Our work is against those who spray the air, water and soil with poisons, poisons for profit. And lots of people are working hard against the same poisoners, and at this point, in late 2025, we are losing the fight for life. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Paris Climate Agreement are down, and Carbon Dioxide is up. At this point we need new ideas. We need to evolve like living beings guided by the Earth.
I have learned something, maybe its not a new idea but the return to one far away…
We have had an unusual experience recently that revealed one possible way to go. Two years ago “Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir” began opening for the ‘love earth tour’. We were opening for Neil Young and Crazy Horse, and then this year in the second phase of the tour his band was the Chrome Hearts. Neil kept rotating the set list, but he sang “Southern Man” is Richmond, Virginia, the capitol of the confederacy. And he sang “Ohio” a few miles from Kent State. And he sang “Be the Rain” again and again, like a hand-off to the Church of Stop Shopping. “Save the planet for another day! Attention shoppers – Buy with a conscience and SAVE!”
Well, our job was to walk out in front of 20,000 people who have no idea who we are. My identity was “not Neil”. We could hear the phrase “Where’s Neil” echoing through the amphitheater or arena or the side of the hill covered with seats. We whipped into our first song as fast as we could with a sound system so powerful a whisper could blow a smirk off a face a half mile away. We had 30 minutes (five songs and lots of preaching) to deliver our Love Earth message, and that included getting the audience to join us in some brutal honesty about those poisoners and the crisis of the Earth that endangers us all.
I’m writing this reflection two weeks into my return to New York. Looking back at our tour with Neil’s caravan is like dreaming of a aircraft carrier full of all the animals of the world. Confronting the middle classes of American with the news of the mass extinction now underway, and trying to be funny and musical with that subject matter – a challenge. Night after night we sang our classics like ARE WE STRANGE ENOUGH TO CHANGE ENOUGH? and I’M FILLED WITH THE FABULOUS UNKNOWN.
I would say about every 7th or 8th person out there would get what we were up to and begin to scream “Earthalujah!” Sometimes there we would be clusters of people that would start jumping together. We witnessed how some very average-seeming folks are harboring strong feelings about the natural world’s fire and flood, heat and drought. But for some of the crowd we stayed too strange for them to change.
And our guide and coach is the Earth, who keeps peeling off those super storms even though most of the human beings refuse to believe that they are in danger, or that the Earth is willing a response to Man with a force that is incomprehensibly powerful. The Earth cultures that we have slaughtered routinely accept the intelligence of the Earth, but we would never…
The unknown storm takes the stage of the world day after day and no-one believes it will blow that hard and then it does. Having respect for the unknown is counter-intuitive for us ‘Western’ people. And the unknown is especially absent from our ideas of politics and social activism. I have come to value taking the role of an unknown ‘fake preacher’ dropped in front of 20,000 people at a time. I am gradually doing what an organism does in the process of evolution. You grow a fin, or a claw, or camouflage – because you are running through mysterious life.
Every 7th or 8th soul in Neil’s audiences recognize what we are saying. They will love the Earth more and more and find a way to stay alive. Earthalujah! To reach the 7th or 8th soul I had to lose my own identity, but Neil lent me his. Or, he protected us with his presence, his history.
We had to sing our hearts out to 20,000 upturned expressionless faces. And we had to find a common ground: We’re all responsible for the poisons, and we’ve been carrying the secret guilt around not knowing what to do about it. But now we will begin to shout and sing and walk out into crowds that don’t know what we want or what they want. We know that we are all hiding the same secret and that we all want to release it and shout and sing all the way to the poisoners. Earthalujah!
Rev. Billy