The Next Obama Spiritual Scandal: the Oprah Connection

For the past two weeks, we have all been bombarded with images of Pastor Jeremiah Wright’s hostile homily about America. Obama has ridden the media storm and seems to have survived the political frenzy. He can breathe quietly for a while, but only for a short time.

Just when he thought that the road to the Whitehouse was safe, his one-time political partner, Oprah Winfrey, is beginning to create another theological storm for Obama.

Recently, the TV icon of superficiality has gotten herself involved with a New Age guru, Eckhart Tolle, and has begun toting his revolutionary ideas of re-hashed transcendental meditation on her website. Not since the Beatles went to India in the Sixties, has a major celebrity ever used their popularity to spiritually misguide a large part of the population. At a recent online seminar, two million Oprah devotees enthusiastically allowed themselves to be cybernetically brainwashed to what Oprah calls “a new awakening and a shift of consciousness across the planet.”

Eckhart Tolle promotes these meditational techniques in his book “A New Earth.” Everybody in the world needs to transform and follow this current wave of New Age spiritual mumbo-jumbo. According to Tolle, "A significant portion of the earth's population will soon recognize, if they haven't already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die."

This smacks of spiritual elitism and harps back to the days of Nietzsche and Nazism.

So, how will this become another albatross around Obama’s neck? When the mainstream faiths begin to feel threatened by this spiritual dabbling of the Queen of superficiality, and when Obama’s opponents are looking to tag him with yet another controversial connection. It seems like he has made another awkward judgment call.

If I was to make a prediction of when this will happen, I would say sometime in early April…