In What Would Jesus Buy? Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping provide guerrilla theater focused on consumerism. Bill Talen, who acts as Rev. Billy, related how he came to create that particular form of social action.

I was mentored by Reverend Sidney Lanier, an Episcopal priest. Sidney and I got to know each other back in the ’80s. Sidney knew me first as a playwright and an actor. He came to my performances in San Francisco. He took me out for a lunch one day and he said, “There’s a prophetic voice in your work. You might consider inventing a new kind of American preacher.” And I said, “Oh, no, no, no,” because I had been raised by right-wing Christians. “I don’t want to go there. You leave that to Saturday Night Live. I’m not going to touch Christianity in my work. I was too hurt by my fundamentalist boyhood.”

But Sidney had another take on Jesus that was much different from the Dutch Calvinists who raised me in western Michigan. It was much more like Jesus as social conscience, Jesus as artist, Jesus as healer, and much less Jesus as the judge, Jesus as the versions I was raised with. He started taking me to churches. I started studying preaching. He introduced me to the Historical Jesus—the people who are reconstructing the life of Jesus. ... He brought me to lives that people had lived when they turned the world upside down, in other words, Jesus-like careers, people like Tennessee Williams and Lenny Bruce, both of whom Sidney knew. He reoriented me. One thing he did say about Jesus was that Jesus, and Mary Magdalene and the Apostles, were guerrilla theater people of their day. They would go into public places, hillsides, living rooms, and they would change the way people saw the world.

So flash forward to ten years ago in Times Square. I got a job from Sidney in an Episcopal church as the house manager for the church, but also from the theater in the church. It was a church where he had been the vicar in the ’60s (St. Clement’s in Hell’s Kitchen). It was while I lived in that neighborhood that the Disneyfication of Times Square took place. The big box stores and chain stores came to Times Square, with the assistance of Rudi Giuliani’s police. Everybody who didn’t seem to be a tourist was legally at risk—especially people of color, especially poor people. Disney’s lawyers were harassing small businesses, vendors—powerless people. Powerless people in the ’90s in Times Square were confronted, and many of them left.

I asked myself “Who is out here with any kind of objection at all? Who is out here raising their voice?” I thought, “The preachers. They’re the people who are shouting here. They don’t have permits.” That was when all of Sidney’s talk—preparation about the possibilities of religious imagery and especially the style of preaching and his introduction to Jesus as a radical, as a guerrilla, as a teacher, as these other roles that I hadn’t thought of before. That is when I bought the collar that I still wear... and started preaching. I started practicing and started developing a theology in which Mickey Mouse was the Antichrist—the materialism of the Disney Store and the sweatshop products on the shelves. [Switches to Reverend Billy persona] “Mickey Mouse is the Antichrist, child. Back away from this den of iniquity.” And I confronted the tourists and discouraged their purchases.