Christmas Shopocalypse: What Would Jesus Buy?

With our recent movie What Would Jesus Buy? and our recent interventions here at the Church of Stop Shopping, we’re trying encourage people to have a creative Christmas this year. You don’t have to get on the interstate in your SUV and sit there listening to the dashboard shout at you: “Buy! Buy! Spend!”

You don’t have to go that big box store full of sweatshop goods. That’s where the fossil fuel intensity is – those things have been shipped around the world, and if you’re in your car or truck or van traveling a long distance to the big boxes and the chains, that’s another fossil fuel intensity you’re bringing to your gift giving this year.

We need to bring our gift giving back to our neighborhoods, back to the local, or what we call the intimate economy, Amen. Stand in your own front door and just assume ‘the best I have to give my loved ones, I already have,’ Amen.

It’s right here in my home, it’s on my street, it’s dealing with people I know – the ma and pop stores, the farmer’s markets, the artisans with their wares they’ve been working with their hands, or the things you may have put in your closet and just forgot about from previous a Christmas, Amen. I’m trying to save Christmas this year from the Shopocalypse, Hallelujah!

In What Would Jesus Buy? we went across the United States from New York to Disneyland in California in two bio-diesel buses with our community, which is made up of people from around the world; people in all five of the New York City boroughs and Jersey, Sweden, Nigeria, Spain, Australia, Venezuela and Korea.