Writing about the politics and spirituality of Midwestern flea market dealers, a social scientist struggled to find a way to immerse readers in the culture of a marginalized people. A talk in front of his Wabash mentors made him realize he needed to put himself back into the story.
You’d know Cochise was once a heavy smoker even if you’d never seen him light up. His face has that blotchy mix of red and gray. His cheeks are hollowed, his eyes slightly yellowed and glassy. And his laugh is a deep, throaty wheeze. People all over Friendship know Cochise is near when they hear his pre-cancerous laugh.
I remember when he was a drunk. He’d tell you so himself. But he promised a judge he’d clean himself up, and he did.
Cochise is one of thousands of flea market dealers who took partial retirement based on disability. He worked many years for a large company with “General” in its name. He did skilled labor: he can assemble, weld, and do minor electrical repair. Because he was injured on the job he was due a settlement. He wound up in court arguing about the amount and conditions. But once he was out, he wasn’t going back…—Flea Market Jesus, pg. 8
Cochise wasn’t supposed to be in my book, Flea Market Jesus; I wasn’t supposed to be there either.
In 2003 when I wrote the grant that would pay me to interview flea market dealers (no, really), I proposed a straightforward sociological study on American individualism with the most individualistic people I could find as subjects. I wanted to understand the religious and political views of people who worked for themselves outside the mainstream marketplace and who did not attend worship—people who described themselves as deeply spiritual, but not religious.
Why did the Louisville Institute give me $47,500 to try this? The fact that I had spent two weeks per year for 20 years in the flea markets of Friendship, Indiana, didn’t hurt. Why had I visited Friendship twice a year for two decades? That’s where we hold the annual championship shoots of the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Asso-ciation.
A black powder Woodstock.
I was only 12 the first time I walked Friendship’s gravel corridors in 1973 with my father and grandfather. I proudly carried a small single-shot .22-caliber rifle called a Stevens favorite, Dad shouldered a 100-year-old double-barreled, muzzle-loading shotgun, and Grandpa held a .39-caliber squirrel rifle converted from flintlock to percussion well before the Civil War. We had the good stuff.
Frustrated looks from inquiring dealers taught us this was not show and tell. In Friendship, a gun making its way down
the aisles is generally for sale. Otherwise, you’re wasting everyone’s time.
I was 23 and a divinity school student at Yale University before I visited Friend-ship again. Dad had been laid off at the power company and was selling regularly in flea markets around Indiana. He and Grandpa had been “setting up” twice a year at Friendship, and Dad bugged me to spend some time with them. So in 1984 I experienced my first full week in one of the flea markets surrounding the “shoot.”
Even after Dad got back on with the utility company, we would return twice a year to Friendship. After all those years of my childhood when Dad hoped guns would forge a bond between us as they had between him and my grandfather, here was a place where they did. So long as neither of us asked ourselves too many questions.—Flea Market Jesus, pg. 17
Though my personal experience added weight to my grant proposal, I’d have scoffed at any hint of autobiography. As a social scientist my job is to minimize the impact of my participation as I observe.
I hoped my familiarity with Friendship would do just that.
And the memoir field is crowded. The past several decades have improved the tools we use to maximize our individual selves. Cellphones, Internet, Netflix, and charter schools make it easier to create customized, boutique networks revolving around our individual choices.
No surprise that our literature celebrates life narratives. Also no surprise we suffer painful nostalgia for a sense of organic community we imagine we ought to have.
But fear not: This is not another heartwarming tale of finding comfort and fulfillment in community renewed, because that’s not how I wound up in my book.
Friendship is a mix of stubborn independence, tired resentment, and a hazy mythology about the past and present. All of this is bound up in America’s large and powerful gun culture. A frontier past, the right to bear arms, Live Free or Die: If you don’t understand these, you don’t understand individualism in America. And if you don’t understand individualism at this level of lived culture, you can’t really understand America.—Flea Market Jesus, pg. 31
In the early drafts, I was merely the omniscient narrator—a role my wife says I play routinely. I conducted roughly 60 interviews, transcribed and sorted through them, determined what themes emerged, and made piles of data that gradually congealed as writing topics. No shock here: This is how one does this.
The basic story of the data was this: Flea market dealers don’t trust big business, but they are capitalist entrepreneurs. They don’t trust government, but they are very patriotic. And they don’t trust churches or pastors, but they have very traditional beliefs about a Christian God and Christ-ian scripture—they are usually literalists about the Bible even though they rarely read it.
But the data report didn’t sing. Its aton-ality bothered me. I had written straightforward data reports before, but this one needed a hook. I’d been drawn to the flea market dealers and their will to make a go of it on their own. I felt called to write this story. But if anyone else was going to care what flea market dealers thought, I was going to have to show them why they should.
In 2006 an idea hit me. Mainstream media was still fretting about the conservative evangelical movement in American culture. Progressives were concerned that the politically visible part of this movement might just be the thin edge of a much-larger wedge. But I knew that my flea market dealers shared almost nothing in common with the highly networked evangelical subculture except Bible beliefs. So fears of a coming groundswell were likely unfounded. There’s a big difference between people who say they “believe” the Bible and people who are likely to become social activists. I knew evangelicals would appreciate this difference.
Sure enough, I sold a story to the evangelical magazine of record, Christianity Today, and they ran it in their 50th Anniversary issue alongside articles by Billy Graham and Mark Noll. To this day, their payment is the most money I’ve received for any of the products stemming from this project. That article was seen by more people than have seen anything else I’ve ever written.
But it wasn’t enough for me.
My ongoing dissatisfaction should have clued me in about my emotional investment in the project. I’m trained to keep my emotions separate from my rational observations.
That was about to change.
In 2007 Wabash Professor Steve Webb ’83 invited me to give the Eric Dean Lecture in Religion, a uniquely unnerving offer. I’d only taken one course from Professor Eric Dean, but he taught me a lot. At the end of that class he had written me a note: “Art, I think you should consider changing your written tone, especially in formal papers. Your friends must find you amusing or else they wouldn’t be your friends, but others are likely to find you boorish and to dismiss your ideas, and you might never be told. So I’m telling you.”
You might think that would have pissed me off. But I am nearly tearing up as I write this, wondering if I’d have the nerve to write that to a student of mine today. Eric felt like he owed it to me to be truthful, and he was a person who took his duty extremely seriously.
Accepting the invitation to present the Dean Lecture, I owed his memory my own best effort.
I also knew that Steve, along with Professors Raymond Williams H’68 and Bill Placher ’70, would be in that room. Their opinions of me meant more than those of all the people who read Christianity Today combined.
So in the end, anxiety made me stop thinking like an academic researcher and start thinking like a speaker about to address a cherished audience. I could not bull past the questions “Why?” or “Who cares?” because if I were a young Wabash man in the audience, that’s what I’d ask me.
The more I thought about the questions they should ask me, the more insightful the questions became. Why did I do this? Why should anyone care?
And that’s how Cochise and I both wound up in my book.
Once I switched from objective data analyst to “located” observer, the explanations came pouring out. Once I removed the enforced distance between myself and my subjects, telling the story was easy.
But I was still very uncomfortable telling it. I was linking a topic on which there is a nearly infinite literature—American individualism—with a specific subject—flea market dealers—on which there was no literature. I was placing myself in the story, using my own experiences to interpret the data. This is not how one does this.
For the Dean Lecture, I simply told the story in the first person. But that wouldn’t do for the book. I needed a way to por-tray the views of the flea market dealers as
fairly as I could.
So I gathered the quotes and voices of all 60 of my subjects into one: Cochise.
There is a real Cochise. That’s what they call him in the flea markets. He calls himself “spiritual but not religious.” I’ve known him nearly 30 years now, he was my first interview subject in this project, and he gave me permission to name the composite character after him.
“My beliefs would probably scare the hell out of them,” Cochise said as we started the interview about his religious views.
“What do you mean?”
“I believe in reincarnation,” Cochise said. “I believe in things from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. If I went to a regular church, they wouldn’t know what to do with me.”
“If you believe so strongly in God, why don’t you want to be part of a community that believes the same?”
“To be honest,” he told me, “I just never have seen a reason to. I’m not sure what they’re preaching is the true meaning of life…Every one of them is sure that what they’re saying and doing is true, but it just doesn’t ring true to me.
“And a bunch of them are hypocrites. You know, I’ll show up one Sunday and they’ll say, ‘Cochise, we missed you. Where have you been?’ And I want to say, ‘Missed me? Dude, where were you when I was in the hospital with hepatitis? Where were you when I needed someone to talk to?’ Missed me, hell. They missed having me put my envelope in the plate.”—Flea Market Jesus, pg. 61
For me—and I hope for the reader—this literary move gave the dealers’ voices the same authenticity I was searching for in my own voice. For every word I put in his mouth, I could ask myself, “Would the real Cochise say this?”
This was a risky strategy. I still don’t consider Flea Market Jesus an academic book. I’m the executive officer of the largest society in the world comprising social scientists who study religion and I didn’t send the book to our own journal for review. I see it as outside the discipline.
But I don’t apologize one bit for the intellectual result. It forced me to come to grips with the reason I do any of this in the first place. Conservative Christianity, conservative politics, gun culture, and libertarian individualism are all part of my personal story.
They always affect what I choose to study and how I approach it.
When I graduated from Wabash and left for Yale Divinity School, I had the hubris to think my analysis would help bridge part of the liberal/conservative divide. I hoped my own fundamentalist, evangelical Christian background would allow me to translate critical, enlightened thinking for other conservatives.
But through the years I’ve come to realize it doesn’t matter which direction the translation went—the underlying reality is that people have different values and ideas. The role of the critical thinker is to take a step back and figure out how these are related. There aren’t all that many original ideas, but sometimes there are original perspectives when old ideas are used to shine a light on new topics.
Lord knows I don’t want to be the guy who says, “Abandon all pretense of objectivity and just write what you feel.” Thinking and writing are, for me, about a steady drumbeat of questions. The disciplined attempt at objectivity is crucial.
But so is the honest realization that each of us decides what is worth thinking about because of who we are. Our prior knowledge and experience determine our ability to understand what we observe, but they also affect the way we report what we see. In this case, being an insider not only helped me tell the story, but ultimately meant I had to be in the story. My participation was part of the process.
It took an invitation to speak in front of the teachers whose opinions mattered most—and let’s be honest, to speak in front of Placher—for me to understand this.
I sometimes wonder what Bill would think of the way Wabash has canonized him. I mean, I couldn’t write 2,000 words here without invoking him multiple times.
But then I think: Bill’s confidence in me helped set my path more than 30 years ago, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. In fact, Bill’s off-hand comment after the Dean lecture—he called my approach “brilliant in its own way”—convinced me to leave myself in the book.
So maybe a little canonization is okay because, now that I think about it, that encouragement is really how Cochise and
I wound up in my book.
There is no presumption here that the poor and poorly educated nurture some secret, naïve truth that we all knew in kindergarten but have subsequently forgotten. But there is a presumption, one that I try to live my life by, that everyone’s story counts the same.—Flea Market Jesus, pg. 14
Speaking Truth in Love
Professor Eric Dean H’61 had a way of transforming young men’s lives.
“Talk about ‘speaking the Truth, in love,’” Rev. John Ohmer ’84 says of Dean’s response to himfollowing “one of my rants against organized religion.”
Dean’s words left him “cut to the core of my heart, mind, and soul— they left me speechless.”
Read the words that changed Ohmer’s life—and how the same professor’s influence led Flea Market Jesus author Art Farnsley to very different conclusions—at the new Wabash Magazine Online: www.wabash.edu/ magazine