Shopacalypse

Reverend Billy is the founder of the Church of Stop Shopping that preaches against "mindless consumerism." An article and a video about Rev. Billy from a recent episode of the Today Show is here. Billy is a performance artist who has staged corporate "exorcisms" on location at stores like Victoria's Secret and Starbucks.

Earlier this year, Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame produced a documentary about Reverend Billy; the film is called "What Would Jesus Buy?" Apparently the movie will come out in December this year. An interview with Mr Spurlock about WWJB can be found here. A quote from the Spurlock interview:

For the past two years I haven’t bought anyone in my family Christmas presents and I haven’t asked them to get me anything either. I’ve said, “I don’t need anything, I love you guys and the most important thing is for me to get to see you and spend time with you.” So we’ve been planning family vacations. Let’s spend our money on something that we will all enjoy, and be together. That’s what I encourage everyone to do. That’s the most valuable thing you can do-spend time together to talk and communicate and connect. We don’t connect with people at all anymore. How many times do you just send an email to somebody without getting on the phone or send a text message? It’s the world we live in. We continue to get further and further away from real human contact. Especially for people that we love and care about, we can’t let that happen. So for me, that’s the one thing that I’ve really tried to do since meeting Billy.

Somewhere along the line we bought into this whole idea that if you don’t buy a lot of stuff or if you don’t buy a lot of things then you are cheap and you don’t love someone or that they are not as valuable. I think we need to remold that.