Now that Thanksgiving is past and the holiday season has officially begun, I’m ready for my favorite Christmas tradition: watching holiday movies. I admit that I have something of a small addiction. I love the classics, of course—It’s a Wonderful Life, Love Actually, Die Hard. I enjoy the new shows, too, especially if they have diverse characters (Dash and Lily, Happiest Season) or involve royalty falling in love in generic European countries with lots of snow (the Christmas Prince trilogy, the Princess Switch trilogy).
But my favorite Christmas movie of all time actually has no royalty, no romantic cookie-baking scenes, and no magic kisses under the first snowfall of the year. The holiday film I love most is What Would Jesus Buy?, a documentary about Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping and their crusade to help Americans confront one of the greatest problems of our era: unrepentant consumerism and the harm it brings to our culture, our communities, and our climate. The film, released in 2007, turns 15 years old this month, but the lessons it shares are more important than ever.
Reverend Billy is played by William Talen, an actor and playwright who was raised in a Dutch Calvinist family in the upper Midwest. According to his website, Talen developed the character of Reverend Billy in the 1990s in collaboration with Reverend Sidney Lanier, the vicar of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church and a famed producer of experimental theater.
Reverend Billy made his New York debut in 1998, when he stood outside the Disney Store in Times Square and declared that Mickey Mouse is “the anti-Christ.” From the very beginning, Reverend Billy’s street preaching against the evils of consumerism, the displacement of small businesses by large corporations, and the exploitation of workers drew attention and pushed boundaries. His Disney Store campaign—which at one point involved him duct-taping Mickey Mouse to a cross—led to multiple arrests.
Reverend Billy continued to preach, protest, and perform, eventually organizing the Church of Stop Shopping and doing shows with its musical ensemble, the Stop Shopping Choir. Co-founded and directed by the artist and activist Savitri Durkee, who is also Talen’s partner, the Stop Shopping Choir performs original gospel music and describes itself as a “a radical performance community” that is “grounded in the work of Justice and in service to the Earth.”
Over the past two and a half decades, Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping have expanded the scope of their concerns beyond Disney and Mickey Mouse to address a wide array of issues, from gentrification and economic inequality to homophobia and immigrant justice. In recent years, they have focused especially on climate change. But while their songs and sermons have changed, their core mission has remained the same: to offer a call to conscience about how Americans’ choices are damaging the planet and its people. Their message has a moral urgency well-suited to the fiery sermons of an impassioned preacher.
Reverend Billy is indeed a compelling preacher. In portraying Reverend Billy, Talen draws on a figure familiar to many Americans—the flamboyant, pompadoured, radical religious leader seen on television, on street corners, and on revivalist circuits. But Reverend Billy is more than a role for Talen. His sermons about the evils of consumerism, capitalism, and corporate greed are powered by genuine conviction, and he and the choir are earnest in their efforts to urge their audiences to reflect, repent of their sins, and experience a conversion toward a more just, ethical, and sustainable way of life.
The work that Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir do together shares many of the features of what religion scholar Melissa Wilcox describes as “serious parody”: a powerful merging of performance and activism that blurs the boundary between the religious and the secular, the absurd and the important. When asked to describe his work, Talen said, “It’s definitely a church service,” but added that it’s also “a political rally, it’s theater, it’s all three, it’s none of them.” Alisa Solomon, a Village Voice theater critic who edited a volume of reflections by Talen and Savitri D, noted that for Reverend Billy, “the collar is fake, the calling is real.”
The film What Would Jesus Buy? offers a delightful portrait of how Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir live out this calling. Produced by Morgan Spurlock and directed by Rob VanAlkemade, the documentary follows Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir during their cross-country “Shopocalypse” tour in the month leading up to Christmas 2005.
Watching Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping bring their distinctive brand of performance activism to audiences across America—and observing how surprised spectators respond—is the highlight of the film. We see Reverend Billy perform a “credit card exorcism” in a local church, listen to a woman admit to her shopping mishaps in a confession booth set up in a store parking lot, and cry out to God to repent of his own sins of using fossil fuels as he pumps gas into the choir’s bus. We witness how he and the choir urge people to stop shopping and reject the commercialization of Christmas along Chicago’s Miracle Mile and in the Mall of America. We laugh and sing along as they knock on the doors of affluent suburban homes and troll classic Christmas carols rewritten with anti-consumerist lyrics. We wait with excitement as the group prepares for the grand finale of their tour: a guerrilla performance in Disneyland on Christmas Day.
In between footage of the performances, the filmmakers offer important context about Reverend Billy, the Church of Stop Shopping, and the mission they undertake. We learn about the history of American consumerism, especially during the holiday season, and its particular impact on children and families. And through interviews, we learn about the performers—not only Talen, but also the choir members— and develop a deeper understanding of why they chose to put their lives on hold to urge Americans to change their consumerist ways.
Of course, much has changed since 2007, the year What Would Jesus Buy? was released. A decade and a half ago, the Great Recession hadn’t yet fully hit. The children in the film pined for Xbox 360s in their stockings. People still crowded into malls and shopped at brick and mortar stores. 2007 was, no doubt, a different era.
But Reverend Billy’s call to curb our consumerism is still relevant and perhaps even more necessary today. The internet, with its influencers and onslaught of online advertisements, has made it easier than ever to make people desire things, at the same time that new technology has made it easier to buy things. Research suggests that many Americans do their shopping online, often just using their smartphones. The Pew Research Center reported, for example, that about three-quarters of adults in the United States buy things with their smartphones, and about one-third do so at least once a week. Shopping has become so convenient that it now demands little more than reaching into our pockets and tapping a few buttons.
The increased ease of shopping has occurred as our climate crisis has worsened. Our insatiable appetite for more and more stuff is one of the reasons we are witnessing alarming forms of environmental degradation, from polluted waterways to emissions that disrupt our climate and dislocate vulnerable populations. Consider, for example, one item: a pair of leggings that I recently saw Amazon selling for $8. The simple black leggings are made primarily of polyester, a petroleum-based material that contributes to microplastic pollution that harms marine life. They are made in China, their transoceanic journey from manufacturer to retailer to consumer made possible through abundant use of fossil fuels, which account for over 75 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions. They are likely wrapped in single-use plastic, which I would discard upon opening, and probably sturdy enough to use for only a season or two before they wear out and I would be forced to send them to a landfill. Consider the short lifestyle of these cheap leggings alongside their outsized environmental impact, and it becomes clear why fashion accounts for 20 percent of the world’s annual plastic production and 10 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions—an amount that exceeds international flights and shipping combined.
Ultimately, our decision to buy more and buy faster is destroying our planet—and may destroy our future, if we let it.
And yet, despite these developments, we continue onward in our march toward the Shopocalypse with nary a concern. Yes, some people participated in “Buy Nothing Day” last week. But most Americans—abetted by the frenzied news coverage of Black Friday deals and “must have” gift recommendations—continue their collective and uncritical embrace of consumerism, revealing a relentless and foolish faith in the salvation of spending and the gospel of getting even more.
The success of Christmas movies lies in their ability to help viewers experience hope and joy. But in my view, the very best Christmas movies do even more than that—they also inspire us change our lives so we can live better and love better. Take, for example, the story of George Bailey, the community-spirited protagonist in It’s a Wonderful Life, or the story of Billy Mack, the washed-out rockstar in Love Actually. For these two characters in these beloved holiday films, Christmas is magical because it’s a season that brings their self-transformation.
And that is why What Would Jesus Buy? embodies the very best of the Christmas film genre. There isn’t a princess or a scene when characters fall in love under a sparkling snowfall. But it’s a film that centers on hope, joy, and the beautiful possibility of transformation. As Reverend Billy says as he’s escorted out of the Mall of America: “You can walk away from the product! Drive the moneychangers out of the temple this year! We are all ending up inside these super malls! These products are taking over our lives! Stop shopping! Hallelujah! Change-a-lujah!”
A little change-a-lujah is what we need most this Christmas.
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