Religion and Theology

This paper will analyze the worldview of Oprah Winfrey, one of the role models of present day American society, and analyze its debt to the New World movement and its problematic relationship it shares with the Christian faith.

Discussion
This paper will discuss Oprahs performance and views depending on the specified Life Domains of Career and Money, Sexuality, Suffering and Death, Family and Friends. It will then try and analyze it to find out its theological and spiritual allegiance, and on that basis will make a studied conclusion about Oprahs acceptability as a role model.

Introduction
It does not always take a Time Magazine Top 100 list to observe that Oprah Winfrey is one of the most influential individuals in American society at the present time. Award winning Talk-Show Host, entrepreneur, author, publisher and a self-made business woman, she moves seamlessly into domains as polarized as poetry and politics. Oprah is, more significantly, conscious of her social responsibility and vocal about her it, and often uses her extremely popular talk show as a platform for airing New Age belief system.

Life Module Career and Money
Starting from humble beginnings in a childhood fraught with trouble and abuse, Oprah rose to the very heights of the broadcasting business. Her philosophy of career is strongly related to a social cause, particularly related to the liberation of women and improvement of girl children. Oprah is the owner of HARPO Inc. and has the distinction of being the first African-American billionaire.

Life Module Sexuality
Oprah Winfrey appears to have a liberal view on sexuality, and is candid about her many romantic affairs in the 1970s, before being more or less settled in with Stedman Graham in 1986. Oprah pledges sincerity in almost all the relationships, and recalls situations where her degree of involvement would cause her great pain, leading her on to the verge of depression and suicide.

Life Module Family
Oprahs views on family are largely fashioned by her own far from perfect family experiences of her childhood. Oprah was sexually abused by a family friend and then by an uncle. For several years, Oprah was sexually abused often (Krohn  Cosgrove, 2004, p.21).  Both of these define why she always stopped shy of raising a family and biological in the formal sense, and her raising concern about the issue of childhood abuse.

Life Module Suffering and Death
Oprah is not new to suffering, and right from a torrid childhood to an equally difficult early life, but believes in the power of the will to outdo these impediments and emerge ever the stronger through grit and determination.

Life Module Friendship
Oprah has been close friends with Gayle King ever since she was in her early twenties. The long-lasting and close nature of their friendship led to widespread speculation about them being gay, which Oprah denies but at the same time accepts that she understands such a misconception is natural. 

Conclusion
Oprah does not openly vouch for adherence to any New Age Movement as such, yet her beliefs as well as an insistence on espousing a kind of deep spirituality in her shows that stops short of being expressly Christian, raise strong suspicions about her strong associations with it. It is often observed that Oprah developed her show quite consciously as a New Age platform, starting with pop psychologists and motivational speakers in the guest list to start with, leading to more explicit spokespersons of the New Age Spiritualism at a later stage. The Oprah Winfrey Shows New Age design evolved slowly, but surely (Harris  Watson, 2007, p.133). Her liberal and unrepentant sexual life, her rather cynical views on family as well as her attempts to combine an all pervading spirituality with career and leisure, her stress of the feminine identity, all betray strong traces of New Age Belief systems. At the same time, she is one of the strongest members of the anti-Satanist camp from within the media (Newport, 1998, p.570).

Coming to a decision about Oprah Winfrey as a role model is a difficult one, Her fight with suffering, poverty, abuse and subsequent rise to stardom has too much of the making of the self-made American myth in it to warrant denial or reproach. However, a close look makes it immediately apparent that the justification behind all these activities is an ego that places the self and the power of an almost god-like self at its center, rather than a gentle submission to the God that made all these apparently miraculous events possible for her. As a result, even appreciating the great qualities that her persona has been bestowed with, I would stop just short of considering her as a role model.