The Reverend Billy is a revivalist preacher who leads the Church of
Stop Shopping, an anticonsumerist communion devoted to putting the
odd into God. Created by the actor Bill Talen, the Reverend first
appeared alongside the sidewalk preachers in New York’s Times
Square during the Giuliani years, bringing his new post-religious
theology to eager crowds. Now Reverend Billy has a cult following
across the country and was recently featured in a profile in the
New York Times Magazine. In these pages we go inside 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” singing anti-Starbucks anthems at the cash register of the
$5 latte. We watch as the defense of a community garden is turned
into an Off-Broadway hit and join with the Reverend as he preaches
love and peace to the crowds that gathered spontaneously in Union
Square after the attacks of September 11.
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