AS far as this reporter is concerned, Christmas shopping is the closest one can get to hell on earth.

Dante and his nine circles? Bring ’em on – just don’t make me walk the streets of Midtown (where, as luck would have it, The Post’s offices are located) between the day after Thanksgiving and Dec. 25.

But this year, before being plunged into the pine-scented inferno, I’ve found salvation in a new movie, out Friday: “What Would Jesus Buy?”

Produced by Morgan Spurlock – the guy who scarfed down all those Big Macs in “Super Size Me” – it’s a documentary about a fairly well-known New York character, the Rev. Billy and his “Church of Stop Shopping.”

“Sister Sara!” the Rev. greets me on the phone, sounding like Jim Bakker or Oral Roberts. Only this guy’s divine mission is to “drive the demons out of those cash registers!”

And now he’s here to save my immortal consumer soul.

How, I ask meekly, can I reconcile my loathing for holiday retail mania with that tiny part of me that really covets “Guitar Hero III”?

“You know, Sister Sara, in our hearts we’re all sinners,” he tells me. “I myself have been, like so many televangelists, pulled every which way by dark desires. In our church we’re all sinners. And we all forgive each other.”

Clad in preacher garb – complete with blow-dried pompadour and clip-on white collar – the reverend has been theatrically spreading the anti-shopping gospel for a decade now, racking up a hefty stack of restraining orders along the way. “I’ve been banned from Starbucks worldwide,” he tells me proudly, “which is like winning the Oscar, in my book.”

In “WWJB?,” the Rev. Billy finally takes his crusade nationwide, hitting the road with the Stop Shopping gospel choir and a film crew. He stops at all the major marks – Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Disneyland and the Taj Mahal of American shopping, the Mall of America.

His message?

“The commitment to shopping in our culture has begun to resemble a fundamentalist religion,” he tells me, dropping the preacher drawl for a second. “We are up against a tremendous force. And that’s actually the source of the comedy for people – that it’s so incredible to even suggest, ‘Hey, let’s stop shopping.’ ”

Getting back into his evangelical alter ego, he counsels me to embrace the inner chain store. “The beginning of a successful resistance,” he advises, “is to let your own body and soul create its own entertainment.

“You have inside your soul,” he tells me, “a vast media empire.”