George González's "The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism"

George González is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Religion and Culture at The CUNY Graduate Center and at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of Shape-Shifting Capital: Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the Ethnographic Project.

González applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change through Performance, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change Through Performance initiates reflection upon an ethnographic scene that opens Chapter 3, which itself serves as a bridge between the two main sections of the book, Act I, which foregrounds the intellectual and political stakes of the relationships between our mode of consumption and climate catastrophe, and Act II, which centers the life and activism of the New York City-based anti-consumerist and “Earth Justice”-grounded radical performance community, The Stop Shopping Church (aka Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping). In short, reading page 99 would serve the prospective reader of the book well by situating them at an important thematic and analytical crossroads.

Chapter 3 begins with a description of one of the group’s street actions at the turn of the millennium: a small group from the ‘Church,’ led by Reverend Billy, a then parodic performance character developed by William Talen, a musician and actor, processes down the Times Square neighborhood toward the flagship Disney Store carrying two crucified oversized Mickey and Minnie Mouse plush dolls (‘fetishes’) on long sticks. Dressed as a combination of 1980s-style televangelist and Elvis, Reverend Billy preaches that Mickey Mouse is the antichrist. The action is designed to protest the Disney brand’s role in the commodification of sentiment and memory, its gentrification of the theater district, and its exploitation of global sweatshop labor.

Page 99 introduces two key considerations. The first is the historicity of the Marxian “commmodity fetishism.” As it turns out, the very idea of the fetish was born of transcultural encounters between sixteenth and seventeenth century Iberian traders and West African counterparts and reflects the values of the European racial chain of being. The second key consideration introduced on page 99 is Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that capitalism can be understood to be a “religiously conditioned construction” or an “essentially religious phenomenon” in its own right.

Bringing the work of the Stop Shopping Church into conversation with religious studies, performance studies, critical theory, sociology and anthropology, the ethnographic core of the book describes the ways in which the Stop Shopping Church has traditionally deployed the signifiers of American religion to mark and critique the co-constitutions of Evangelical Protestantism and neoliberal capitalism (consumerism as religiously constructed) as well as its organizing social function as religion (consumerism as essentially religious phenomenon). The book describes and analyzes the ways in which the originally parodic Stop Shopping Church has come to function as (in the group’s own words) a “post-religious religious” community grounded in green values and how and why the critique of the fetish (the finger wagging of ‘put down that Mickey Mouse doll!’) has, under the leadership of co-founders William Talen and Savitri D, transformed into a much more radical and capacious political ecology that takes direct critical aim at the ways in which the effects of ritualized consumption boomerang back at us in the form of extreme weather, species extinction, and deadly toxins taking up residence in human bodies (consumer capitalism as systemic ‘Shopocalypse’).

Visit George González's website.

--Marshal Zeringue