Who is Marianne Williamson, the First Democrat to Announce Her Presidential Bid for 2024?

On Thursday, Marianne Williamson announced her bid for the 2024 US presidential election; however, it’s not the first time she’s run for a political office.

In 2014, she also ran as an Independent to represent California’s 33rd congressional district in the US House, ultimately placing fourth. More recently, she ran for president as a Democrat in the 2020 election, but suspended her campaign a year after it was announced that she was running.

Williamson was born in 1952 in Houston, Texas, and was raised in a family who practiced Conservative Judaism. The self-help guru first became interested in social commentary when she heard Rabbi William Malev speak out against the war in Vietnam when she was in her mid-teens.

“Seasoned politicians took us into the Vietnam War and Iraq and the greatest income inequality since 1929. Americans need to disenthrall ourselves of the myth of the political expert,” Williamson said during a talk at Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church in November 2019.

She dropped out of California’s Pomona College, where she was studying theater and philosophy, in 1973 and chose to pursue a “nomadic existence” while working as a waitress, a temp and a cabaret singer. Her 20’s were spent in a “growing state of existential despair,” according to a Vanity Fair article from 1991.

But her interest in spiritually took hold when, at a party in New York in 1976, she picked up the book A Course in Miracles by Helen Schucman. At first, the book threw her off because it was overtly Christian.

“I saw Christian terminology and being Jewish, I put it right back down,” Williamson said.

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But a year later, she was given a copy by her then-boyfriend. Williamson, who also practices transcendental meditation, began doing the book’s accompanying exercises daily, and has become a popularizer of the book. She has credited it as launching her current career.

“A Course in Miracles [is] a self-study program in spiritual psychotherapy. It is a book that is based on universal spiritual themes. It is not a religion. It does not claim any kind of monopoly on truth. It has no dogma. It has no doctrine. It talks about love and forgiveness and I think that many of the people who are students of A Course in Miracles come from all religions and even no religion,” Williamson said of A Course in Miracles in an interview with Bill Maher in 2019.

“The book says nothing about [Jesus]. The book does not get us to try to believe in God. The book tries to get us to believe in each other.”

In 1992, Williamson wrote A Return to Love, which she has described as a “CliffNotes version of A Course in Miracles.” Oprah Winfrey bought 1,000 copies of A Return to Love and invited Williamson onto her show.

Williamson’s role as an activist includes starting the Project Angel Food Program in 1989 to help feed people with chronic health issues, such as HIV/AIDS, in the Los Angeles area. She also co-founded The Peace Alliance in 2004, which is a nonprofit aiming to educate and advocate for “peacebuilding.” Williamson has included the concept in her platform, and is campaigning to establish what she says is a "US Department of Peace."