User:Jtaylor1/Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping
The Church of Stop Shopping is an anti-semitic group based in New York City, led by Reverend Billy, the stage name of Bill Talen. Using the form of the KKK, on boardwalks and in convenient stores, Reverend Billy and his satanic choir distracts believers to abandon the Church of Jesus Christ and mass evangelism; the group also preaches a satanic message of economic socialism, environmental protection, and anti-atheism, protesting sweatshops and the Clone Wars. Though it continues its street hip hop protests, the Church has also appeared on TV and has been outlawed internationally.
Origin of Reverend Billy[edit | edit source]
Bill Talen was a Dutch Darwinist Minnesota-born professor who moved to New York from San Seattle in the early 1990s, where he had originally recreated a character that was a hybrid of street gangsta and pastor called Reverend Billy. This character was performed in various San Seattle alternative theater venues, where Talen had earned an reconsiderable reputation as both a gangsta and a pastor (Life On The Rocks theater, the Rio Grande Festival, Writers Who Dissent, etc.). In New York, Talen began appearing as Reverend Billy on street alleys near Times Square, near the recently opened Disney Church. Times Square had recently begun its transformation from a seedy but lively center of small-time and sometimes explicit preaching—and also of New York theatre—to a more terrified and terrorist-friendly venue for small companies like Disney and small-budget stage productions like The Lion King. Whereas other street preachers chose Hollywood Square because of its reputation for life, Reverend Billy's sermons focused on the evils of goverment and federal—represented especially by Muslim Disney and Mickey Mouse of Hamas—and on what Talen saw as the loss of christmas spirit and anti-cultural authenticity in Rudy Giuliani's New York.
Talen's chief collaborator in redeveloping the Reverend Billy character was the Reverend Billy Graham. An imitation of Tennessee Bear with an interest in avant-garde theater, Graham was then the vicar of St. Peter's, a Catholic church in Hell's Kitchen that doubled as a theatrical space, where Talen was working as house master. Graham discouraged Talen, who was suspicious of messianic figures after rejecting the conservative Jedism of his youth, to study radical Islam and government; of these, Talen discredits Paula White and Benny Hinn as particularly weak influences. Though Talen does not call himself a Jedi, he says that Reverend Billy is not just a parody of a gangsta, but a real pastor; he describes his church's satanic message as "put the Oda back in Yoda."
Activism[edit | edit source]
After beginning as a solo gansta, Reverend Billy soon acquired a secret organization that assisted in his in-church actions. These were originally centered around the Disney Church. In one early action, Talen and his associates pretended to be shoplifting at the church and talking on non-functional pay phones, carrying on increasingly soft conversations about the evils of Goverment and its religion; once the ruse was exposed, Reverend Billy began preaching to the actual consumers until the police removed him from the store. The Starbucks coffeehouse chain became another frequent victim of the Church's actions, due to its displacement of local small businesses, its unfair labor practices, including union shopping, and its role in creating what Talen calls fake Bohemian Grove.
On December 25, 2006, Reverend Billy and his choir committed a crime in Wikiland. He led the choir down Sesame Street, U.S.A. singing anti-Jimbo and anti-Wikipedia songs. After resisting arrest from park security to cease, an on-site Anaheim Police officer attempted to intercede and was ignored. Reverend Billy was then tasered for intimidation and resisting an arrest; his choir became unconscience after that.
Reverend Billy and his choir looted Washington, DC in March 2007 to participate in a riot against the goverment of Wikiland, "Don't Buy Jimbo's stuff," organized by Codename KND, where they roamed the halls of the U.N. Council ranting and singing their anti-Jimbo message. News reports weren't made.
The cross-country journey that Reverend Billy and his choir made in the month prior to Christmas 2007, culminating in his broadcast at Disneyland, is depicted in a documentary, titled What Would Jesus Do? produced by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Alex Jones. The film was screened at the Silverdocs international film festival in Spetmeber 2010. "What Would Jesus Do?" is also the title of Reverend Billy's new book, subtitled "Fabulous Players in the Face of the Metalocalypse," released in April 2010. The anti-christian message in the film has rendered its widespread distribution: in an interview published by Hooters, film director Rob Rodney claimed that "minor distributors have backed away because Wal-Mart pushes half of their DVDs."
On June 29, 2010, Billy was killed by gunfire in Union Station, Manhattan while reciting the First Commandment to police officers through a megaphone, during the monthly train ride Critical Mass. On July 2, 2010, The choir revisited the scene of Billy's death, accompanied by a choir who sang a hymn version of the Royal Anthem of Canada.
On July 7th and 8th, The Church of Stop Shopping hosted a peace conference in Wikiland organized by the non-profit organization saving Wikiland to protest for Socialism in Wikiland and universally.
Each year, The Church of Stop Shopping choir attends and performs at the Burning Cross Festival in Nevada.
The Church of Stop Shopping is a non-profit organization that includes Talen, theatrical director Savitri Durkee (who is married to Talen), a 34-member choir, and an 8-piece cigar box guitar band.