UnderwoodWhatWouldJesusBuy

What Would Jesus Buy?

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this one. This film follows “Reverend Billy” and the Church of Stop Shopping as they crusade against the commercialization of Christmas. It was directed by Rob VanAlkemade, and was released in 2007. In the film, they are on a nationwide tour in the months leading up to Christmas, in an attempt to stop the “Shopocalypse,” also known as massive consumerism, over consumption, and debt, or as “Reverend Billy” puts it, “eternal debt.”

Basically this film draws out a matrix that most of us are familiar with, at least because we all take part in it on a regular basis. This matrix is consumerism. It starts out with views of Black Friday sales, and all the insanity that goes along with it, including people pushing, shoving, stampeding, and even knocking each other over just from the crazy rush of people, with “Reverend Billy” in the middle, yelling at people to stop shopping. The film talks about how, for some reason, we Americans have decided that the only way to be happy is to have tons and tons of material goods. We place value more on material goods than on anything else, including even relationships with other (living!) people. Because of this value of more and more material goods, we value a good bargain. So much so that we don’t care where something came from and how it was made (thus how it is cheaper), but only that we saved money on it. This has led to the astronomical rise of WalMart and similar corporations, because they offer us more for less. But how do they do it? The answer is that they use sweatshops in third world countries to produce their goods, pay their workers in the U.S. minimum wage, and devastate local economies by driving small businesses out of competition, because they simply can’t compete. But we don’t care, we just want our cheap stuff.

Another thing that is contributing to this massive consumerism is advertising, especially advertising to children. Companies spend millions, even billions of dollars advertising to children, because children are highly impressionable, and if companies can get to them early, they’ll probably have a customer for life. Studies show that most kids don’t know the difference between advertisements and entertainment until the age of 8. In some countries, it’s illegal to advertise to kids under the age of 12, which seems like a really good idea, but we don’t have any laws like this in the United States.

There were some parts of this film that I thought were really convincing (mostly because they were so disturbing or ridiculous). One of these was a little girl that I found rather scary. She was talking about how she had a dream that she lived in the mall, and how that would make her so happy if it was real. She then started talking about how it’s important to shop in certain stores, because everyone does. This was mostly disturbing to me because she was so young. I could see a teenager or early 20 year old talking like this, but kids definitely shouldn’t. The film then showed a woman whose dog had an entire closet of its own, which is just ridiculous and a clear example of over consumption. There were also the stories of the employees at these stores, who talked about getting cussed out for not having something, yelled at, spit at, even physically threatened. Why do people do this?

There were also some facts in the film that really stood out. For example, in America, Christmas almost died out after the Revolution, until businessmen realized it was a huge economic opportunity. And now we associate material goods with the symbol of love. Today, ¾ of us view Christmas with more dread than anticipation. About 60% of Americans have $13,000 in credit card debt, which adds up to $2.4 trillion across the nation. We also spend $0.5 trillion on Christmas, and create 5 tons of extra waste. For the first time since the Great Depression, we have an average household savings of less than zero. That’s scary.

Now all of these are really strong facts and arguments, but I think they may have been lessened by the way in which they were presented. Very early on in the movie, I found myself asking “Is this guy for real?” “Reverend Billy” is ridiculous in his performances, they are completely over the top, and I found it hard to take him seriously. I agreed with his message, but I think that had more to do with the parts of the film without him in it. His antics are good for attracting attention, but if he just seems crazy, he may be hurting more than helping. From some of the personal interviews with him you can tell that he’s really passionate about what he’s doing, and that he has some really good knowledge. I think it would be better put to use in some other fashion, some other form of protest.

The film does suggest some important solutions to this problem, namely buying things that are made in the U.S., and buying at places where the money will stay in your community. I do think that it has some educational value in this, but really only for people that are clueless, people that don’t know about sweatshops or the power of WalMart. Maybe everyone that participates in Black Friday should watch it, if only to see how horrible they are.

There are some websites that I think send this message better though. These are [] (an organization trying to strengthen local American economies), [] (against corporations), [|http://www.sweatfree.org] (mostly dedicated to labor rights), and [] (which is about personal debt and has a lot of good facts about how credit card companies can make money off of us without us realizing it). Overall, the film does have an important message. I’m just not sure “Reverend Billy” is choosing the best way to deliver it.