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. We have many different kinds of faith backgrounds; a number of us are PKs: Preacher’s Kids, Amen Hallelujah.

We made the movie two years ago. We went into the frenzy of shoppers after leaving Buy Nothing Day in Times Square. We got out on those buses and went across the country into the shopping malls, into the Magnificent Mile in Chicago and the Mall of America in Minneapolis; we went down through the big shopping malls of Des Moines and Kansas and all the way down to the headquarters of Wal-Mart and exorcised their front door.

Then we went down into Texas, where we had a revival. We headed out west, up and down the strip in Vegas on a flatbed truck and asked Christmas to approach. We went into seven or eight super-malls in Los Angeles and baptized a child in a Toys "R" Us parking lot, into a life, we hope, we pray, in which this child can resist consumption.

Then we went down to Disneyland on Christmas Day, Amen. We had a trinity of devils in our film: Wal-Mart, Starbucks and Disney. We also had a little bit of a moment with Mall of America and Victoria's Secret.

It’s the whole idea of killing the main-street economy and imitating, simulating it inside a big box store. We’re embracing a big subject here. But the biggest preacher of all is the Earth: The wind and the rain and the fires and the droughts speaking through us. We’re making a big statement and we’re humble before the complexity and scale of this message that we’re carrying.

I would say the starting point is that we forgive everyone and we forgive ourselves. We’re all sinners – we know that. We all shop. None of us are without our own problems in this area, so we’re not coming and judging anyone.

THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS BILL TALEN

I started out as a performance artist ten years ago when I was opposing Disney in Times Square. I joined the sidewalk preachers there. I pumped up my hair to Elvis proportions and I had a white tuxedo coat from my catering days and a collar from the local religious supplies store.

At the beginning, there was parody mixed in there because I was upset at the power that right-wing apocalyptic preachers had in the American government, but I’ve had to go through a humbling process.

And after 9/11, Reverend Billy became a pastor. So many of my fellow New Yorkers wanted a fellowship and so many of us had different kinds of faith backgrounds, but wanted to gather in one room. Reverend Billy made us safe. This idea of the Church of Stop Shopping made us safe. We just don’t know what to label ourselves, exactly. We invite people to draw their own conclusions.

When I look back on this experience, I don’t think I imagined that it would become what it has. We have people emailing us their change-alujahs from around the world, adopting our language and being grateful to us for the celebration of change.

I’m glad I stuck with it and I had some wonderful people help me along the way, especially the director of our Church, who fashions our performances and retail interventions when we go inside big boxes and chain stores. That would be my wife, Savitri.

FRIENDS AND FOES

Evangelical Christians are among the biggest supporters of this stop shopping message and of the movie. What would Jesus Buy is a question they are asking as well. It’s not so much an us-and-them opposition anymore – it may have been 10 years ago.

The people who are most offended by what we do are the people from the biggest fundamentalist Churches of all, which are Wal-Mart and these big worldwide mega corporations. You’ve heard the old statistic that out of the 100 biggest economies in the world, 51 of them are corporations and 49 of them are nation states.

Those executives are the angriest with us. We’ve been banned now from all Disney property worldwide, banned from all the Starbucks’ worldwide, and our CD has been banned from Wal-Mart.

We had to distribute the film ourselves because everybody’s afraid of Wal-Mart; they’re famously vindictive, vengeful business people and a lot of the big movie distributors won’t touch us because we come out and say Wal-Mart has pain and suffering in their products; they are a sweatshop company.

It’s a complex world we’re in and we know there are contradictions. We’re telling the people ‘let’s change Christmas this year,’ but here’s a movie to go see for $10. We need to get the word out there somehow and we’ve entered into the commercial means to do that.

We’re urban people in the world, of the world, and yet we know that we must change what Christmas is to us personally or we’re in big trouble, Amen.

The Church of Stop Shopping is a 12-month-a-year Church, but Christmas is a special way of delivering this message. It’s about what we do in our lives all year long. If we could change Christmas, we could change the whole year. Amen.

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Visit Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping [1] on the web
Visit the website for the feature film, What Would Jesus Buy? [2]