Marianne Williamson teaches the miracles of the Son of God, but she hasunwittingly become the Daughter of the Press. America's latest Mary Magdalene is Mary Media-lene.
The press has pandered to her celebrity apostles and her best-sellina book, Return to Loving (HarperCollins), without giving her the praise she deserves for her thankless hard and unglamorous work for dying AIDS and cancer patients and the homeless on L.A.'s streets. But Jesus never received such good press as Williamson. Of course, the world was a smaller place in 37 A.D. Certainly, the crowds who cheered Jesus' death sentence and jeered at him as he hung from the Cross were far fewer than the combined readers of Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the L.A. Times, USA Today, Newsweek, and all the talk shows that have covered Marianne Williamson's ascent to Mount Olympus. That is not counting the thousands to whom she preaches at her lectures in Los Angeles and New York, nor those she sees at her Centers for Living. Before discussing who she is and why so many need her, we need to ask why the press, which has covered her so feverishly, has not really asked these questions itself. Increasingly, the greater part of the media is built around entertainment, closely allied to public relations. This means the reverential treatment of anything and any one connected in any way to stars. The press, in their desperation not to miss the chance to mention as many stars as possible, have rushed madly like the Gadarene Swine over the cliff of hyper-celebrity to provide Ms. Williamson's star-studded credentials. This involves copying Williamson's gilded Rolodex into the articles, which we have all seen. Often this is not the fault of the writers themselves but the result of the demands of the marketplace. Still, it makes for boring coverage.
Yes, Williamson did indeed conduct the marriage of Liz Taylor. Yes, Cher, Richard Gere, Kim Basinger, Michael Jackson, Bette Midler, Shirley MacLaine, and Croesian tycoons such as David Geffen and Barry Diller (among others), may indeed be her apostles who help her raise money for her charities. But far more interesting are the 750,000-plus readers who have bought her book, the millions who have bought her taped lectures and the thousands who attend her seminars.
What is Marianne Williamson?
Williamson's attitudes toward established churches are precisely those of Jesus toward the establishment of his time. Williamson is far more interesting a phenomenon and far more intelligent a character than the reborn Christian preachers like the Bakkers and the Swaggarts.
But is she just a new cult rising to horrifying heights of hypocrisy and vulgarity before crashing like a corrupt savings & loan (a la Bakkers) or a flaky genocide (ala Jonestown)? She is in fact very different and more important historically than the Swaggarts and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. They were simply conglomeurateurs--brazen hypocrites with bad taste, ripe for the entertaining scandals that felled them. Clearly, they had nothing whatsoever to do with the austerity and morality of early Christian teaching: Jesus' whole strength was that he disdained bureaucracy and hierarchy. But what about today's organized religions?
The book Megatrends 2, specifically predicted a move away from organized religions to a New Age spiritualism. They were correct: The organized religions, Christian and Jewish, would be sensible not to dismiss Williamson's levity. Whether or not we like her, her rebellious irreverence has far more in common with Jesus Christ than, say, the religion of a prince of the Church, such as Cardinal O'Connor, or the princes of Judaism, such as Rabbi Schneerson of the Lubavitchers. Their robes, hierarchies, titles and residences have alienated them not only from this generation (which we will discuss below), but also from the historical Christ and his teachings.
"Religion," Williamson explains to me as we sip tea in the Regency Hotel in Manhattan, "is like a map. The route isn't important. It's the destination that matters. Let's face it: organized dogmatic religion hasn't been a great gift to mankind. The divisions among religions are as absurd as the divisions among nations. When God created the world, he didn't draw a line between Canada and America."
Williamson teaches a book called A Course in Miracles, which Jesus was supposed to have dictated to a psychiatrist in the Seventies. She preaches the limitless power of the individual (which she calls the "Self") to improve, to conquer hate, falsity, and self-pity (which she calls the "Ego"), and to love. She teaches that there is a "miracle" in every individual, just as there was in Jesus: "The miracle is a shift in our own thinking: the willingness to keep our own hearts open."
Refreshingly, she does not blame all wrongs on parents and society; she discourages any whining. Though Williamson uses the imagery of Christianity and Judaism, she is as much inspired by Eastern religion. The attraction of her teaching is clear: the power of the individual to conquer all without the help of stodgy institutions that are out of touch with modern generations.
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