The 2020 election has a motley crew of non-politicians who have expressed interest in running for the presidency, from fugitive/disgraced cybersecurity impresario John McAfee to former Starbucks CEO and self-aggrandizing billionaire Howard Schultz. Yet perhaps none of the potential nominees has been as head-scratch-worthy as author and spiritual leader Marianne Williamson.

In a live-streamed event broadcast from a Beverly Hills theater in January, Williamson strode onto the stage against the backdrop of a giant American flag, to rapturous reception from the crowd. She announced that she wanted to run for president as a way “to engage voters in a more meaningful conversation about America, about our history, about how each of us fit into it, and how to create a sustainable future.”

”Our national challenges are deep, but our political conversation is shallow,” she said. “My campaign is for people who want to dig deeper into the questions we face as a nation and deeper into finding the answers.’’

If you listened to Williamson’s speech without knowing anything about her or her work, you’d be forgiven for assuming she sounded less like a presidential candidate than like a New Age-style spiritual leader of sorts, because that’s exactly what she is. A world-famous spiritual leader and author of New Age tomes such as A Woman’s Worth and A Return to Love (the latter of which was plugged by none other than the high priestess of the genre, Oprah Winfrey), the brassy, straight-talking, highly charismatic Williamson has attracted fans all over the world, including celebrities like Katy Perry, Kim Kardashian, Nicole Richie, and Laura Dern. To a degree, she’s something of an antecedent to Goop, albeit sans the plugs for jade vagina eggs and with more sensible pantsuits and casual references to Jesus.

But who exactly is Marianne Williamson, and why is she running for public office? Here’s a primer to the career of the self-proclaimed “bitch for God.” She may have next to no shot at taking the White House, but as spiritual gurus exert more and more influence over American life, she’s worth understanding.

Who is Marianne Williamson?

The daughter of an immigration lawyer and a homemaker, Williamson was born in Houston, Texas. She was raised Jewish, though she did not regularly attend synagogue as a child. (While her books and lectures quote a range of spiritual leaders from Jesus to Buddha, Williamson still identifies as a practicing Jew and does not see a conflict between her faith and much of the Christian-inflected language she uses in her work.)

Like many self-help gurus, Williamson has often spoken about being aimless and adrift prior to her spiritual awakening. She spent two years at Pomona College, a liberal arts school in California, before dropping out to move to New Mexico, where she briefly lived in a geodesic dome on a commune. She then ping-ponged between the East and West coasts, spending her 20s temping and occasionally working as a cabaret singer. “I sank deeper and deeper into my neurotic patterns, seeking relief in food, drugs, people, or whatever else I could find to distract me from myself,” she later wrote in A Return to Love.

It was around that time that Williamson discovered the book that would determine the path of her career: A Course in Miracles. Otherwise known as the Course, A Course in Miracles is a massive three-volume religious work that teaches that the only real thing in the world is God’s love, and surrendering to God’s plan can lead to inner peace and real-life miracles.

Although A Course in Miracles is often marketed as a secular self-help text, it relies heavily on the language of Christianity; when it was published in 1976, the author, medical psychologist Helen Schucman, claimed Jesus had dictated it to her. Nonetheless, the teachings of the book resonated with Williamson. “I never realized you can’t find peace in your life without forgiving other people,” she told the LA Times in 1992. “I never knew how many of my problems stemmed from my fear of other people.”

In 1983, Williamson moved to Los Angeles and began teaching the book at the Philosophical Research Society, a center for metaphysical study. Over the next decade, she garnered a massive following — particularly among LGBTQ men amid the HIV/AIDS crisis, for whom she held weekly support groups at the Center for Living, an organization that provided counseling for HIV-positive patients during the early days of the crisis, when few other organizations would. (She also founded a charity, Project Angel Food, to deliver meals directly to HIV/AIDS patients’ homes.)

”Western medicine had nothing to offer,” Williamson told LA Weekly in 2014 of the early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis. “Organized religion was silent for quite a while. ... And there was this young woman in Los Feliz talking about a God who loves you no matter what.”

With the publication of A Return to Love, her first book, in 1992, Williamson ascended the ranks from West Coast shaman to world-famous spiritual guru: The book became a self-help classic, spending weeks on top of the New York Times best-seller list. A plug from Oprah, who claimed she experienced “157 miracles” after she read the book, led to sales of an additional 1 million copies; over the next few decades, Williamson would become a regular guest on Oprah’s show, and she is often touted as Oprah’s spiritual adviser.

The book is the source of Williamson’s most famous quote, which is often seen on inspirational Instagrams and erroneously attributed to Nelson Mandela: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”

Williamson has since written 12 books, from the career guide The Law of Compensation to the spiritual weight loss manual A Course in Weight Loss: Spiritual Lessons for Surrendering Your Weight. Her rise to fame has not been without controversy: She has been subject to accusations of hucksterism, not to mention bullying. Former employees have said she has alienated even her most fervent believers with her egocentric behavior and intimidation tactics, with one source telling Entertainment Weekly in 1992 that Williamson has a ”despotic, tyrannical streak and inability even to hear dissent” and that her charitable organizations are a front to ”sell her book and increase her own fame.” (Williamson has laughed off such critiques, referring to herself as “a bitch for God.”)

But even Williamson’s detractors cannot dispute her naked charisma and prodigious rhetorical skills. “She uses the language and attraction of sensuality to hold an audience,” one Psychology Today journalist wrote in a profile of Williamson in 1992. “Her charisma is sexual and humorous. Watching her perform is more like wrestling naked with Venus than kneeling with the saints.”

What are Marianne Williamson’s policies?

Throughout her career, Williamson has been vocal about her political views, from her stance in favor of offering reparations to black Americans (which she compares to the German government offering billions of dollars in compensation to Jewish victims of the Holocaust) to her proposed solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“I don’t think the ultimate answer will be about settlements or checkpoints,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last fall, in what is perhaps the most Marianne Williamson response of all time. “The work of the genuine peace builders must be on the level of the heart.”

Her foreign policy agenda in general is couched in what she calls “peace building.”

In a foreign policy speech at the World Affairs Council of New Hampshire, Williamson explained, “The same holistic paradigm that has transformed our view of physical health can be applied to our societal health. Active peace-building measures reinforce the social health of our planet the way good nutrition and exercise reinforce the physical health of our bodies.”

She summed up her approach by saying: “Love of our fellow human beings, not fear and domination, should guide America’s foreign policy.”

On the domestic front, Williamson is perhaps best known for being the first candidate to address reparations, and the only one to call for direct payments to the dependents of slaves — she wants to put aside between $200 billion and $500 billion for a reparations program.

She is, however, more in line with her fellow candidates on other issues. She supports the Green New Deal, universal pre-K, free college, protections for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, gun reform, increasing abortion access, and the Equal Rights Amendment. She also wants a version of Medicare-for-all that does not eliminate private insurance plans.

Why is Marianne Williamson running for president?

This is not Williamson’s first foray into politics. In 2014, she ran for Congress as an independent in LA’s 34th Congressional District, against longstanding Democrat Henry Waxman. Despite raising $2 million for her campaign and garnering such high-profile supporters as Nicole Richie (who appeared in her campaign video), Katy Perry, and Alanis Morissette (who wrote her campaign theme song), Williamson only came in fourth, winning 13.2 percent of the vote. Ted Lieu ultimately won the seat.

But Williamson’s experience in a congressional election apparently didn’t slake her thirst for politics in general. Prior to announcing her bid for president (she is now running as a Democrat), she publicly endorsed Bernie Sanders and has spoken out at length against President Trump’s administration. In her announcement speech, she made it clear that her bid for the presidency was in direct response to what she saw as the “spiritual and moral rot” in Washington.

It’s also clear that she is positioning her bid for the presidency as a moral imperative, using the language of spirituality that is woven throughout her work. “It’s going to be a co-creative effort, an effort of love, a gift of love, to our country and hopefully to our world,” she said in the video for her exploratory committee.

Nonetheless, while Williamson’s congressional campaign was largely dismissed in 2014 — “she’s not a credible candidate,” Eric Bauman, the LA County Democratic Party chair, sniffed in the LA Weekly piece — the political landscape has irrevocably changed since, and it’s clear that she and her followers are taking her presidential run seriously, even if many other Democrats may not.

”It is time for us to rise up, the way other generations have risen up,” Williamson said in her January announcement speech as a crowd of her acolytes roared.