud, including the encouragement of reading and the promotion of religious, racial, cultural, and sexual tolerance, by downplaying difference. Yet Lofton presents these Oprah effects in prose that often oscillates between a balanced review of scholarly and historical sources and conclusions tinged with disparagement. It is this tone, which belies her analytic neutrality, that might lead Oprah’s audience members to wonder what Lofton is doing to “their Oprah.”

Lofton’s epilogue focuses on the “‘Oprahfication’ of Obama,” by which she means the way that Oprah put Obama into the mold of a “familiar sort of savior,” a commodified product of neoliberalism.  She and some of her more socially progressive readers are disturbed by this commodification—including Deidre English, who calls such Oprahfication “chilling.” Yet the effect of Oprah’s decision,to come out and take an explicit political stance—not only aligning herself with a Democratic political candidate, but also actively promoting his presidency—was enormous. Oprah’s decision to openly endorse one candidate was quite a contrast from her usual practice of even-handed inclusiveness. One effect, of course, was to alienate some of her most conservative viewers, producing a small drop in Nielson ratings. But another effect was to create a huge base of support for Obama among people, especially women, who otherwise might not have imagined voting for a black presidential candidate. Some have argued that she may have influenced the very outcome of the election.

Oprah has this power to shape middle-class American discourse precisely because she does not take an overtly radical political stance focused on upending the current economic and social order from the outside, which would alienate people who are worried about rapid social transformation. She instead operates from within, performing and promoting a middle-class subjectivity grounded in a form of spirituality that has deep roots in American religious practice. She made it conceivable to identify Obama with the mainstream middle class—an effect that goes well beyond shallow, commodified “Oprahfication.”

The concept of depth is another one of those Oprah inkblots that exposes academics’ anxieties about the contradiction between their elitism and their egalitarianism. Lofton herself is uneasy and noncommittal about the concept of depth, presenting arguments that are critical of Oprah’s lack of depth, while aware that the criticism of spirituality as “thin” raises the question of what “thick” or “deep” might be. What is needed is a more systematic analysis of the politics of “depth,” beginning with its deployment by academics.

The association of Oprahfication with lack of depth is clearest in critiques of Oprah’s effects on the reading public. Lofton, like others, is skeptical of the interpretive approach to reading that Oprah encourages in her book club: she stresses that Oprah’s interpretations, which encourage readers to react emotionally to a book and relate its characters to their own lives, lack depth and reduce books to their ability to “return women to an Oprah way of life,” reiterating the core theme of Oprah-as-icon. Lofton is one of several scholars who have engaged in the classic highbrow-lowbrow debate and either bemoaned the loss of “depth” in an Oprah reading or celebrated how Oprah’s approach is a new style of reading that has encouraged the middle class to engage with both new authors and classic tomes that otherwise may have been inaccessible to most readers. Cecelia Farr, for example, compares the book club to an introductory English class: the first step is to reach students. One could also draw a comparison with Sesame Street, which uses the idiom of commodities to “sell” reading to kids.  Both Oprah and Sesame Street effectively reach and shape a self who always already inhabits a commodified world. Furthermore, Oprah’s book recommendations brought many female and minority authors the kind of visibility and respect that otherwise might have eluded them, effectively forcing a widening of the literary “canon.”  Surely, a “deep” reading is not precluded by a form of reading that first grabs people emotionally and gets them to buy and open the book. But Oprah stimulates our class anxieties surrounding taste and the discernment of quality as manifest in our ability to interpret a novel “deeply.”

I turn finally to the question of gender and to scholarly anxieties about Oprah as an icon of womanhood. Why would Lofton say that “women and femininity in Oprah’s empire are . . . served up to be sacrificed”?  What are the effects of Oprah’s use of gender?  Are women being sacrificed or rendered powerless by Oprah’s embrace of feminine style?  Feminists may well be concerned that this sort of emphasis on the feminine deprives women of their political voice and plays into the hands of an arch-conservative like Glenn Beck, the only talk show host who rivals Oprah’s popularity. Beck is the antithesis of Oprah in so many ways—a white male whose commentary plays a central role in shaping conservative political discourse as it is articulated by many middle-class Americans. Yet he himself has stated on his show that his wife watches Oprah. Though he denigrates Oprah, his comments imply the following peculiar analogy: Oprah is to women what he, Beck, is to conservatives. In this analogy, the domestic doings of women can be safely ignored. Beck asserts a form of divisive but beleaguered masculine culture that must be protected from the incursions of foreigners, government, elite liberals, and uppity women. If Oprah is painted as merely promoting feminine distractions, then she too can be safely mocked and ignored.

Lofton’s reading of Oprah unwittingly participates in a similar class- and politics-based denigration of the feminine that involves a problematic conceptual slippage. Many feminists of a certain age, who recall their bra-burning resistance to gender inequities in the workplace and the home, have been critical of an upcoming generation of women who seem to have forgotten these hard-won social gains as they subject themselves to a feminine style and impossible shoes. But a large proportion of this younger generation doesn’t necessarily recognize the bra or the shoe as a symbol of male domination as they dress for their successful careers. Furthermore, their concern with style needn’t mark them as politically apathetic or conservative, as both Beck and Lofton appear to assume. Beck uses a specific form of masculinity as the emotional juice for his political conservatism and tries to paint women’s world as apolitical and powerless. Assuming that he is correct reproduces this assumption.

Denigration of feminine political action has a long past. The temperance movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was mocked as a bourgeois woman’s concern before it moved into mainstream politics and became the powerful force that resulted in Prohibition. Discussing how Oprah was directly influenced by the multiple strands of spiritualism that developed in the nineteenth century, scholar Trysh Travis has suggested that these forms of spiritualism were marginalized both by the general public and by the academy because they were judged to be “pathologically bourgeois and feminized.” They were criticized as being vague and superficial—a concern that Lofton herself expresses about Oprah’s approach to Obama, to books, and to spirituality. Historically (and, from an anatomical point of view, rather paradoxically), the feminine has been seen as lacking depth. Lofton’s criticism of the way Oprah encompasses both style and personal autonomy in her vision of self-improvement rests on a similar unease with feminine style and bodily practice, which is shared by many scholars. Yet, in our time, neither femininity nor masculinity can be detached from commodified bodily practices. Oprah’s entanglement of spiritualism and feminine commodities, which Lofton so powerfully demonstrates, can instead be viewed as an ethical discipline that not only embraces forms of embodied feminine pleasure but links these pleasures to forms of power that have the potential to recast the political process by reshaping the middle-class subject into one who is tolerant of the racially, culturally, religiously, and sexually other.

Focusing on the ways in which Oprah’s performances make scholars uneasy exposes the silent ambivalences and contradictions that shape our own discourse. These contradictions emerge from tensions between our egalitarian ideologies and our entrenched intellectual elitism. Oprah preaches a more egalitarian and tolerant social order, just as do many liberal scholars and other members of the intellectual elite, but she goes about it very differently. She disrupts intellectual elitism by making aspects of elite culture—ranging from lifestyle to literature—visible and accessible to everyone.  Unfortunately, efforts of the intellectual elite to promote a better world often backfire, foundering on the political polarization of liberals and conservatives. Conservatives attack liberals, especially those at elite research universities, for being out of touch with mainstream America. In some respects, they are right. Our uneasiness with Oprah arises precisely at those moments when we draw the line and pass judgment on her appeals to the lowbrow middle-American consumer. And yet Oprah has figured out how to transmit her message of tolerance even into the home of Glenn Beck.

-
What a strange, provocative experience it has been to dwell with Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon during these unsettling months. The seams of public life seem especially frayed of late—a precariousness underscored by disasters natural and political that keep coming. And yet ours is the radiant moment of endless possibility so central to Lofton’s subject, whose chief promise is that of a self that matters, that experiences abundance and becoming. It was with this coexistence in mind that I plunged into Oprah’s world.

The book’s many levels are only partly reflected in the conversations it has begun to generate. Lofton’s most widely discussed contribution is her reading of Oprah as “religious,” and the implications this identification has for the way we think about “religion” and “secularism” and something fuzzier called “spirituality.” Lofton urges us not simply to see in the story of American celebrity dreams an outline of secularism’s frames; she insists on both the collaboration of these categories and the hypertrophy of the religious, spilling beyond the limits of what she calls the “blaring data of tax-exempt religiosity,” whose supposed gravity and grounding in something called “real” religion constrain the scholarly imagination. Rather than seeing in the rituals that attend Oprah a formulaic “empowerment” by which consumers “make meaning” in their lives (one of the duller formulations of the 1970s, still on academic life support), Lofton locates and traces Oprah’s productions to explore the “great divide between what is properly religious and what is not.” Both empty signifier and placemarker of abundance within the “pulverized space” of American dreaming, “religion,” Lofton reminds us, is that by which the projects of the self reach beyond their material limits only to be sold back to us as lifestyle, makeover, transformation, and community. The expressions by which this “religion” takes shape are not just those of celebrity charisma and national fantasy but the stories we tell about ourselves, and which we see writ large in O. Her productions posit for themselves a world in need of their care.

The book is also, however, a critical engagement with its subject and with scholarship. Appearing during a period of reappraisal in Religious Studies (whether or not the field recognizes it happening), the book lays bare certain aversions fundamental to the way (American) religions have been analyzed. While the field grows continually more aware of the collusion of categories once held distinct by the modernist imaginary that still haunts our analytic—not just secular/sacred, but market/home, or self/other—Lofton argues forcefully and correctly that scholars of religion often shield themselves from the implications of this entanglement. More than simply kneading in ever more layers of nuance to pad our tender accounts of our subjects—or expanding what she calls “a checklist of classifications premised on a scientific posture complicit with religion’s eradication”—Lofton reminds us that no method or tone, however fervently defended, can avoid the fact that we are always, already, from the moment we begin, complicit with our subject. This intimacy is never more powerful than when we disavow or overlook it: the scholar in imagined distance or the secular’s disenchantment.

What does this entail? On the one hand, scholars no longer have the comfort of a kind of shallow critique (which Lofton identifies as either reflexive anti-consumerism or blunt constructions of Oprah’s “trap”). Neither, however, can we afford the luxury of scrutinizing these things forever at a distance—always Hegel watching Napoleon’s armies from Jena’s hills. The implications are great here, because of the way the field is haunted by one chief identitarian assumption, rooted equally in the old politics of representation and in methodological caution: authenticity. Lofton is concerned that “in our scholarly ambition to translate our subjects—to, as the phrasing often goes, take our subjects seriously—we have become sycophants to our subjects, reframing every act as an inevitably creative act.” In this she is part of a growing, and welcome tendency in the field.

But why are these considerations of “religion,” “spirituality,” and “the secular” important to us now? It is not simply the case that O makes for provocative material, though she surely does. Indeed, Lofton demonstrates her subject’s superfluity as her powerful cultural production captures themes and concerns central to American religions. But what Oprah provides is not simply data to confirm certain modes of study, nor merely an exemplification of a trend. Lofton urges us to see Oprah as a context in which certain languages and sentiments are conjured and sustained. Beyond the complex weave of the religious and the secular, Lofton practices her own critical arts subtly, by attending to the drab architecture of cultural desires instead of merely hacking away at their most obvious expressions. Religions are everywhere, mirroring (and driving) the excess that gives shape to us, outracing the conventional legal and scholarly disciplines that hope in vain to pin it down. Of Oprah the metonym, we “make of her pieces what we need,” gathering her multiplicities into us. In our relentless optimism, our dreams “programmed into analogy,” our “ideally accessorized moment,” and our “straight-backed righteousness of the spiritually assured,” we are “stunned before her plenty” as before the excess of the secular in which we all float, suspended adrift on common dreams of having it all.

Consider Lofton’s chapter on Oprah’s book club, with its wonderful performance of alternate textual strategies amidst a dazzling reading of reading. What do we learn from what Oprah does to texts? We learn about Chautauqua, and Franzen too. But what seems far more important and illuminating is how Oprah “manages literature’s subversive potential.” As reading and “religion” collapse into one another, Lofton reads literature’s reduction to a heroic overcoming of personal struggles, a sentimental gesture that dovetails with “novelistic retellings of their life stories.” All narrative, all consumption, all expression devolves onto the self in an endless enhancement. And yet, Lofton reminds, these individual projects of accessorization as meaning turn “inevitably, unstoppably, back to her.”

If O becomes “history by the sheer will of her narrations, by the hegemony of her sway,” her readers and viewers may be left only with the relentless quotidian within which the injunction to make oneself over is intoned. Lofton reveals a world in which we find alluring the templates to which we are fitted, a melancholy whose song of empowerment sells us resignation as the hope we know will be dashed. The unreality of the ☺ contained in O’s regimens of reading, dreaming, and self-fashioning leaves us weighed down, as it were, by the sheer abundance of possibility, frozen in a moment of prescribed, radiant optimism. We change our experience of a world which seems built to constrain us.

But, as mentioned at the outset, I wonder if Lofton’s critical project can be so neatly summed up, as before a commercial break. Surely her reading of the strange joy in the impossible endless possible can have no relevance for drab materialism or a culture with its blood up, right? Oprah links up to the American religious past, and to the world of The Secret and the fluid discourse of journeys of self-discovery, but surely she cannot tell us about worldly disorder and rage. Yet Lofton reminds us that Oprah is “the one picture that tells the whole story,” a story broader than her corporate brand, with greater reach than the historical predecessors Lofton deftly names, or even than the first level of Lofton’s own critical discourse. These formulations of the “spiritual” exceed even Oprah’s excessive condition, and tell us more about our own. While we might look to Oprah “to determine the spiritual ambition of her secular conveyances,” we might also look to Lofton’s formulations as a way to understand how apparently non-O modes of public expression come to be, and on what they draw their energy.

We think of the purity of O’s joy and possibility, and the rage of the world they seek to enliven. What accounts for the coexistence of this supreme spiritual assurance and the furors of Fred Phelps, Rep. King, and Governor Walker? It is not simply that dumbfounded joy and hyper-aggression exist in an interesting tension. Somehow, Lofton helps us see us how Winfreyan radiance inexorably bleeds into the toxic, fact-averse, combat-soaked tone of things. These modes held apart share the love of an endlessly primary, endlessly revisable self, which is to all things the only thing. Lofton does not tell us about or describe directly the simultaneity of these impulses; nor do I highlight this possible critical engagement in order to collapse all expressions into a single muddle of religious affect of simulacra. But her work gives us a way of thinking about how affront is the co-conspirator of joy, outrage the outcome of the self’s bubble pricked. At stake in this cartography of O’s endless expanse is the ironic occlusion of the self in these self-assured projects. If Lofton is right that O’s production constitutes “the culmination of the religious now,” this “now” is one in which the triumphant self of autonomy and abundance and make(O)ver is constantly undermined by its own impossibility. As with our heavily mediated social worlds more broadly, Oprah’s generative existence reveals how what it means to be an “I” is to become both subjects and objects of what Bruno Latour calls “belief in belief.” This malleable modern “I” is always within and out of our reach, our certainty of its existence leaving us precisely where we are, with all the disappointments and powerlessness and fury that sometimes entails. But then there is that swelling soundtrack chord, a new dream dreamt for us, always a new now to believe in. Our wishes cannot be the problem, can they?

Lofton writes that Oprah “conjures a religious space in regard to her country’s mythic dream, becoming a site of ritual and moral transaction for a nation possessed by the idea of a plural marketplace for everyone’s dreams.” Oprah’s traces and makings are not simply those of a conjoined spiritual and secular; they are simply ours, whether we like it or not. They are, perhaps improbably, a necessary condition of the shapes of public life today. And they resonate powerfully in the context into which the book is published, one in which the book’s comparative possibilities and implications deserve careful elaboration. Lofton shows us the scope of their influence through her study of O, in the breadth and suppleness of her comparisons.

As fate would have it, the simultaneous financial crisis in Illinois provided the opportunity She would need to stay there. State and federal budget cuts had brought Chicago’s public infrastructure to a near standstill. Sensing an opportunity, Ms. Winfrey proposed that in exchange for an unprecedented injection of capital, She would receive development rights to certain sites in the Central Area. Former Mayor Daley and the newly elected Mayor Emanuel agreed to be Her brokers with the Illinois legislature and the Obama administration. By the time the deal was done, Ms. Winfrey had acquired perpetual leases on several acres over I-290, the Circle Interchange, and the Kennedy Expressway.

No one could have anticipated the great developments that followed. By the time Oprah Media (OM) became fully operational, in ten short years, Ms. Winfrey’s expanding wealth had driven Her notorious benevolence to even greater heights. In 2020 She offered to pay off the mortgage debt of any private property owner in the Central Area if they gave up their rights to sell. Not surprisingly, most of the wealthy declined, but the vast majority of middle-class home and business owners willingly accepted, since their property values had remained stagnant for over a decade. She also built new housing blocks for the poor. Impeccable management and family development programs insured that most families only stayed for a few years, thus erasing any comparisons to the public housing that had once plagued Chicago. And by accepting these gifts, the poor and middle classes all effectively became Ms. Winfrey’s subjects, with neither willingness nor ability to separate their fates from Hers.

The schools were next. Her endowment of the University of Illinois at Chicago made college nearly free to all citizens of the state for the foreseeable future. UIC was renamed the Chicago Free University. Ms. Winfrey also built what by all measures was the world’s largest charter school—with a place for every child within the city limits. She guaranteed total equality of education for everyone. All families, rich and poor, sent their children, since Her school surpassed even the best private academies. This earned Ms. Winfrey the nickname, “Mother of Us All.” Her investments had a dramatic effect on the urban economy in just a few years time. The number of skilled employees began to multiply exponentially, as Chicago Free University expanded its enrollment and people from around the world were attracted to the prosperity and culture of wellness that She created. Ms. Winfrey’s empire grew as they grew, and the Central Area became Her company town.

The architect Daniel Burnham’s dream of the White City was rebuilt on the foundations of Ms. Winfrey’s stewardship. After Her hostile takeover of Google in 2025, the OM library over the Circle Interchange became the undisputed center of global knowledge and communication. The archive and its sister institutions renewed Chicago as a center of enlightenment on the level of Vatican City or Mecca. And thus The Oprah ascended from Icon to Guru to Prophet, by building a Radiant City of benevolence and power.