Discussing Pastor Billy was interesting to me because I was first exposed to him last year in my social movements class. In that discussion we talked about how he uses religion to create a collective identity for people to claim and protest. He uses theatrics to get his point across as well.
In our class this morning we discussed how he descripturalizes or desecrates capitalism to demonstrate its evil force in the world. He does this by taking on the persona of a pastor and chanting things like "Monsanto is the Devil". He gets his church together to go to locations, like Starbucks or banks and yells and sings at the people there participating in the capitalist enterprises that he and his followers believe to be evil and hurting the Earth.
It was interesting to see the perspectives these classes had to offer. In Social Movements we did not take his church seriously as a church, we thought of Pastor Billy as a persona, we discussed how he was using this language to call attention to what he was doing or get more people interested in his work by using the familiar structure of christianity. While in this religion class we took his church as real and analyzed how he was able to create and sustain a faithful protesting base of 'parishioners'. By giving certain companies the label of evil and making a group based on casting out that evil, Pastor Billy and his Stop Shopping Choir. http://www.revbilly.com/
