I don't know jack about her "religion." But I do know that this analysis of "the church of Oprah" in the NY Times is deficient.
...The scholars found conflicting sources of Ms. Winfrey’s spirituality. It began, but definitely does not end, with the black church of her youth. In her 2003 book, “Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery,” Eva Illouz, a sociologist, quotes Ms. Winfrey as saying: “Since I was three and a half, I’ve been coming up in the church speaking. I did all of the James Weldon Johnson sermons” — Mr. Johnson being the poet whose “God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse” was published in 1927. “I used to do them for churches all over the city of Nashville,” Ms. Winfrey said..
While respecting Ms. Winfrey’s use of her Christian heritage, Dr. Illouz ultimately concluded that the talk-show host might be something of a false prophet. That is because, she said, Ms. Winfrey and her cadre of self-help experts treated suffering as something beneficial. Ms. Winfrey turned the black church’s ethos of self-reliance in the face of suffering into an exaltation of suffering itself.“By making all experiences of suffering into occasions to improve oneself,” Dr. Illouz wrote, “Oprah ends up — absurdly — making suffering into a desirable experience.”
It would be strangely masochistic if "suffering as occasion to improve oneself" exactly equals "suffering is desirable." I mean, we Buddhists sort of know that suffering is inevitable but to the extent that there is a "point" to suffering it's an occasion to learn to be not attached to nor repulsed by suffering. Suffering is universal, and that should be an occasion for the cultivation of compassion.
Dr. Illouz may be a sociologist - and may even be a good one - but she really ought to learn more about religion.
And Oprah Winfrey certainly enabled all breed of spiritual hucksters and quack snake oil peddlers...I'm sure I must have said something negative about her in the past about all this...but that doesn't justify making uninformed statements about religion.
