How Oprah Became a Messiah: Prophet and Profit

Paul Harvey

As Oprah departs, to much media coverage, let us turn once more to our contributor Kathryn Lofton for a summing up of "What is Oprah"?

K. Lofton's book Oprah: Gospel of an Icon, has engendered a lengthy, multi-part, fascinating set of responses from numerous other scholars at Immanent Frame, and on the occasion of Oprah's departure from the network airwaves, Lofton's reflections on her career and meaning in the context of American religious history can be found at CNN Belief Blog, in the Los Angeles Times, in the New York Daily News, and in the Washington Post. Over at Killing the Buddha, Nathan Schneider also provides these links as well as a link to his own interview with Lofton, and gives his own thoughts, here.

Perhaps the easiest place to connect in to all this discussion is at the piece at the CNN Belief Blog, where our valued colleague writes:

As she departs from her ritual slot, there will be a vacuum for some. Yet if history has taught us anything, it is that the void will not be left gaping for long. “The false messiah is as old as the hope for the true Messiah,” wrote Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig. “He is the changing form of this changeless hope.”

Oprah represented humanity’s ceaseless interest in spiritual responses to personal problems. We now live in her world: one of first-person confessions, required makeovers, and spiritual consumption.

The measure of her consequence will be not in whether or not she mattered to you, but whether the world you occupy looks more like hers than you know.

The Scandal of the Evangelical Behind

Randall Stephens

I've been having the students in my Religion and American Culture class summarize news stories related to the course. One brought in a feature on an interesting study--presented at the American Heart Associations Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism/Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention 2011 Scientific Sessions in Atlanta. It reveals that young people who go to church regularly are more likely to tip the scales as adults than their non-religious counterparts.

Jeannine Stein of the Los Angeles Times reports:

An inactive lifestyle, watching TV and eating too many fatty foods are all to blame for many Americans being overweight and obese. We may have to add religion to that list. A study finds that young adults who regularly attend religious activities may be more prone to obesity by middle age than their nonreligious peers. . . . "It's possible that getting together once a week and associating good works and happiness with eating unhealthy foods could lead to the development of habits that are associated with greater body weight and obesity," said lead author Matthew Feinstein of Northwestern Medicine, in a news release. "We don't know why frequent religious participation is associated with development of obesity, but the upshot is these findings highlight a group that could benefit from targeted efforts at obesity prevention."

My one question . . . Why?

Is it Religious Belief or Charlatanism?

by John L. Crow

Wednesday evening the ARH graduate students at FSU had its monthly colloquium and during the lively discussion, the issue of fraud and charlatanism came up. In particular, how do we address the beliefs and practices of the historical actors we study? What about claims of healing and medicinal products? When a religious leader sells a product, such as a patent medicine or an herbal remedy, which they claim cures diseases, do we assume they believe in the product, or can we question whether their beliefs are true, raising the possibility of fraud? What if they claim they can heal by the laying on of hands, or from afar? Should we mention this possibility of fraud when there is no direct evidence?

Yesterday afternoon, in a seminar discussing the Sehat and Sullivan volumes Emily Clark blogged about, we discussed the relationship between the courts, religious intolerance, term definition, and the precarious position courts are in when they have to make judgment calls regarding religious belief and practice. While having this discussion, the previous question about charlatanism came to mind and putting these two issues together, I remembered the 1944 Supreme Court case of United States v. Ballard. While this case was not mentioned in Sehat, it would have fit his narrative well, especially in the chapter where he discusses the Supreme Court’s “radical” shift in the 1940s when “the court entered an entirely different world…[b]y acting as a guarantor of rights” (226).

Guy and Edna Ballard, along with their son Donald, were the heads of the “I AM” movement founded in 1930. According to Guy Ballard, while he was hiking on Mt. Shasta in California, he encountered the ascendant master Saint Germain. With roots in Theosophy, Ballard claimed that Beloved Saint Germain, the current master overseeing the Earth, chose Ballard and his family to be the mouth piece for the “I AM” movement. Through the Ballards, the masters, including Jesus, dictated new teachings which would grant immortality to those who accepted the teachings. The masters also claimed their wisdom would save the United States from destruction. Most importantly, because of his special position as the spokesperson of the masters, Ballard had attained a supernatural state of immortality. This enabled him to heal disease and conquer death and old age. He claimed he could do these things for others both in person and from afar if the followers sent the Saint Germain Foundation love offerings via mail. Ballard made these claims in printed literature created by the Saint Germain Press, on radio shows, which had a broad audience, and through correspondence courses.

Ballard unexpectedly died in 1939 causing a crisis within the movement. His death obviously refuted his claims of immortality. A number of his former adherents and students used this opportunity to challenge the movement and complained to the federal government about Ballard’s statements. In 1941, the United States filed a lawsuit against Edna and Donald Ballard, claiming that they were guilty of mail fraud, accepting money for products and services which they knew were fraudulent. Eighteen counts were brought against the Ballards. These claims of the Ballards included:

• That the Ballards had attained a supernatural state of self-immortality, which enabled them to be entirely free from ailments common to man and to conquer disease, death, old age, poverty and misery, and that they could and would transmit that supernatural state to others willing to pay therefor.

• That the Ballards had, by reason of supernatural attainments, the power to heal persons of ailments, diseases and injuries and the power to cure persons of diseases normally classified as curable and of diseases normally classified as incurable, and had in fact cured hundreds of persons.

• That the Ballards had a divine and supernatural ability to bring forth from a supernatural state money, riches and other things necessary to mankind and could transmit that ability to others willing to pay therefor.

At the end of the case, both Edna and Donald Ballard were found guilty of twelve counts of fraud. The significant thing about the case, though, is that the district court judge gave certain instructions to the jury to not consider the religious claims made by the Ballards. The language of the judge is so specific I quote the passage in full:

Now, gentlemen, here is the issue in this case: First, the defendants in this case made certain representations of belief in a divinity and in a supernatural power. Some of the teachings of the defendants, representations, might seem extremely improbable to a great many people. For instance, the appearance of Jesus to dictate some of the works that we have had introduced in evidence or shaking hands with Jesus. To some people that might seem highly improbable. I point that out as one of the many statements. Whether that is true or not is not the concern of this court and is not the concern of the jury. As far as this court sees the issue, it is immaterial what these defendants preached or wrote or taught in their classes. They [the jury] are not going to be permitted to speculate on the actuality of the happening of those incidents. The issue is: Did these defendants honestly and in good faith believe those things? If they did, they should be acquitted. If these defendants did not believe those things, [if] they did not believe that Jesus came down and dictated, or that Saint Germain came down and dictated, did not believe the things that they wrote, the things that they preached, but used the mail for the purpose of getting money, the jury should find them guilty.

When the case was appealed (Ballard et. al. v. United States, 138 F.2d 540, (C.A. 9 1943)), the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned the ruling, claiming that the judge should not have excluded the issue of religious belief. The majority wrote, regarding the claims of meeting the masters and the powers of healing, “Whether such representations were false or true was a question which should have been submitted to the jury.” The case was appealed to the Supreme Court which sided with the district court and overturned the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The significant point is that this opinion established the precedent that the United States government is not in the business of deciding which religious claims were true and which were false. The Supreme Court’s majority opinion states:

The Fathers of the Constitution were not unaware of the varied and extreme views of religious sects, of the violence of disagreement among them, and of the lack of any one religious creed on which all men would agree. They fashioned a charter of government which envisaged the widest possible toleration of conflicting views. Man's relation to his God was made no concern of the state. He was granted the right to worship as he pleased and to answer to no man for the verity of his religious views. The religious views espoused by respondents might seem incredible, if not preposterous, to most people. But if those doctrines are subject to trial before a jury charged with finding their truth or falsity,then the same can be done with the religious beliefs of any sect. When the triers of fact undertake that task, they enter a forbidden domain. The First Amendment does not select any one group or any one type of religion for preferred treatment. It puts them all in that position.

With the Supreme Court’s decision, the Ballards were retried. This new case also went to the Supreme Court (Ballard v. United States, 329 U. S. 187 (1946)) and was vacated because in the second trial women were illegally excluded from the jury. The end result was that Edna and Donald Ballard were never convicted of fraud.


In looking at the case of the Ballards, one might wonder how nineteenth century religious figures such as Andrew Jackson Davis would fair. After Davis was visited by Swedenborg and Galen while in a mesmeric trance and given his staff of healing, he then claimed to be a trance medium and that he could heal people. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy also made claims related to curing disease. Healing is a significant aspect of various Christian movements, including Pentecostalism and Primitive Baptistism, to name just a couple. As scholars of religion, how do we engage the issue of fraud? Is it fraud only when remuneration is involved? Or is it only a problem when the alleged cure fails to work? Many say that as historians of religion we should adopt the stance of the Supreme Court and assert we are not in the business adjudicating any religious claims regarding belief and practice.

The United States v. Ballard set a precedent that, as Winnifred Fallers Sullivan points out, is impossible for the United States courts to follow. In a detailed study of Warner v. Boca Raton (1999), Sullivan shows that the court is routinely placed in the position of deciding what is a religion and thus protected belief and practice under the establishment clause in the Constitution. She notes, “legal protection for ‘religion’ anywhere demands a definition of religion” (151). I think we, as scholars of religion, are more aware than most about the difficulty of defining religion, and all the implicit and explicit baggage that comes with definition. But this, then, brings me back to my first question, how do we address the beliefs and practices of the historical actors we study? Of course there is no one answer and scholars must decide based on the data and claims of the historical actors. But what these books and court cases demonstrate is that our discipline is not alone in the struggle to answer these questions.

Spring Break 1899: Who needs MTV when you have the Battle Creek Sanitarium

Emily Clark

Spring break is upon the Florida State University campus. Many of the undergraduates will embark on journeys of “rest” and “relaxation” to tranquil towns like Panama City Beach. Graduate students like myself will enjoy a quieter Tallahassee and catch up on our reading and grading with a cup of coffee – or when things get real crazy, a refreshing and hoppy pale ale. Taking a break to rejuvenate is not a novel idea. If this were this spring break 1899, I might go cleanse my mind and body at Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. Founded on the ideas of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (of Kellogg's cereals) became the institute’s lead doctor and head-honcho in 1876. Kellogg was a prolific writer, as a simple Google Books author search demonstrates, and his writings center on health and the relationship between health and religion.

Health reform and improving the physical condition of American bodies was a focus of Kellogg’s, as he strove to remedy “the harmony” of “bodily functions.” Kellogg was especially concerned with digestion, noting how “the miracle of digestion” reflected a well-tuned body. He was a big fan of enemas, and the Sanitarium contained a fecal and urine lab which analyzed the waste products of residents as a means to track holistic improvement. If the body worked at the ideal natural state – as God intended – it would show in digestion. In the words of my graduate colleague Adam Park who has studied Kellogg, “poo had theological significance.” In an aptly named book about the body, The Living Temple, Kellogg laments, “Departing from the way of life marked out for him by his Creator, man has sought out many inventions, the soul- and body-destroying influences of which are clearly evident to the thoughtful observer.” The cure for these physical and spiritual ailments was a new way of living, eating, exercising, and sleeping – all of which one could learn during her or his stay at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. This quest for perfection was not neutral however, for Kellogg was a eugenicist who looked unfavorably upon those not white, middle-class, and Protestant.

Always striving for improvement and eventual perfection, Kellogg’s utopian aspirations remained, even after he strayed from the Seventh-day Adventist Church and Ellen White’s direct tutelage. In addition to the fecal lab, Kellogg developed other scientific methods to examine a person’s body and to monitor her or his progress. A calibrating machine, the Universal DynamoMeter, measured the bodies of incoming residents; due to poor lifestyle, many residents failed to maintain the proper angles and proportions of slimness and posture. The Universal DynamoMeter was merely one of Kellogg’s many life-improving inventions. Another key problem of city living (on top of bad nutrition and lack of exercise) was the poor city air. Kellogg believed in the reviving quality of crisp, cold, Michigan air but recognized the foolishness of sleeping outside in the harsh Michigan winters. Problem solved with attaching sleeping hoods to one’s window to funnel the clean air directly to the top of one’s bed. Exercise was another key element to life at the Sanitarium. Kellogg’s instructions reflected the larger emerging fitness culture, and residents took full advantage of the Sanitarium’s large outdoor gymnasium.

Preaching on the relationship between religion and health was not unique to Kellogg. Around when Kellogg took over Battle Creek Sanitarium, Mary Baker Eddy published her classic Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which explains how disease and pain were really just misguided thinking and a false understanding of matter/spirit. This text remains foundational in the Church of Christ, Scientist. Eddy and Kellogg's focus on the body, health, and spirituality are part of a much larger trend in American religion. R. Marie Griffith's Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity elucidates the centrality of the body - its maintenance and discipline - throughout American religious history. Firm bodies and firm souls, Kellogg was not alone.

But back to my dream spring break of 1899, I would have been in interesting company. The list of visitors to the Battle Creek Sanitarium for body and mind rejuvenating is noteworthy. Mary Todd Lincoln, Warren G. Harding, Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart, Richard Haliburton, and everyone’s favorite Kingdom of Matthias follower Sojourner Truth all spent time at Battle Creek, righting the wrongs American society had done to their bodies.

Cancer Cannot Kill Doggerel

Paul Harvey

I spent a lot of time growing up waiting in the hospital waiting room. This wasn't because I was ever ill when younger, or because I sustained any injuries more grievous than spraining my ankle about 10,000 times playing basketball for the last 40 years. Rather, my father, a family physician in a small town and one of just two doctors for one entire county in the Oklahoma Panhandle, got called in a lot -- and if my mother wasn't around, the hospital waiting room was my babysitter. For years, I stared down the mysterious hallway which had a sign reading something like (to the best of my recollection) "No One Under 13 admitted," waiting for the day I could walk freely down the ward and glimpse at the effects of the exotic diseases that must be lurking there.

In that waiting area, I read an awful lot of Boy's Life, Highlights, and pretty much the entire corpus (slight exaggeration, but it seems like it) of Reader's Digest, Field and Stream (weird, since I have always hated fishing, and have gone hunting exactly one time in my life), Guideposts, U. S. News and World Report, and other stuff that I can't even remember. Then there were the dermatology medical journals, my favorite since they showed all sorts of gross and disgusting skin diseases. They didn't stock National Geographic, presumably because those pictures of bare-breasted women out somewhere on the African savanna would shock the church ladies.

The waiting area was also replete with all manner of tracts, posters, and various transitory publications featuring a staggering amount of inspirational doggerel. I used to read that stuff (it was at least amusing, more than I could say for Field and Stream), and wonder who exactly it appealed to. But I was just a boy; who was I to say? Time to get back to the daily prescribed Bible reading, and wonder why exactly I was supposed to read the book of Leviticus, rather than (say) the autobiographies of Jerry Kramer and Bart Starr of my football heroes the Green Bay Packers.

Since then, inspirational doggerel has become a mega-industry. In "Doggerel Fails Me," a terrific piece up at Killing the Buddha, Mary Valle takes up a theme recently explored at fuller length in Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Ehrenreich's subtitle overstates the case, as it seems all subtitles of trade and popular non-fiction books (of the "How such and such Changed the World Forever" variety) do nowadays, but I appreciated the takedown of pink ribbon kitsch and feel-good maxims that seem to signify the death of tragedy.

Valle, a participant in a trial for cancer victims, knows whereof she speaks, and concludes that if doggerel of the "cancer cannot" variety helps some people, then fine. But the inspirational poem is a lie, because of course cancer can; it took my father, about as selfless and positive thinking a person as humanly possible to be. I'm still pissed off about that, and thinking about the words I read in that waiting room make me even angrier. I found Valle's conclusion much more potently comforting:

But I backed down from the ledge: people must like “Cancer Cannot” or you wouldn’t see it so much. It was time to do what I had come for. I took a seat and said a prayer for my new friend, and for the parents who donated the Meditation Room and their daughter, and decided that I’d contribute my own book to the Meditation Room collection, seeing as how there was no poetry on the shelf. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson: not a lie in the bunch.

On Illness Stories and Hospital Beds

Art Remillard

I’m blogging from a bed. It's supposed to look like a hospital bed. More on that later. For now, let’s talk about stories.

Whenever I do research, I’m not looking for sources. I’m looking for stories. Sometimes I find fragments of stories in letters and diaries. Other times I find more detailed stories in memoirs and autobiographies. In any case, since I write religious histories, I want stories that convey a certain essence—something that is reflective, insightful, unique, aesthetically compelling—something that gets to the heart of an issue, event, or idea.

But even when I do find that gem of a story, I worry that I’m just not getting everything. Recall Mike Pasquier’s post on this very point as it related to Hurricane Katrina. “The circumstances just seem too aberrant, too disjointed from ordinary time and space, to capture the religious experiences of the moment,” he laments. “Scholars of religious studies, myself included, tend to use phrases like ‘lived religion’ and ‘extraliturgical religion’ to describe religion outside the carefully scripted confines of ‘official religion’ or ‘institutional religion.’ But these categories seem only to get at the before and after the storm; the now remains elusive.”

Stories of the storm, filtered through memory, will always cast a veil of mystery. Is it even possible, I wonder, to find a “now” perspective? Probably not. But illness stories might come close. In At the Will of the Body, medical sociologist Arthur Frank chronicles his journey through two illnesses, a heart attack and cancer. Religion and storytelling play no small role in his account.

Stories we tell ourselves about what is happening to us are dangerous because they are powerful. Stories come to us from many sources: some we seek, many happen without our notice, others impose themselves on our lives. We have to choose carefully which stories to live with, which to use to answer the question of what is happening to us. Jacob’s wrestling became a story I lived with as part of my personal mythology of illness. This is what it is to be ill: to wrestle through the long night, injured, and if you prevail until the sun rises, to receive a blessing. Through Jacob’s story, illness became an adventure.

Frank elaborates on the significance of stories and spirituality in The Wounded Storyteller and The Renewal of Generosity. He emphasizes how a diagnosis wounds both a person's body and identity. Reconstructing both calls for a new story, one that accounts for the illness and all of its implications. Caregivers can play a significant role in this process, if they are truly caregivers. “I reserve the name ‘caregiver’ for the people who are willing to listen to ill persons and respond to their individual experiences,” he explains in At the Will of the Body.

Is Frank’s illness story—and others like it—“now” enough? “Cancer never disappears,” he affirms. Frank will always live with his illness, and tell his illness story. And this story's religious dimension might influence readers too. As Martin Marty put it in his review, “this short work can transform lives or at least ways of thinking about living.”

This brings me to my faux-hospital bed. It’s Relay for Life time at St. Francis University. Students from my “Narrative Medicine” course decided to set up 3 hospital beds, with 3 volunteers acting as cancer patients for 24 hours. Somehow, I ended up being one of the patients. I've assumed the identity of a 40-year-old brain cancer patient. I'm married, with two kids. I’m also angry, depressed, disoriented, and enveloped in pain. My motor skills are such that the “nurses” have to feed me.

So I have a story. It's a story of humility, mainly. I've ceded my freedom to move, sleep, and eat. It's nothing like the real thing, but maybe I'll leave with an improved sense of empathy. After all, throughout the day and night, survivors have stopped to share their illness stories. The depth and detail has been nothing short of astonishing. Every story resonates with spiritual force, causing me to reflect on the limits of life, and the reality of death.

I'm almost finished now. I have crossed over in to another identity, as well as another discipline, and will be resuming "normalcy" soon. I will bring back new insights. In particular, maybe on my next trip to the archives, I'll pay closer attention to stories of illness. They seem to make the “now” a bit less elusive.