But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist — I really believe he is Antichrist — I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my ‘faithful slave’, as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened you — sit down and tell me all the news.
Last weekend, I was telling my mom why I’d called her previously to ask her opinion about Louis Farrakhan. “I wrote about him for my newsletter,” I explained. “I quoted you.”
My mom did not, at any point in this conversation, ask to read my newsletter about Farrakhan, much less to subscribe to my newsletter in general.
My mom did go on to tell me a story about a friend of hers.
My mom says her friend attends a church where the pastor once described Oprah Winfrey as the Antichrist.
Too hastily, I imagined a black pastor, having launched himself in a proper Baptist conniption, shouting wild theories about Oprah, Steadman, Gayle King, and Pizzagate.
But then my mom revealed the pastor to be white.
I should’ve known.
I know white people — including white people who watch and enjoy Oprah — have always been crazy with regard to Oprah.
I grew up outside of Richmond, Virginia, and I knew plenty of redneck moms who enjoyed The Oprah Winfrey Show every afternoon. Of course, the Antichrist overrides the god-fearing redneck’s better judgment with the promise of a free car.
I’m sure only black people watch the Oprah Winfrey Network, though.
I googled around, expecting to find a few obscure traces of the pastor’s Oprah-as-Antichrist theory.
In fact, I found countless web rants and news articles about Oprah’s pivotal role in the end times.
Mike Bickle, a Kansas City megapastor, preaches the Oprah-as-Antichrist theory to a large evangelical congregation. “I believe that one of the main pastors, as a forerunner to the Harlot movement — it’s not the Harlot movement yet — is Oprah,” Bickle says. “She is winsome, she is kind, she is reasonable, she is utterly deceived.”
I have never seen so many sequential compliments amount to such a stark condemnation!
“I told you,” my mom said, “and it’s mostly our white brothers and sisters.”
In fairness, Oprah does speak in the style of a woman who knows, and loves, many Scientologists personally.
Still, I have a hard time understanding why any white evangelical Christians should fear Oprah. She can sound very New Age in her extreme wealth, but she’s no more or less dubious than any popular televangelists.
Jerry Falwell, Jr., appears to be a messy deviant, and no one has revealed him to be the Antichrist!
I suspect this is all about about politics.
Last year, Oprah — having won the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement — gave a Golden Globes speech about the Me Too movement, Recy Taylor, civil rights, and popular entertainment.
With incomparable confidence, Oprah addressed the great feminist malaise in the post-Trump moment. (Six months later, Trump would nominate Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.)
“It's not just a story affecting the entertainment industry,” Oprah said about the Me Too movement. “It's one that transcends any culture, geography, race, religion, politics, or workplace. So I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue.”
In rousing rhetorical force, Oprah seemed more powerful than ever before, though she’s always been a progressive agitator and civil rights champion. Her audience, including Meryl Streep, immediately petitioned Oprah to run for president.
The evangelical rants about Oprah-as-Antichrist predate Oprah’s speech at the Golden Globes. However, I can’t help but notice their proliferation only after Barack Obama’s election. Oprah, you’ll recall, was the first super-famous person (of countless super-famous people, ultimately) to endorse Obama in the 2008 presidential election.
For white reactionaries, Obama was the Antichrist in his own way, but Hillary Clinton was also the Antichrist, too, and now Obama and Clinton are both too conclusively removed from elected office to productively regarded as the Antichrist, so now Oprah is the Antichrist, if only by process of elimination.
I am old enough to remember when the Antichrist was Napoleon Bonaparte.
Listen, there are plenty of sensible, realistic reasons to oppose Oprah’s influence in popular culture. Oprah is intelligent and righteous, but she’s also hilariously out of touch, she promotes charlatans into celebrities, and, through no fault of her own, she embodies the deranged American outlook on celebrity as divine right.
I remember arguing about Oprah with everyone, including Obama’s most famous speechwriter, Jon Favreau, on Twitter a day after the Golden Globes speech. I remember Favreau insisting that Democrats must fight fire (Trump) with fire (Oprah). I remember this making sense, but only in the most terminally pessimistic sense suggesting a worst-case scenario for democracy, conceptually.
I deleted Twitter for a reason.
In researching Oprah’s ascendance as the Antichrist, I watched one evangelical YouTube dipshit with whom I kinda, sorta agree. “Satan is using Trump to flood politics with all these Hollywood actors,” the man said, agreeably.
In his roundabout way, Obama forced white Christian reactionaries to transform Oprah Winfrey into the Antichrist. They had no other choice, really.
If only she had endorsed John Edwards, at least initially, Oprah might not risk deceiving God’s children and thus depriving them of redemption in Christ.
I run the risk of further offending God (as well as my mother) as well as the Antichrist (which is to say, Oprah) with the circulation of this newsletter. “If O comes for you,” my mom texted me, “I didn’t say a word.”
Of course, Oprah is smart and accomplished enough to understand how popular esteem works. Surely, she knows running for president would, unceremoniously, polarize her. The surest route to Antichristendom is politics.
She’s not running.
If Oprah is the Antichrist and she did run against Trump, would that make Trump out to be Christ, or, at the very least, the Prochrist?
The New Testament hypes the Antichrist with excruciating vagueness: “the liar” who “denies the Father and the Son,” according to John.
The Antichrist could be Drake, for all I know.
The gospels get too vindictive and hysterical for me to make much sense of the Antichrist’s portrait. It’s a bit of a witch hunt, really.
In any case, I’ll ask around. I’ll call my mom and report back.