Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir

I got an e-mail that Reverend Billy was going to be in town - so naturally I had to go! It was at the Sabathani Community Center just a short bus trip south of where I live!

Anywho - it was awesome! The whole point of their existence is their message: shop consciously. Don't just buy things because they are cheap. Do you really NEED to buy as much as you do? Do you unknowingly support child labor and sweatshops? Are your actions hurting the environment and women's rights either in America or abroad?

We live in a world of Globalization. That means we must take responsibility for our actions on a GLOBAL scale. This is not always easy - but it must happen if we as humanity are to "evolve."


I found it a very fun sermon. The choir was very lively - and the performance seemed quite professional.

One part I especially enjoyed was when he exorcised our credit cards!! :)

He also stated that our actions have to go beyond fair trade. He stated that the Mall of America denied peaceful Peta protesters their freedom of speech. So....

They then went to the Mall of America to stage a protest of the unfair trade going on there. This is from their blog:
This is truly one of the most bizarre, incongruous and triumphant experiences of my life. We enter the seemingly endless corridors of chain stores and shiny, reflective chrome in a flood of red, white and blue choir robes (joined by a busload of amped-up members of our Sabathani audience.) We’ve discovered that our robes are our secret weapon — our foil. People just aren’t threatened by a choir! I have been working on my casual air of confidence, authority and mall-grade spacey pleasantness. We make our way to an empty stage in an atrium that has been staked out in advance. Julio jumps on an upright piano and suddenly we’re singing "Stop Shopping," complete with choreography, looking out on a vista of 3 tiers of chain stores and unsuspecting, confused shoppers. The minutes tick by and we launch into "Starbucks and Disney." Billy is now onstage wielding his gigantic, white acoustic megaphone. I am blown away that there has been no frantic rush of security guards, no stern and humorless demands that we must exit the mall immediately. We finish the song and shuffle forth to sermonize in other corners of the monstrosity, hijacking a bank of escalators for another performance. We sing jubilantly, "Stop Shopping!" as we loop continuously up, then down and then up again. The patriotic color scheme and anti-shopping words seem a huge contradiction to some befuddled onlookers, while others’ interest is piqued. It’s a full 45 minutes before we are asked to leave the premises and takes actually going into an Abercrombie and Fitch store and kneeling before the counter with it’s taxidermied moose presiding above center, staring blankly out over our bowed heads into the great unknown.