Reverend Wilby

Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping is a radical performance community based in New York City. The Stop Shopping Choir is accompanied by a comic preacher, Reverend Billy, portrayed by performer William Talen. The philosophy of the Church of Stop Shopping surrounds the imminent "Shopocalypse", which assumes the end of humanity will come about through manic consumerism. The Stop Shopping Choir accompanies Reverend Billy and stages guerrilla theater style actions, singing on the property of the Disney stores, Monsanto facilities, and Trump Tower, among others. In 2007 they were featured in What Would Jesus Buy? a film produced by Morgan Spurlock. They are often considered part of the Culture jamming movement. The group uses the content from their direct actions to create songs that are performed on concert stages and in cabarets. 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. In 2024 they joined Neil Young and Crazy Horse on their Love Earth tour across the country. In 2024, George Gonzalez, a sociologist and scholar of religion, published The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism, which is a serious scholarly treatment of the group's quarter-century of arts-based public pedagogy.