Not that it doesn’t have partisan tilts and colorations. Some of its manifestations are more common in conservative America — where they usually have an evangelical and commercial gloss, as with Joel Osteen and his epigones. (This red-state style of spirituality was recently co-opted, with some success, by the prosperity preacher known as Donald Trump.) Others are more common in liberal communities — where they emphasize Eastern wisdom and Lost Christianities and the New Age and Esalen-style mystical humanism. Where the spiritual worldview blurs into secularism, it’s usually claiming scientific bona fides; where it blurs into traditional religion it’s usually talking about Jesus. And Oprah herself, with her Obama-endorsing, #MeToo politics and her tendency to mix spirituality with pseudoscience, is clearly somewhat on the blue-state side of that divide …

… but only somewhat, because the divide between blue-state spirituality and red-state spirituality is much more porous than other divisions in our balkanized society, and the appeal of the spiritual worldview cuts across partisan lines and racial divides. (Health-and-wealth theology is a rare pan-ethnic religious movement, as popular among blacks and Hispanics as among Americans with Joel Osteen’s skin tone, and when Oprah touts something like “The Secret,” the power-of-spiritual-thinking tract from the author Rhonda Byrne, she’s offering a theology that’s just Osteen without Jesus.) Indeed, it may be the strongest force holding our metaphysically divided country together, the soft, squishy, unifying center that keeps secularists and traditionalists from replaying the Spanish Civil War.

Which is not to say that it’s a good force in its own right; you could fill a book (as I once tried to do) with theological and sociological arguments about what’s wrong with religious individualism, its false ideas and fatal consequences. But it clearly holds the balance of power in our cultural conflicts, and it’s hard to imagine our civic peace surviving without the bipartisan influence of its soothing faux profundities.

I know, I know: You’ve stuck around this long to find out what all this religious business means for an Oprah presidential campaign. The disappointing answer is that I have no definite idea. It could be that Oprah would cease to be a figure of the spiritual center the instant she assumed a partisan mantle, that in entering in the political fray she would automatically lose her papal tiara. Or it could be that her religious authority would make the Democratic Party far more popular and powerful, more a pan-racial party of the cultural center and less a party defined by its secular and anticlerical left wing.

It could be that she would be extremely effective in the increasingly imperial role that our presidency plays, effectively uniting throne and altar and presiding over our divisions with a kind of spirituality-drenched “mass empathy,” to quote Business Insider’s Josh Barro, that our present partisans conspicuously lack. Or it could be that by turning the spiritual center to partisan ends she would hasten its collapse, heightening polarization and hustling us deeper into metaphysical civil war.

All of these scenarios seem possible, even as the most plausible scenario remains the one where she decides being a prophetess is better than being a president and declines to run at all. But either way, the Oprah boomlet is a chance to recognize her real importance in our culture — and the sheer unpredictable weirdness, perhaps eclipsing even Donald Trump’s ascent, that might follow if our most important religious leader tries to lay claim to temporal power as well.