STEPHANIE SALTER: If the Shopocalypse comes this Christmas, will you be ready?

By Stephanie Salter
The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE December 22, 2007 09:34 pm

— Just when I thought I was alone in the depths of disconnect, mine eyes were lifted and mine ears were unstopped. I saw a blond pompadour and I heard a voice ring out:
“If we could change Christmas, we could change the whole year. Amen.”
It was the Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, preaching the message that could save us all from what he calls “the Shopocalypse.”
The Reverend, nee Bill Talen, is a performance artist, activist and, currently, star of a documentary film you won’t find on DVD at Wal-Mart, “What Would Jesus Buy?”
Talen and his wife, Salvitri Durkee, are the founders of the Church of Stop Shopping, an endeavor that began as New York street theater and has morphed into a raucous-but-serious nationwide crusade. With a 40-member choir, led by Durkee, the church travels the country doing “interventions” against over-consumption in the temples of retail and discount shopping.
Malls, big box chain stores, Disneyland and Starbucks are the direct targets, but it is our own heart of darkness that the Rev. Billy wants to penetrate. Somewhere, somehow, he tells us, the United States veered off its modest and moderate course of consumption into a hyper-materialism that is obscuring the moral, environmental and cultural costs of our insatiable quest for more.
We complain about losing local mom-and-pop stores and good American jobs to “foreigners,” all the while we shop in chain stores that pay our fellow citizens low wages so we can buy dirt-cheap goods that are produced in sweatshops in third-world countries.
Billy’s sermons are a call to wake up and smell the addiction that has a great people in its grip. He wants us to connect the dots from that $25 made-in-Bangladesh cashmere sweater — and that 89-cent bottle of water that has been trucked across thousands of miles — to the damage we are inflicting on our natural resources, our entrepreneurial spirit and our individual souls.
As the lyrics to one of the Church of Stop Shopping’s hymns asks:
Will you survive the fire?
The Shopocalypse, the shopocalypse!
Can you feel the heat in this shopping list?
The neighbors fade into the super mall.
The oceans rise but I – I must buy it all.
Shopocalypse, Shopocalypse…
It ain’t the blues, it’s convenience.
“What Would Jesus Buy?” was co-produced by Morgan Spurlock, who conceived and executed the brilliant film indictment of our fast-food nation, “Supersize Me.” “WWJB?” opened in about two dozen theaters last month, but — like most documentaries except those by Michael Moore — it is not exactly on the usual cineplex circuit. The Keys in Indianapolis is the only Hoosier venue listed on the film’s Web site, and the movie isn’t playing there this weekend.
When it goes to DVD, “WWJB?” automatically will be shut out of about half the video sales market, say its creators, because Wal-Mart has a lock on half. Starbucks isn’t likely to feature “WWJB?” at the checkout, either. According to a story on Alternet, Bill Talen generated his own memo from Starbucks corporate to its employees, advising them on “What Should I Do if Reverend Billy is in My Store?”
In several interviews, Talen and Spurlock said they have been pleasantly surprised by the reaction to the “WWJB?” concept by regular Christians. Many are as sick and tired as the Rev. Billy is of what we do to Jesus at Christmastime and all year ’round.
“Evangelical Christians are among the biggest supporters of this stop shopping message and of the movie,” Talen says in an essay posted on orato.com, the “citizen news” site. “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.”
That was right about the time Talen said he got the idea for the Rev. Billy from sidewalk preachers in New York’s Times Square. He donned a white tuxedo jacket from his days in the catering trade and “pumped up my hair to Elvis proportions.”
Ironically, he originally parodied fundamentalist television evangelists, but, he says in the Orato posting, “I’ve had to go through a humbling process.” The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York brought out the pastor in Talen, and the conspicuous consumption on view in nearly every corner of U.S. life gave him a mission.
“When I look back on this experience,” the Orato essay says, “I don’t think I imagined that it would become what it has. We have people mailing us their change-alujahs from around the world, adopting our language and being grateful to us for the celebration of change.”
Change-alujahs — praising an effort to improve our mindless, wasteful ways — and confessionals about our sins of shopping excess have been posted on a variety of sites, such as Orato and rev.billy.com. Trailers of “What Would Jesus Buy?” proliferate on the Internet and can give potential Church of Stop Shopping converts an idea of what awaits us when the documentary is released on DVD.
Despite their performance personas, Talen and his wife say they understand that the issue of U.S. consumerism is complex and riddled with contradictions. But a little consciousness-raising often can lead to some positive behavior modification.
“I know that people are going to shop one way or another,” Durkee told Alternet’s Alison Wilmore. “I just hope they’ll think about what they buy and try and support local economies. Utopian ideas are really important, but if I can get 100 people to shop less, that’s great.”
Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.