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The Reverend preaches: "It's not easy for Americans to slow down their consumption. No, it ain't! We've got to help each other out. Give each other the power. Yes we do! To back away from the product. To turn. To escape the big box. The hypnosis of corporate greed! Amen, hallelujah."

 The Tate Modern in London—the most-visited art gallery in the world—got a new addition to its collection last week. The performance artist and preacher Reverend Billy, together with his choir and a crowd of supporters, put on an exorcism against all the money that BP funnels into the museum to whitewash its public image. The company is responsible for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010 and the Tar Sands extraction effort in Canada.

On a Monday morning in Los Angeles, in a half-empty strip-mall Starbucks on Reseda Boulevard, two young women are declaring their love for each other.

Before there was Reverend Billy, there was Bill Talen, born and raised in Minnesota, in the midst of conservative Dutch Calvinism, a faith he rejected as a teenager. He became a playwright, performer, and producer, working for years in San Francisco before he moved to New York City in the mid-1990s. “Rev. Billy,” Talen’s alter ego, was created in 1997, when Talen/Billy began street-corner preaching near the new Disney Store in Times Square, using the cadences and mannerisms of a TV evangelist to decry the chain-store commercial excesses of gentrification.

 "I think of a child's mind as a blank book. During the first years of his life, much will be written on the pages. The quality of that writing will affect his life profoundly."  -- Walt Disney 

"We are drowning in a sea of identical details. . . . Mickey Mouse is the Antichrist. . . . Times Square has been blown up by 10,000 smiling stuffed animals. . . . Don't shop, children, save your souls!"   --Reverend Billy 

On a drizzly evening earlier this week, the Rev. Billy, who calls Mickey Mouse "the Antichrist," was denouncing the evils of mindless consumerism at CalArts, the Valencia college partly founded and funded by Walt and Roy Disney.

Thursday night, the Rev. Billy and his Life After Shopping Gospel Choir will be preaching their puckishly anti-capitalist message from the bully pulpit of REDCAT, the multipurpose venue tucked inside Walt Disney Concert Hall. A late-night performance was added after the first one sold out.

Two weeks ago Reverend Billy, the performance artist and activist best known as the leader of the Church of Stop Shopping, was plying his trade, public proselytizing. He and 15 members of the church’s choir traveled from New York to Washington to stage a protest as part of Appalachia Rising, a campaign to end mountaintop-removal coal mining. They gathered around a mound of symbolic dirt in the lobby of a bank that they say finances mountaintop removal, shouted “Hallelujah!” and sang folk songs.

Even though we’ve come way farther than we did back in the day when Abraham Lincoln was alive, and he may have been gay too by the way, reading this New Yorker article about the gospel singer Tonex reminds me (once again) that we’ve got a loooooong way to go. The low down is that in September of 2009 the gospel singer Tonex came out of the closet, after dogging years of rumors and ending a four year marriage. And now he’s struggling to find his way, but not his ego, because his Church is not a-okay with him being gay.

Activist/performance artist Reverend Billy Talen held an "unmarriage until gay marriage" ceremony at Central Park's Bethesda Fountain on Sunday.

The Rev. Billy Talen makes us giggle. Not because he actually got dozens of couples to show up in New York's Central Park on a chilly Valentine's Day to revoke their wedding vows in support of gay marriage, but because he asked the crowd, "Can I have a same-sex-elujah?"