Description
The Reverend Billy is a revivalist preacher who leads the Church of Stop Shopping, an anticonsumerist communion devoted to putting the unusual into God. Created by the actor Bill Talen, the Reverend first gave the impression alongside the sidewalk preachers in New York’s Times Square all the way through the Giuliani years, bringing his new post-religious theology to eager crowds. Now Reverend Billy has a cult following around the country and used to be recently featured in a profile within the New York Times Magazine.
In these pages we go within the Disney Store on 42nd Street (“the high church of retail”) to witness staged dramas against consumerism that employ eight hundred Disney characters with their “reeling eyeballs and sky-cracking grins” as the mise-en-scène. We encounter the icon-twisting logic of credit card exorcism performed in front of astonished tourists and listen to a gospel choir made up of “recovered preachers’ kids” making a song anti-Starbucks anthems on the cash register of the $5 latte. We watch as the defense of a community garden is turned into an Off-Broadway hit and sign up for with the Reverend as he preaches love and peace to the crowds that gathered spontaneously in Union Square after the attacks of September 11.