The radical preacher and his Stop Shopping Choir are rattling the cage of the corporations with their new show Monsanto Is The Devil. We spoke to them about big business, Ferguson and why Monsanto is like god in the Old Testament

Walk into Joe’s Pub on a Sunday afternoon this month, and you may feel like you stepped into a revival meeting. Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir have returned for a six-week residency at the Public Theater’s performance venue to perform their latest show, Monsanto Is The Devil. While appropriating the character of the Christian televangelist pastor, popularised by Jimmy Swaggart in the 1970-1980s, Reverend Billy delivers a radically different message. In the past, he and the Stop Shopping Choir have led “exorcisms” of cash registers and the Tate Modern. Last year, Reverend Billy and the musical director of the group, Nehemiah Luckett, were arrested and charged with riot, trespass, unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct after a performance in the Manhattan branch lobby of JP Morgan Chase.

This Thanksgiving saw Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir make a visit to St Louis, Missouri, where they hosted an organic meal on the front lawn of Monsanto’s headquarters, before joining protesters from Ferguson.

Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir perform Monsanto is the Devil at Joe’s Pub. Photograph: Minister Erik McGregor/Flickr

I spoke with Reverend Billy (AKA Billy Talen), activist and lead performer, and Savitri D, the director of the project to discuss their work and the connections they see between human rights and earth rights.

What are your backgrounds?

Billy Talen: In the 1970s-1980s, I primarily did monologues, which was a performance form that defined that time. The monologuing gradually became the character, and the monologuing became sermons.

Savitri D: Both of us came from different sectors of the theatre world. In Billy’s case, it was performance art, and in my case, it was dance and straight theater.

How did New York City contribute to the formation of the Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir ?

SD: Both of us were responding to the conditions we found ourselves in the late 1990s in New York City, during the Giulani era, as neo-liberalism creeped into the city and as Clintonian economics saturated the environment around us. I think both of us arrived to this project from the problem of being an artist under those conditions and also the problem of other people living in this state under those conditions. From looking around and seeing the massive racial profiling taking place to the attempt to create a perfect shopping moment in the city, it was destroying the lives of human beings and small business owners. All these things were coinciding and, as an artist, you have that moment where you realise there’s an imperative to respond.

Why did you decide to model your performative actions on Christian church services?

SD: Let’s face it: the US is a Christian nation. And while televangelists are not as ascendant at this moment as they’ve been in the past, they were an important part of the culture in 1980s, and even, 1990s. They were speaking with the president at the White House, and they were all about their righteousness on TV and the radio. But often it was a very self-invented form, some of these preachers didn’t go to seminary, they invented themselves. The self-invented preacher and the self-invented church is an old, old American tradition. Billy was stepping into that.

How did the Stop Shopping Choir form?

SD: The choir appeared around Billy, when he preaching on the street in Times Square. I think the choir grew organically as Billy shouted on the street and people agreed.The choir came out of reality; it came out people stepping forward, and saying yes. It’s really fascinating to think of what a chorus is and the role it plays in theater. It is the conscience, and it is the true credible voice because it’s multiple voices.

Why is your latest show titled Monsanto Is The Devil?

BT: We feel that Monsanto threatens people with pests and weeds, and then sells people their pesticide coated, DNA-spliced idea of corn. Basically, they are teaching people to distrust nature and distrust the natural world. When you don’t trust the natural world, you create climate change. Monsanto’s actions defeat the ability of the local ecosystem to recycle CO2 into the plants and trees, which are major storage sequesteration sites for our vegetation. Organic farmers will tell you that that’s one of the basic ideas of their farming method: to cycle the atmosphere into the soil.

Do you see any connections between the fundamentalist church and Monsanto?

BT: The heart of the issue here is that Monsanto is like an Old Testament God, who comes to you and says: “Trust me, you’re in trouble, you’re going to die, so turn your faith over to me and you will be my chosen people. But you have to agree to sign up with me, I’m your only God.” Many Americans are fed up with the fundamentalist God, and learning to trust life as it is given to us here, on Earth. You have to stop being afraid of it. You have to trust it, and it with bear you up. I’m trying to dismantle that old Jimmy Swaggart faith of “Be very afraid, and give me your money.”

On your site, you recognise two other devils, consumerism and miltarism, could you talk about why you believe those two are the devils of society?

SD: From the perspective someone in the United States, consumerism is how we operate. It’s a domestic tactic, and militarism is the foreign tactic of this neoliberal agenda. It’s the corporatisation of our democracy. In this system, the only way to save the economy is to shop more, to create more retail jobs instead of real jobs, which further fosters our incredible debt. Even if we did want to exert our citizen force here in the US, we can’t because the democracy is so corporatised. Look at the last election cycle, and how much money was poured into advocating against the GMO labelling law.

BT: There is also foreign impact of these policies and how militarism operates with the expansion of these companies in other territories. The expansion of the factory farm has terrible implications for climate change.

Something that really stood out was the line: ‘Death by invisible toxins isn’t really that different than death by visible bullets,’ when Ferguson was brought up. Could you explain this idea?

SD: First, it’s important to value the life and death that’s going on in Ferguson as much as we can, and elevate the reality of that crisis in this moment. We could talk about the connections in theoretical ways, but those are real lives.

BT: We had been planning to come to the St Louis area for months, partly in partnership with the Organic Consumer Association, to educate and organise around organic farming and food. And then Ferguson happened next door. In the past couple of months, several of us have gone, and we raised money for them with a Joan Baez concert. We hope we can help in some modest degree.

SD: That said, Billy and I have been talking a lot before Ferguson, before Michael Brown was shot, were talking about how we can connect human justice with earth justice. Both are essentially created by the same set of problems: corporatised democracy, steroidal capitalism, and racism.

How do human justice and earth justice connect?

BT: The basic problem of power, the most immediate issue is this big chemical company and across the way, there is a racist police department besieging their own community. But now, there is a coming together of human rights and earth rights. A lot of people believe these are separate issues, but we’re coming to the point where we have to have a single view of the violent occupation of the people by these elites.

SD: There’s also an interesting use of ‘science’ in both cases, which also illuminates the connection between human and earth justice. Hugh Grant is the CEO of Monsanto, which is a science-based company. And in Ferguson, the grand jury decision was defended by ‘scientific evidence.’ [County prosecutor Bob] McCulloch essentially downplayed the witness accounts – provided by people – in favor of ‘scientific evidence.’ In both cases, it’s an elevation of elitist science. This is also a problem of our times, the concept that science is more credible. It limits our political process in some ways; it’s like saying, “Don’t question this, the system is trustworthy – it’s scientific.”

Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir will be performing Monsanto is the Devil on Sundays at Joe’s Pub through 21 December .

