The American Academy of Religion is pleased to announce that “The Church of Stop Shopping” with William Talen as the Reverend Billy, directed by Savitri D, is the 2026 Winner of the AAR Religion and the Arts Award.
The Church of Stop Shopping was cofounded in 2000 by William Talen, an actor, writer, and jazz musician, and Savitri D, a classically trained dancer, choreographer, and organizer who directs the group. The “radical performance community of singing activists” has contributed over two decades of religious activism through performance. The jury agrees with these words from the nomination statement:
“The Church of Stop Shopping has made significant contributions to our public and scholarly understanding of the relations between art and religion by mapping and miming, through their street performances and music, the shifting social grammar of neoliberal capitalism, mirroring back and critiquing economy’s religious zeal, ritualized appetites, consanguineous partnerships with conservative Protestantism, and wholescale commodification of what the sociologists, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello ([1999], 2007), refer to as the “artistic critique.” For over two-decades, the Stop Shoppers have brought attention to the ways in which neoliberal capitalism ritualizes desire and shapes subjective horizons through (largely metaphorical and preconscious) consumer aesthetics, with profound negative consequences for the plights of labor, libidinal freedoms, cultural possibility, and, most urgently, the planet. Importantly, they also theorize, use, and embody religion and art to suggest modes of active resistance.
In the beginning, Talen’s performance character of Reverend Billy, a mélange of fundamentalist televangelist and Elvis Presley, provided the anti-consumerist group with a visible grassroots iconicity. In its first decade, a well-choreographed Gospel Choir donning flowing robes musically accompanied and supported the “fake” preacher’s parodic sermons that breathed fire and brimstone on the likes of Mickey Mouse, the consumer antichrist, and Starbucks’s iterative ritualization of consumers and branding of social space. In the subsequent decades, the community has come to recognize the ways in which they have become their own kind of religious community (in a Durkheimian sense), what Reverend Billy calls “post-religious religion,” and that what is politically needed to survive ecological catastrophe is a transvaluation of values that is akin to the creation of a hereto unknown “Earthy religion.” If the early performances of the group sought to exorcise advertising semiotics from consumer souls, today the Stop Shopping Church is most interested in conjuring forth, not away. Their street theater, more polished performances, and music seek to reintroduce the Earth (especially its oceans, flora, and fauna) precisely back into spaces wherein capitalist alchemy and magic most brutally disappear political ecology (such as Chase Bank branch lobbies).”
The AAR commends the Church of Stop Shopping on decades of important contributions to religious activism through performance, and we looks forward to further engaging with the Church of Stop Shopping in an online forum in 2026. For more information, please see the Church of Stop Shopping and their instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/revbillytalen/
Photo credit: John Quilty