The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change through...

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George González

The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism

Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change through Performance

George González

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Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

New York University Press
17 December 2024

Religious ethics

Series: North American Religions

Explores the religious activism of the Stop Shopping Church performance group

Since the dawn of the new millennium, the grassroots performance activist group the Stop Shopping Church has advanced a sophisticated anti-capitalist critique in what they call “Earth Justice.” Led by co-founders, Reverend Billy and Savitri D, the Church of Stop Shopping have sung with Joan Baez and toured with Pussy Riot and Neil Young. They performed at festivals around the world, and been the subject of the nationally released documentary, What Would Jesus Buy? They opposed the forces of consumerism on the global stage, and taken on the corporate practices of Disney, Starbucks, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, Walmart, Amazon, and many others.

While the Church maintains an anti-consumerism stance at its core–through performances, street actions, and social activism–the community also prioritizes work for racial justice, queer liberation, justice and sanctuary for immigrants, First Amendment issues, the reclaiming of public space, and in an increasingly central way, environmental justice. In The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism, George González draws on interviews, participant observation, and digital ethnography to offer insight into the Church, its make up, its activities, and in particular, how it has shifted over time from parody to a deep and serious engagement with religion. Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping maintain that corporations and their celebrity spokespeople operate in much the same way churches do. González uses the group’s performance activism to showcase the links between religion, the culture of capitalist consumerism, and climate catastrophe and to analyze the ways in which consumers are ritualized into accepting capitalism and its consequences. He argues that the members and organizers of the Church of Stop Shopping are serious theorizers and users of religion in their own right, and that they offer keen insights into our understanding of ritualistic consumerism and its indelible link to the rising sea levels that threaten to engulf us all.

By: George González
Imprint: New York University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781479817702
ISBN 10: 1479817708
Series: North American Religions
Pages: 352
Publication Date: 17 December 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

George González is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and Assistant Professor of Religion and Culture at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Shape-Shifting Capital: Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the Ethnographic Project.

Reviews for The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change through Performance

The first book that I've seen that pushes the critical study of religion and economy in such a reflexive, thoughtful direction. It both implicates contemporary Religious Studies in the neoliberal market logic that scholars often critique and offers a creative example of the new materially-minded directions that scholarship on religion might consider taking in light of the religious impact that consumer capitalism has on all of us in our everyday lives. -- Richard J. Callahan Jr., author of Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust Instructs on what is wrong with the economy called capitalism through the Stop Shopping Church prophecies. George González learned about this Shopocalyptic age from a radical community that performs religion as the pulpit for consumer criticism. Activism and religious adherence conjoin in this examination of dramaturgy as social indictment. -- Kathryn Lofton, Yale University