The Church of Stop Shopping
'Stop, stop shopping'
By Trevor Butterworth
Published: December 1 2007 02:00 | Last updated: December 1 2007 02:00
If the multitudes that arrived in midtown Manhattan last Friday - the post-Thanksgiving start to the US holiday shopping season - had resigned themselves to a Broadway darkened by striking stagehands, there was some amusement to discover that the stagehands weren't the only strikers in New York.
Outside the Disney Store on Fifth Avenue 35 bellicose elves were chanting, "Silent night, we're on strike: no outsourced toys for little tykes", while a red-robed choir sang, "Stop, stop shopping". In the midst of this chaos stood a white tuxedoed preacher bellowing into a bullhorn: a "shopocalypse" was coming, the Reverend Billy warned baffled shoppers - "the end of mankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt!"
In recent years the Church of Stop Shopping - a secular street-theatre group led by Bill Talen, a 57-year-old playwright and actor - has mounted other similar performances, but this year, with the release of What Would Jesus Buy? , a documentary produced by Morgan Spurlock, director and star of Super Size Me , the protest is going nationwide. The film follows the Rev Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir as they tour the US exhorting Americans to think about the real meaning of Christmas. Chief among a number ofconfrontations-cum-provocations is the occasion when Rev Billy attempts to exorcise Wal-Mart's headquarters in Arkansas.
Talen is an endearing performer, and his Steve Martin affability could even push WWJB beyond cult status. But what could really make the movie into a "change-a-lujah" moment is that far from denouncing the movie for impiety, or dismissing Rev Billy for mocking the evangelical tradition, a number of influential Christian sources have signalled their approval.
The magazine Christianity Today says the passion of the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir is "contagious and admirable", despite its secularism. Writing in Sojourners Magazine, the distinguished biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, professor emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, went so far as to link the Rev Billy with the ancient prophets of the bible and "the great prophetic figures of US history who have incessantly called our society back to its core human passions of justice and compassion".
"I was raised by a right-wing apocalyptic Christian sect - Dutch Calvinists from Michigan," explains Talen as he recovers over a margarita. In a couple of hours will be on a flight for the San Francisco premiere of WWJB . "I was hurt by Christians," he continues, "and my feeling was let Saturday Night Live make fun of them."
Inspired by the example of the Rev Sidney Lanier - Tennessee Williams' cousin and the model for the character of Rev T Lawrence Shannon in the play The Night of the Iguana , Talen set to work on inventing a new character, someone who could, like Rev Shannon, drive his congregation outside into the rain to create a new kind of church - one that reclaimed public space.
"At the beginning, I was more like a parodist," Talen says, "but I became something else soon after the experiment began." And so it came to pass that in 1999 the Rev Billy walked into the Disney Store in Times Square, holding up a large plush toy and proclaiming Mickey Mouse to be the Antichrist.
"When I went in there, I was breaking the faith of the Disney religion," said Talen. "I had hundreds of little Goofys and Plutos and Alladins and Snow Whites looking at me with consternation . . . and here I was shouting about sweatshops."
It was, he says, electrifying - a moment where politics and theatre fused. The second time he did it Talen was arrested, and he has since chalked up over 40 arrests for pushing the limits of free speech in corporate and street environments. He is, as a consequence, possibly the only person to have been banned from every Starbucks in the world for exorcising the cash registers on behalf of Ethiopian coffee farmers.
In fact, such has been Rev Billy's momentum that a non-profit church has grown up around him, meeting once a month in St Mark's Church- in-the-Bowery. According to Savitri D, Talen's wife and the church's director, some of the congregation are "really religious - and then we have the radical fairies - a Wiccan, Sufis, Jews and Protestants." For these people, Rev Billy is more than an actor, he has become, as he puts it, a pastor for the post-religious.
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