INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM TALEN

(REVEREND BILLY)

Please share a brief history of the Stop Shopping movement and how it got started.

Well, it came from two directions. One was Reverend Sidney Lanier, a former Episcopal priest, who was also an inventor of culture. He was a vicar at a church up in the Hell’s Kitchen called St. Clement’s. He and a friend named Wynn Handman started a tradition of bringing scenes from American and British plays into the church service itself. Playwright Tennessee Williams, aka Thomas Lanier Williams, was his cousin. So, he created a social movement there with Tennessee Williams, helping them start this theater. Williams wrote a play that became a movie called Night of the Iguana. In the opening scene in John Houston’s version, he has a breakdown at the pulpit, and he chases the entire congregation out into the rain. And that really is the beginning of the idea for the earth church. Sidney discovered me in San Francisco and took me to dinner; we produced a play and it took off from there.

The other influence is Savitri D, our director, who was born in a mountain community north of Taos called the Lama Mountain, which is partly Hopi and partly an alternative spiritual community called the Lama Foundation, started by her parents. It was a way station between the beatniks and hippies and it was a way station between the east and the west. Her mother was Asha Greer, who published, edited, and illustrated Be Here Now, by professor Richard Alpert, or Ram Dass, who was also a friend to this community. When Savitri and I got married 21 years ago and started this thing, I couldn’t have married a more qualified person.

What is the overarching message of the Earth Church?

My sermons are basically saying we live on as the Earth. We are the earth. And we live in different forms. And sometimes the molecules are flying away from us. The part that was identity, the part that we thought we controlled, goes out into the ecosystem around us. And that’s life too.

Love life – and death is a part of life. So that is the spiritual element that changes how you look at things, how you make love, how you are generous, how you give. You back away from a predatory economy. You’re forgiving and you’re giving. That part of yourself that is love, which is trust and loyalty and sharing and gentleness and intimacy, opens up and becomes complex in ways that you could not have could not have done otherwise. You cannot access that easily when you are part of the fundamentalist religion called Neo capitalism, where everything has a price and everything’s on the market, and the regulators are disempowered. Nature is much more in danger, and people who are not able to provide for themselves are much more in danger. Some politicians call sharing money in any form communism, even if it is just generosity, which is absurd.

If you love the Earth and love your life here while you are here, and love what the Earth does, with the molecules that are shared with life, when life takes over, our identity is gone but life continues. If you love that concept, that cyclical indigenous concept, then you love sharing, then you’re not going to put everything on the market. You’re going to love sharing, you’re going to be life for other people.

So, to me, it all comes together. And I think it comes together in the writings of Ernest Becker. He provided ways of thinking about life that left us being generous, providing for each other, looking out for each other’s safety, and yet providing for our wildness, because he had very sophisticated ways of providing for the life of the artist. The life of the person who disrupts and walks away from. And by doing so, his writing always says, by leaving the monoculture, leaving that fundamentalism, you open yourself up for honesty about your own temporality and honesty about how life goes by, and then you value every moment. Then you can be vulnerable and you can cry and laugh.

What is your connection to Ernest Becker?

We’re honored to have Dr. Becker in our sermons, to quote him. He’s a fellow soul in the pantheon of Earth philosophers like Emma Goldman and Zora Neale Hurston, back through Henry David Thoreau to some of the old Greek philosophers. Meanwhile staring us in the face are the people that we methodically kill to this day, every day. And even for good people in positions of power, it’s really hard to turn this around. So, we need people like Dr. Becker, who essentially translate the language of Western logic, shall we say. We need resistance to the world of living your life by shopping. And Dr. Becker puts the whole cycle together – there’s death in life that makes life better, but it means you’re taking a risk, with that kind of life, of all kinds of craziness. You’re not safe within the ordered confines of some sort of fundamentalist system, whether it be Walmart or the Roman Catholic Church.

And this message makes our activism so much stronger. When we sing as we go into the lobby of the great poisoner, Chase Bank, we have in our lyrics that we our we are agents of the earth, we are the earth at that point. We’re not doing it for careers and we’re not doing it because we’re even disapproving of them. We’re not doing it because of right thinking or moral clarity or because we’re uppity environmentalists, none of that. We’re just the earth and we want to share with you. You can be free of this consumer bank. Love the Earth. And that’s just as radical as can be. You don’t have to do it as an economist or a moralist or a careerist, just do it out of simple love. It’s erotic. And sing! It feels good.

By the way, “Love with Extinction” is the song of our repertoire that makes me think of Dr. Becker the most.

What sort of reactions do you receive?

Our main theatrical thing over the 21 years has been trespassing while singing. We’ve done that in Walmart, at Starbucks and Disney, and now it’s JPMorgan Chase. Chase is one of the main co2 fluorinated gases and methane poisoners with their financing of gas and oil projects, plastics, gold mines, Bauxite mines, and so forth. Between September 2019 and March 2020 we invaded 27 separate Chase Banks.

When we go into a bank or a chain store, or in the early days, sweatshops and union busting, when we go inside some people think it’s hilarious, some people think it’s really musical and try to sing along. Other people hate us, or get really annoyed, they can’t concentrate on writing a check or something. We like that because we’re breaking the glass of culture. We’re blowing up culture. Maybe I shouldn’t use that violent phrase, but we’re disrupting, it’s rupture, it’s rapture! We’re disrupting the culture because the totality of this culture right now is that we are accelerating the pain and suffering and premature death of so many people. The culture makes the economy, and we have a growth economy, which is impossible. You can’t have a growth economy because it’s a finite planet. You just can’t have an infinite economy on a finite planet.

We’re destroying all the ecosystems, we’re using the air, the water, the soil, as raw resources for our industries, but that doesn’t work. It’s deadly. So we’re happy just to have lots of different responses to our work. Because different people have different ways of changing the mind. It might be laughing, it might be crying, it might be a bad mood, it might be depression, it might be ecstasy, or an epiphany. However they want to do it, we push them and we start them their journey. Or maybe we remind them of a journey they were on before. A lot of people have a journey of exploration, about living, when they’re in college, or when they’re wandering when they’re young. And then they get committed to a marriage or to a mortgage. Marriage and mortgage both have “aging” at the end of those words. They might just get older and set in their ways. And we might remind them of that early exploration, because a lot of our people are younger in our choir. Youth is when you explore and when you have wonder about life.

Wonder about life is what we have to join people to again, ultimately that is the most disruptive of all loves. And love is the most disruptive emotion. Emma Goldman said that love is the defier of laws. Love is the molder of our destiny, how we change. So, we say the Earth is our great teacher. And death is a big part of that teaching. Because death is a part of life. Indigenous people know that. A lot of this is about dragging urban people in here and getting them in touch with their own indigeneity.

Do people have to be singers or musicians to join the choir?

We have one door which is the musicians’ door. We have some Grammy winners, a Tony-nominated star of Hades town, some very excellent out-of-work New Yorkers who come in here between plays and so forth. But on the other hand, we also have activists. Activists teach the musicians about cops and jail support, and locking arms at front doors, and the whole science of trespassing while singing, which we get from civil rights, and Act Up, among other things. Basically, any social movement in the United States history that has made change has that feature. And then the musicians teach the activists what a chord is.

We love community choirs. If you go on YouTube, and you listen to a very smooth college choir, conducted by some person with a PhD, it’s very perfect and smooth. They stop and start together, they modulate to the next key perfectly, and it’s all very thrilling for a certain sort of bourgeois ear. But then, if you listen to a community choir, they are workers, community members, mothers who have lives, who deal with three kids all week, and they rehearse once, if they’re lucky. They come and they are part of the ritual at the church. It is not all about smoothness, it’s about laughing and crying. So, we like the rougher sound of a community choir, because usually there are some smoothies. And then there are also people who are just believers. Sometimes they miss the note, or they’re a little bit flat. But there is passion and rawness. And that’s what makes a community choir great. And science supports it too! There have been studies that harmonizing together for two hours a week completely changes your electromagnetic state and injects you with dopamine.

What are some of the impacts of the work that you’ve seen, or felt?

We give people emotional and intellectual defenses against the addiction to shopping. Consumerism is the main fundamentalist religion in this country. I don’t know if Dr. Becker would agree with that, but that’s what we believe. Now for more than 50% of the people who are asked their religion on official polls, the most popular answer is none of the above. But almost all of them, religious or not, are shoppers. And we just have a saturation of shopping. A recent study estimated that if you live in New York and have a computer, you’re exposed to around 10,000 shopping events per day, such as advertising events of some kind. It could be as simple as a person walking by with a logo on their shoe. Everything urges you to buy products. That’s the urban existence of New York. We love the phrase “stop shopping,” because it’s a good thing to stop shopping even for 10 minutes in the United States. If you live in the middle of New York, and you don’t shop for 10 minutes, that might be a very good thing. Ultimately, we stand by it.