A 2007 Stop Shopping Church action at a Starbucks in Austin, Texas caught on video by a political commentator serves as a good example of the kinds of dramatic, choreographed actions the group would undertake at Starbucks outlets across the world. The Choir, dressed in red gospel robes, processes down the city streets on their way to their latest retail amphitheater shouting, “Stop . . . Stop Shopping!” Reverend Billy, clad in his bright white preacher’s suit, uses his bullhorn to self-identify for the Texans for whom the spectacle is new: “We’re a movie, we’re a faith, we’re common sense, we’re common sense— we’re trying to get Americans to stop their shopping!” Many of the Choir members carry cardboard shields with the Starbucks logo crossed out. These props will assist them in their miming of the spiritual battle they are about to undertake.
As Reverend Billy approaches the coffee shop doors, he identifies the store as the devil’s lair: “I feel the devil right here!” Cautiously, he invites his “children” to enter, behind him. As the Choir enters the store, they chant: “Push back . . . Push back Starbucks!” Using his arms to hold back the invisible evil powers, Reverend Billy eventually testifies in front of the congregation. He summons the “Fabulous Unknown” and asks this power to enter into his hands and through his heart. “What would Jesus buy? Would he buy a $4 latte if the people who made that coffee got less than 40 cents out of that $4?” Reverend Billy exorcises the cash register of its mermaid demon. Overtaken by the spirit of the “Fabulous Unknown,” which for the Stop Shoppers signifies, as a kind of negative gap, the final mysteries of life that neither traditional religion nor the religion of consumerism can ever answer away, Reverend Billy collapses to the ground. The Choir helps the good preacher back to his feet.
For scholars with interests in North American religion, the scene is instructive. The religious metaphor— the stylizations of costume, speech, and affect— bring attention to the Stop Shopping Choir’s insistence that American consumerism and conservative, Evangelical Protestantism are entwined fundamentalisms (Talen 2006, 56). The heightened affect of the performance also brings attention to the fact that, far from being some dull and instrumental practice of cost- benefit analysis, consumption is very much grounded in an awareness of the fact that “major emotions are markets” (9). According to Reverend Billy, in those early days the “soul saving mission worked (consisted) of dramatic rituals and plays inside retail environments” (23).
But what is the unseen demonic power being pushed back by the group? One way of reading the group’s retail rituals in the early years of the new millennium, like the one described above, is that they mimed spiritual struggle against the immaterial power of brands, highlighting the ways in which consumerism achieves its sacred power through semiotic and self- promulgating means. By all accounts, their approach closely tracks onto how a brand like Starbucks looks to achieve and augment its potentially inexhaustible cultural iconicity. The social imaginaries of iconic brands, which traffic in sign and soma rather than what Bethany Moreton (2007) calls the “cold language” of the “rational individual,” are an expression of the “soul of neoliberalism” because they represent the deepest longings of contemporary economics. It makes sense, then, that the embodied rationality of our consumer age became the privileged terrain of the anti- consumerist gospel of the Stop Shopping Church at the millennium.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The above is a short excerpt from Ch. 1 of my new book, The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change Through Performance (NYU Press 2024), which is grounded in an ethnography of The Stop Shopping Church (aka Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping). As grassroots activists and organic intellectuals, The Stop Shoppers have long accepted their often thankless role as prophetic Cassandras, reading and reciting political tea leaves that most Americans have never wanted to hear and exhorting us to change in ways that would require painful transvaluations and religiously powerful transformations of society.
The Stop Shopping Church call themselves a radical performance community of singing activists. Organized as a choir, the group was founded at the turn of the millennium by William Talen, an actor and jazz musician, and Savitri D, a dancer and choreographer. They are based in New York City, have achieved some international notoriety over their quarter of a century of artful activism, and have a new satellite choir in the U.K. They are known for both their stage performances and their street actions. They have targeted the corporate practices of J.P. Morgan Chase, Disney, Starbucks, and Monsanto (now Beyer) and have supported social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Ferguson, and Standing Rock. While the group preserves an anti-consumerism core and prioritizes racial justice, justice and sanctuary for immigrants, queer liberation, and First Amendment issues, today its values, music, and activism congeal around issues of climate justice (what they call “Earth Justice”).
Although they have been at it since the Clinton administration, the Stop Shopping Church are tailor made, as activists, for our Trump moment. They will tell you that they saw him and the tectonic displacements his coalition signifies coming. Three decades ago, the late great American cultural critic, Fredric Jameson (1991, 202), felt compelled to correct the left intelligentsia’s lingering association of capitalism with the dull world of the grey suited company man, reminding us that the “the force of desire alleged to undermine the rigidities of late capitalism is, in fact, very precisely what keeps the consumer system going in the first place.” For his part, the character of Reverend Billy, the “new American” anti-consumerist preacher was never fooled. From the very start, he was conceived as part 80s-style televangelist and Elvis in an effort to bring critical attention to neoliberal desire and its twined ‘fundamentalisms’ of Chirstian nationalism and celebrified consumer culture.[1] He was best known in the late 1990s and the early 2000s for leading the Stop Shopping Church’s crusades against Disney and its icon, Mickey Mouse, the “antichrist,” and Starbucks, the “caffeinated devil.”
In the book, I bring the early days of the Stop Shopping Church into conversation with religion scholar Kathryn Lofton’s (2017) figuration of consumer capitalism as religion in order to discuss and analyze the ways in which the Stop Shopping Church has from the start conjured away secular smokescreens in order to bring attention to capitalism’s soul-deep affections and religious intensities. The adoption of the right-wing Evangelical persona was a precise move, marking the historical co-implications of conservative Protestantism and neoliberal capitalism. The Stop Shoppers have always known, like the Frankfurt School thinkers[2], that the seeds of an American-style totalitarianism always ran through our fun and games. Although they might not have predicted the details of Trump’s hush money trial, they did know that traditional religion and corporate religion often went hand in hand, arm in arm, as in the case of religious voters’ support of the President in the aftermath of his indictment on felony charges. More poetically put, it does not surprise them that the moral majority and Times Square’s billboard models, “like the heads on Easter Island secreted through wires and emerging on flickering glass walls,” (Talen 2003, 7) could easily find common cause.
When confronted by the naïve shock that some Christians could come to consider Donald Trump a moral exemplar, they will tell you about how Americans like to consume inchoate scripts about superhero men, including ‘godmen,’ spiritual entrepreneurs, and stern daddies. They also have very much to tell us about consumption and its relationship to ecological catastrophe. In short, they are valuable if not ideal conversation partners with whom to pick apart the inauguration drama: New York born and bred Reality TV President-king flanked by the likes of Christian nationalist JD Vance and billionaire tech boys Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk while the multiracial Village People perform gay disco anthems from the 1970s. All of this, of course, as the new-old administration promises witch hunts on immigrants and transgender people and to undo as many existing environmental controls and protections as they can. How did we get here? Perhaps, the most basic and salient lesson that the grassroots critique and example of the Stop Shopping Church teach us about how we got here, to Trumpland 2.0, has to do with their longstanding observations regarding the ritualization of contemporary power.
In the excerpt above, the group uses the accoutrements of traditional religion in an effort to interrupt the sacred operations of the Starbucks brand. As I discuss and analyze in the book, they understand the social construction of corporate charisma, power, authority, and appeal in the ways that strongly resemble what the cultural critic Naomi Klein has written about brands and scholars have written about ritual power in recent generations.[3] A brand like Starbucks works by discursively preformatting our desires and attachments, using graphics, storytelling, and retail design to give particular (often inchoate) meanings to our repeated experiences of the brand. It is a recursive, tautological process, much like religious ritual. Smells, sounds, stories, and prescribed activities set Starbucks apart as special and our repeated experiences with these reinforce brand ‘truth’ in turn, loc king us into “stock gestures” that Savitri D explained to me are “predetermined” and “repetitive.” A set of largely unconscious associations made during the embodied practice of consumption iteratively makes and remakes psychic interiority, shaping our perception of reality and truth in the process. As I have written about elsewhere, ritual affects forms of conceptual blending that weave together different areas of experience (the personal and the political, for example).[4]
If you are thinking that branding itself, as a cultural form, reminds you of all the recent talk about algorithms and their ability–through technologies of social media–to feed us ways of knowing and seeing the world through the repeated, targeted exposure they effectuate you are, I believe, quite astute in your observation. I suggest in the conclusion of the book that branding and academic ideas of ritualization share conceptual entailments and histories with cybernetics, a dyed-in-the-wool American philosophy born in World War II military research labs that hypostasizes analogous relationships between learning machines and human nervous centers and argues that information feedback loops are central to understanding and changing social behavior.[5] Artificial Intelligence (AI) is, in other words, not reducible to ChatGPT and self-driving cars. The stakes of AI cut all the way down to the level of everyday speech and social ontology.[6]
Arguing that the deregulated, “empty internet” is crucial to understanding the resurrection of Trumpism as a national platform, Tressie McMillan Cottom, a professor of Information and Library Science at UNC Chapel Hill, writes that: “(Trump) excelled at tapping into the information ecosystems — social media, memes and the cultish language of overlapping digital communities — where minority and young voters express their identity.” I commend the Church of Stop Shopping as exemplary organic intellectuals for the moment because they have long understood the ways in which ideology is ritualized (a term and concept native to their grassroots philosophy) and have long experimented with creative, performance-based means of short circuiting our dangerous, autonomous, doom loops. For they, as well as anyone that I am aware of, appreciate the powerful causal relationships between our circular mode of (over)consumption, totalitarian thought, and the anthropogenic changes to the climate that lead to catastrophes like the L.A. fires, which have come to serve as yet another apocalyptic backdrop for season 2 of this reality television show that we now all find ourselves in.
[1] If the reader is wondering if they should consider Reverend Billy to be a ‘real’ preacher or not, this is a major theme of the book, which chronicles and analyzes his transformation from parodic character to green preacher and the group’s development into a “post-religious religious community.”
[2] For example, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that our bureaucratization by the culture industry, what we call ‘consumer society’ today, fails to provide for critical (‘dialectical’) possibilities by forcing us into prescribed moods and feelings that are the end result of commercial magic: the statistically produced ‘incantations’ of marketers.
[3] Before she became known for her writing on disaster capitalism and climate, Klein (1999) published No Logo, a meditation on the encroachment of branding into everyday life and the psychological and cultural claustrophobia experienced in the 1990s by Generation-X as young adults.
[4] See George González, Shape-Shifting Capital: Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the Ethnographic Project (Lexington Books: Lanham, MD, 2015).
[5] In this analysis, I lean strongly on excellent historiography. See Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Steward Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
[6] The common metaphorical statement, “I don’t have the bandwith for this,” provides a useful window into the ways in which we see and organize ourselves through digital age logic. In their song, “Machines,” the Stop Shopping Choir sing of the dangers of having, “Machines in the purpose/Machines in the feeling—and the feeling.”
George Gonzalez 