Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping
[1] The Stop Shopping Choir accompanies Reverend Billy and stages guerrilla theater style actions, singing on the property of the Disney stores,[2] Monsanto facilities,[2] and Trump Tower,[3] among others.
The director of these shows is church co-founder Savitri D. Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir routinely perform at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater in New York City.
[7] In an effort to increase attendance at St. Clement's, Lanier had torn out the altar and pews, inviting actors to perform scenes from plays by Tennessee Williams and Terrence McNally, and founding the American Place Theater.
"[7] In the early 1990s Talen moved with Lanier to New York City from the San Francisco Bay Area, branding his act as a "new kind of American preacher"[8] The Reverend Billy character debuted on the sidewalk at Times Square in 1998, outside the Disney Store, where he proclaimed Mickey Mouse to be the anti-Christ.
[9] Reverend Billy's sermons decried the evils of consumerism and the racism of sweatshop labor, and what Talen saw as the loss of neighborhood spirit in Rudolph Giuliani's New York.
In 2005, he stated his mission to CNN news, while dictating in speech patterns typical to televangelists:Drive the demons out of those cash registers...We're trying to get [shoppers] to slow down their consumption, amen.
[15] She was born in Taos, New Mexico in 1972 and raised at The Lama Foundation, one of the earliest and longest lasting intentional spiritual communities in the US, founded by her parents, Steven and Barbara Durkee.
[8] Led by musical director Nehemiah Luckett,[22] the choir members are volunteers who rehearse weekly at the Lower Eastside Girl's Club in the East Village.
They have accompanied Talen into the lobbies of multinational banks such as JP Morgan Chase or research facilities belonging to Monsanto, dressed as golden toads and honeybees, singing songs in support of the day's sermon.
[25] In April of 2024, Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir joined Neil Young and Crazy Horse on their Love Earth tour throughout the United States.
[27] There, the Reverend held a protest reading of "The Raven" atop the scaffolding over the soon-to-be-demolished home where some believe Edgar Allan Poe had finished writing the famous poem.
[29] On June 29, 2007, just before the start of the monthly Critical Mass bike ride, Reverend Billy and Savitri D recited the First Amendment repeatedly to police officers through a megaphone in Manhattan's Union Square.
[1] In 2012 and 2013, Reverend Billy and the Church focused on the extinction of species brought by climate change, specifically targeting banks they said financed projects that worsened global warming.
[36] In one action in a Chase bank in New York City, Reverend Billy and choir director Nehemiah Luckett were arrested and charged with riot, trespass, unlawful assembly, and disorderly conduct.
[37] In July 2011, while on tour in the UK, Reverend Billy and the Choir staged an action at the Tate Modern in London to protest its sponsorship by the oil company British Petroleum (BP).
In one action, they entered the Micro-robotics Laboratory at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Science to confront scientists working on the invention of robot pollinators, popularly known as RoboBees.
They purchased fruits and vegetables to place before a display case with a model of the RoboBee, singing and lamenting the focus of scientists replacing living bees with robots, rather than solving the collapse.
"[40][non-primary source needed] In 2015, Reverend Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir opened a series of shows for Neil Young during his tour in support of The Monsanto Years.
