In traveling the last couple of weeks, I missed the opening of What Would Jesus Buy in New York City so I’m doing a little catch up here.

As the website explains:
What Would Jesus Buy? follows Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir as they go on a cross-country mission to save Christmas from the Shopocalypse: the end of mankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt!

Reverend Billy, his choir and his congregation are very much for real. And, come on, you’ve got to love a guy who does exoricisms at Wal-Mart!!!

The reverend is based in New York and he travels the country preaching about the ills of consumerism. (It is more interesting to spend some time on his website than the movie site if you want to see what he’s all about.) He espouses many of the same ideas that I present in Brands of Faith. Consumerism is encroaching on our lives, that experiences with consumer products have replaced experiences with the divine, and so on.

I’m sorry I didn’t know about Reverend Billy when I wrote the book, but glad that Spurlock is getting him a wider audience. For those in NY, he’s playing this Sunday from 2-4PM at the venue below:

Highline Revival
Highline Ballroom, 431 west 16th street, New York, NY
shake it up with the stopshopping gospel choir and the not buying it band
12$ see venue

And you can thank me afterwards for saving you money on your Xmas shopping.

Just want to draw your attention to some recent press in which I was quoted about media and religion that you might be interested in. One is a piece on how the town of Ave Maria is having a difficult time selling some of their properties.

A second piece will be in the Thursday paper of the Herald News. This is a piece about Robert A. Schuller, the son of the founder of the Crystal Cathedral in California.

Next week, I’ll update my speaking engagements and radio interviews, which are coming more rapidly now that the book is out. Hope to see you at some of these events or that you can take the time to listen in. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

I’ve been traveling a bit so only just heard about the televangelists being investigated by the senate. The AP article outlines that six televangelists, including major names like Creflo Dollar and best-selling author Joyce Meyer, are under scrutiny because of possible questionable financial doings.

These financial issues are very similar to what happened with evangelicals in the 1980s. Money given to the churches were misappropriated and spent on extravagant houses and cars and so on. There is also the question of tax exemption — should these money making organizations be exempt from taxes when the money is not being used for the purposes of the church? Finally, beyond tax exemption, there is the parsonage exemption. Pastors don’t have to pay tax on the house that they live in. Rick Warren (of Purpose Driven Life fame) fought a very hard and very expensive lawsuit to make sure that one stayed on the books. (Much of this information is in Brands of Faith.)

You’ll notice that Rick Warren and Joel Osteen and Bill Hybels are not on the list of organizations being investigated. This is because they have worked vigilantly to stay above board in their financial dealings. I don’t know anything specific about the rights or wrongs of the evangelicals being investigated, because I didn’t do research on them. However, where there’s smoke, I’m willing to bet there is fire.

Last week I attended the conference for the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. I found myself drawn to sessions where critics meet the authors more than individual research papers. (I think it was because they had a number of these sessions this year in a way I hadn’t seen before.)

One session I attended was about Faith in the Halls of Power. In researching this book, D. Michael Lindsay interviewed 360 evangelicals to get a sense of their influence on various segments of our culture including entertainment and politics (Jimmy Carter is one of the many individuals interviewed for this work). In preparation for each interview, the author did a minimum of eight hours of background research. This work is nothing if not thorough.

His major conclusion: while evangelicals have achieved places of power in many realms they are not a singular power that will overwhelm the culture. The main reason for this is that there are simply too many egos involved. (It would be way too easy to make a comment about men here, but I’ll leave that to you instead.) He also discovered that none of them have read the Left Behind books — most interviewees were adamant about this point. I suppose this point gives us some insight into another divide among evangelicals — those that are in positions of power and those that are part of the masses.

The book seemed very interesting, the author was very engaging and this work has been highly reviewed. It’s definitely worth a look-see.