"Fake" Healing Post-9/11
Both Talen and Durkee had alienating experiences with religion growing up. Durkee describes her father as a "fundamentalist Muslim," though she was raised mainly by her mother on a commune in northern New Mexico that exposed her to Sufism, Buddhism, and Native American spirituality. She was taught to respect all religions and, when she met Talen in 2000, bristled a bit at his satire of Christian preaching. But, already an accomplished performer and theater director, she made what would become the Church of Life After Shopping part of her own work and spiritual practice.
Billy Talen comes from a Dutch Calvinist family in Michigan, the son of an agricultural banker. Early on, he acquired "a special antipathy for predestination," which he understands to mean that "a Republican CEO-type God will decide whether you're going to heaven." He says he was always rebellious, and as a teenager he began hitchhiking around the country to escape home. By the mid-1980s, well into his thirties, he finally settled down as an actor, writer, and producer in the San Francisco theater scene.
It was there that Talen met Sidney Lanier, an Episcopal minister whose own antics were dramatized in the play-turned-film The Night of the Iguana, by his cousin, Tennessee Williams. At the time, remembers Lanier, he was "mostly traveling in the opposite direction from the Church."
After seeing Talen perform, Lanier took him out to lunch and said, remembers Talen, "We need a new kind of American preacher." Lanier convinced him that in order to speak relevantly to American politics and society, one has to understand its religion. They watched sermons together and studied "existential Christianity," the historical Jesus, ancient Gnostics, and Continental philosophy. They learned the styles of televangelists like Billy Graham and Jimmy Swaggart. "Gradually I relaxed out of my fear of all things Christian," says Talen, "and started regarding it as a force." Over the course of years, they formed a close friendship, moved to New York, and, in the process, created a character.
Reverend Billy's debut came in the late 1990s with sermons in the Times Square Disney Store. Soon, he had an ad-hoc choir, a crusade against corporatizing culture, and a "theology": God is odd, an Unknown that appears precisely in the spaces where the predictability and packaging of big business is not. He called people to turn away from chain stores and toward each other, allowing themselves to see the miraculous "Godsightings" of ordinary life. Talen says he is not a Christian, but he came to look enough like one for theologian Walter Brueggemann to declare him a modern-day prophet in Sojourners.
During the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attack, Reverend Billy began to cross the line from performer to actual pastor. This happened not in an official sense -- "I think it would be a mistake for Reverend Billy to be ordained in organized religion," says Talen -- but through an organic process. While many turned to traditional religion in that period, those who felt outside of it gravitated to Billy. "People whose New York journey to spirituality had been irony, or the arts, or sex, or something, something after religion," says Talen, "they gathered with us after 9/11." Reverend Billy's church set up shop in the city's theaters, many of which had closed their doors in the wake of the disaster.
"There were a lot of people who were not religious, who didn't have a community per se, and didn't know how to heal," remembers Savitri Durkee. Many of the people who came were Gen-Xers who instinctively questioned authority. "Billy was perfect in that moment because he's a fake leader," Durkee says. "Because he's not a real leader, we can go for it. We can trust the situation somehow."
Durkee too became a leader in the community and sometimes even finds herself expected to play the role of the old-fashioned preacher's wife. "It's an incredibly demoralizing and demeaning position," she says. "I try to reject it as much as I can and insist on a different kind of collaborative presence." While the volunteer choir rehearses, Durkee is the one up front, orchestrating their movements, while Talen drifts in the back, checking that everyone is well and putting forth an occasional suggestion.
The community that has formed around Reverend Billy is a spiritual smorgasbord. Choir member Greg Ostrom regularly goes to Catholic mass and was a Christian Brother for twelve years. One of the choir's youngest members, Oliver Rizzi Carlson, grew up Catholic but now cites Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God books as a major influence. Will Tucker, a writer from Harlem who hosts a radio show for the mayoral campaign, was raised Unitarian Universalist and is now a Baha'i. He thinks of Talen's candidacy as part of the age of Baha'u'llah, a "cosmic domino effect" that began in 1863. Campaign manager Danny Valdez, on the other hand, says he has no religious background at all.