The headline and deck of Tess Stuart’s report on Marianne Williamson — “That Marianne Mind$et: Obeying the Law of Divine Compensation” — tell you nearly everything you need to know about this one-trick pony of a profile in Rolling Stone. Stuart has latched onto one of the oldest chestnuts of politics (They’re all in it for the money) and turned it into a unified theory of everything, or at least of everything about Williamson.
There was a time when a Rolling Stone writer would have made the effort to understand the worldview behind a person who speaks of miracles and transformation, but that was more than 10 years ago, back when it published Janet Reitman’s “Inside Scientology.”
It’s so much easier now to compare Williamson’s New Thought response to Hurricane Dorian to a prayer offered by a chaplain during a governor’s press conference, as though they are equally ridiculous:
Yet, at other points, it does feel like Williamson is getting something of a raw deal. A week after we met, as Hurricane Dorian was crawling across the Atlantic Ocean toward Florida, Williamson wanted to help. She tweeted, in an attempt to marshal her then-2.76 million followers, “Millions of us seeing Dorian turn away from land is not a wacky idea; it is a creative use of the power of the mind. Two minutes of prayer, visualization, meditation for those in the way of the storm.”
She was mercilessly ridiculed for the sentiment — so badly that Williamson ultimately ended up deleting the tweet.
Although it wasn’t the official end of Williamson’s campaign, it might have been the functional end: the last time she made national news. There was relatively little notice, by contrast, when Henry McMaster, the governor of South Carolina, opened a press conference about the state’s emergency preparations for Hurricane Dorian with a prayer from an Army Corps of Engineers chaplain, who said, “God, we know that you’re able to turn a storm. You’re able to say to that storm: Peace, be still. We give you glory now, and in your name we pray. Amen.” You could say that man was asking God for a miracle, but no one made fun of him for it.
To say that Stuart is fixated on Williamson’s financial profile would be an understatement.
In fact, she devotes several hundred words to the question before finally giving Williamson a chance to address the theory:
But ask Marianne Williamson if her run has a profit motive, and a beatific expression will shimmer across her face. “It’s quite the opposite,” Williamson tells me, sitting at a sun-drenched rooftop bar a few blocks from Bryant Park in early fall. “I’m not doing the things right now that you do in my career to make a living — speaking fees, etc. I’m not off giving doing seminars. A senator running for president is still getting a Senate salary, right? This is the opposite of a lucrative thing to do.”
Williamson continues, plugging her most recently released book by name, “If you look at my Politics of Love that came out, it is not a bestseller. It is way down on Amazon.” (It was, at press time, ranked Number 25 in “Religious Studies: Church & State,” Number 74 in “Spiritual Healing,” and Number 79 in “History of Religion & Politics.”) She fixes me with a bemused look. “If I want to, I kind of know how to sell a book. It’s called a book tour.”
It is an achievement of sorts to cast a jaundiced eye even on an organization that delivers food to people with HIV/AIDS:
After a youth spent in a family of what she described as “world travelers,” Marianne attended Pomona College in southern California before dropping out to work as an editorial assistant to rock critic Albert Goldman in New York. There, she stumbled onto the text A Course in Miracles, which she credits with sparking her own life-changing revelation: “We can take our own lives seriously, regardless of whether or not anyone else does.” After reading it, she began taking her own life seriously: lecturing at the Philosophical Research Society on L.A.’s Los Feliz Boulevard and launching a charity, Project Angel Food, that delivered “hot meals and kindness” to homebound AIDS patients.
Stuart spends one paragraph acknowledging the bipartisan nature of money in politics (in her words, “it’s basically accepted that many (if not most) people who run for president are ultimately running one grift or another”). We learn the humorous detail that Herman Cain once promoted an erectile dysfunction treatment called TestoMax 200 and that “Rick Perry parlayed his aborted campaign” — You see, Perry is a pro-life Republican, get it? — “into a turn on Dancing With the Stars.”
The one politician who most clearly escapes Stuart’s interest in profits is Hillary Clinton (no stranger to wealth, as Forbes reported in 2016). In Stuart’s universe, Clinton is solely the “deeply experienced rival” defeated when Donald Trump made “outlandish (and often nonsensical) promises to a segment of the electorate who felt their views weren’t being heard.”
The closest Stuart comes to grasping anything of Williamson’s quirky mind is in this passage:
To understand Williamson’s motivation, it helps to think of an inspirational quote, often attributed to Nelson Mandela: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. Marianne Williamson believes that. It was Williamson, not Nelson Mandela, who first wrote those words. The mistake is common enough that the Mandela Foundation has taken pains to correct it, and it’s a useful example of how hard it’s always been for Williamson to get credit she deserves.
The quote is from Williamson’s first book, A Return to Love, published in 1992. The rest of the passage [says]: It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
A whole worldview — including an 1,100-word book written by Helen Schucman, a psychotherapist who said she transcribed the words directly from Jesus Christ — rests behind those words. It’s a wild story and worth hearing, to understand America in this day and age.
Alas, you will learn precious little about it from Tess Stuart, who appears to think it’s more important to know how much money Williamson earned from a “four-part weight-loss seminar, [a] five-parter on making money (or, rather, obeying 'the law of divine compensation’), and a three-part ‘Aphrodite Training.’”
This is riveting stuff, to be sure, for politically inclined accountants.