Posted on 30 November 2011, 0:27

Reverend Billy, the New York performance artist, street preacher, prankster and political activist is having an intensely busy time right now. A few weeks ago he was at St Paul’s Cathedral, washing dishes in the Occupy London Stock Exchange camp and preaching to an enthusiastic congregation on the cathedral steps.

Earlier this week he was invading a branch of Victoria’s Secret in New York, announcing the arrival of the ‘shopocalypse’, laying hands on the tills and exorcising them of the demons of consumerism – as featured in a fascinating interview with an unbelieving Glenn Beck.

But on Sunday afternoon, in the darkness of Manhattan’s Highline Ballroom, a paying audience of 200 or so people were sitting at their tables on the dance floor, waiting for the Reverend Billy to appear for the premiere performance of an oratorio for the Occupy Wall Street movement. I was there too, up in the gallery, as I’ve never been a fan of the stalls. From there, I shot some video of the event.

In the flickering candlelight, the Church of Stop Shopping Choir began moving between the tables, making their way to the stage, singing the words of the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and the press, and the right of peaceable assembly. It was hardly Cole Porter, but curiously powerful nonetheless.

Last on stage was the Reverend himself, in his customary white suit, blond bouffant hair, white cowboy boots, black frontal and deep dog collar in the Episcopalian style. As the choir sang, he prayed breathily into the mic: ‘We ask the God of the 99 percent to be with us. We’ve got some apocalyptic, direct democracy to pull off today! Revolujah!’

What followed was a political rally delivered with all the tricks and theatrics of a Pentecostal meeting, but stripped of its content. There was a testimony, not of a soul gloriously saved, but of Kendall Jackman – ‘Saint Kendall’ the Reverend dubbed her – who had her home repossessed by Bank of America.

There were frequent exhortations shouted by Reverend Billy: ‘Occupylujah, children! Do I hear an amen?’ There was the superb singing of the choir, performing the words of the Occupy Wall Street declaration to tunes straight out of a Broadway musical. There was even a moment of silence for Mohammed Bouazizi, whose death in Tunisia almost a year ago sparked the Arab Spring.

Finally, the audience started calling for a sermon from the white-suited one, which he delivered with a crowd-stirring peroration: ‘As the winter comes on and the police get permission to use rubber bullets, pepper spray and all the rest of it, we know that we’re going to continue to expand… We’re going to find places to occupy.’

Bill Talen has been channelling Elvis and Pentecostalism in the persona of Reverend Billy for more than a decade, and for some time was on the vestry committee of the progressive St Mark’s Church in the Bowery, until he left under a cloud of disagreement over making the church his base.

I went to see Revd Winnie Varghese, the priest in charge there, who told me that although his anti-consumerist message is ‘absolutely what we believe in as well,’ the relationship with St Mark’s and other progressive churches in the city is broken. ‘He performs in rental space and not in churches,’ she says.

That is perhaps not surprising, since his shows plunder the imagery and rituals of over-enthusiastic worship in a highly satirical take on Pentecostal religion.

‘I have smart friends who think he’s hysterical,’ says Winne Varghese. ‘They are also anti-religious, and I think that’s why they like it. They see it as very effective mockery of the black Pentecostal movement. I personally find that quite offensive. I’m kind of old school about racial politics, and I don’t like it.’

As soon as the show ended, American Christian satirist Becky Garrison took me over to grab a few seconds with Reverend Billy, who was just off the stage. He said he couldn’t talk long: ‘It’s part of my job, a pastor has to shake hands at the door.’ But I asked him if he felt his time had come with the Occupy movement after all his years of activism.

‘I know a lot of people need what we’re saying right now. But I know that when we went to Macy’s on Thursday, there were tens of thousands of shoppers there, and none of them had any idea who I was. So it was putting the stop shopping idea, like a seed, into the minds of a vast number of consumers, who will vote in the Iraq war, who will keep using fossil fuels and will march us off the cliff. So if I’m having a little bit of a flavor of the month experience right now, I’m not naive enough to think…’

He tailed off, but was clearly rebuffing my invitation to grasp a Messiah moment.

I was struck by his ‘pastor shaking hands at the door’ comment, though. He was off the stage and out of the spotlight, but still in character as Reverend Billy.

Earlier this month, Billy and his wife and partner Savitri Durkee, a theater director, took part in a conversation about their work which was featured in Religion Despatches. Savitri commented: ‘People cleave to the comfort of Billy being Reverend Billy. If we think that Reverend Billy would be Reverend Billy no matter what, that he would shout into an empty room, or wake up alone in the night in an anti-consumerist fever, if we believe that he isn’t “putting it on,” then, yes, we believe him to be more serious, more real.’

His final words to the faithful in the Highline Ballroom, delivered to huge cheers, were ‘See you in the tombs!’ – the holding cells of the NYPD.

Reverend Billy is not a real reverend. Sunday afternoon’s show though was a real and not pretend event. It seemed designed to put steel into the hearts of the protesters. He quit the stage as the audience chanted, ‘Whose occupation? Our occupation!’ It’s revival, but not as we know it.