Synopsis: Americans live their lives through institutions:
government, businesses, schools, clubs, and houses of worship. But
many Americans are wary of the control these groups--especially
government and business--exercise over their lives. Flea Market
Jesus provides an up-close look at the rugged individualism of
those trying hardest to separate themselves from institutions: flea
market dealers. Having spent most of his life studying American
religious organizations, Art Farnsley turns his attention to
America's most solitary, and alienated, entrepreneurs. Farnsley
describes an entire subculture of white Midwesterners--working
class, middle class, and poor--gathered together in a uniquely
American celebration of guns and frontier life. In this mix, the
character "Cochise" voices the frustrations of flea market dealers
toward business, politics, and, especially, religion. Part
ethnography, part autobiography, Flea Market Jesus is a story about
alienation, biblical literalism, libertarianism, and deep-seated
religious belief. It is not about the Tea Party, the Occupy
movement, or the Christian Right, but it shines a light on all of
these by highlighting the potent combination of mistrust,
resentment, and personal liberty too often kept in the shadows of
public discourse among educated elites. Endorsements: "Drawing on
extensive participation in flea markets and systematic interviews
with the people who sell their wares there, Arthur Farnsley has
written a vivid and sympathetic portrayal of flea market dealers
and the world they inhabit. But this book is about more than flea
markets. Part memoir and part cultural analysis, Flea Market Jesus
compellingly connects dealers' economic precariousness, religious
beliefs, and alienation to broader currents in American politics
and religion." --Mark Chaves, Duke University "Had anyone else told
me he was going to write an account of American individualism as it
is concocted, practiced, and sometimes sold in a Midwest flea
market that hosts buckskin-clad muzzle-gun shooters and tomahawk
throwing on the side, I would have patted them on the back and beat
a quick retreat. But not Art Farnsley. This has long been a part of
his world. And the result is one of the most personally engaging
and intellectually compelling accounts of individualism since
Thoreau. Farnsley dips into his own marginality to play
interlocutor to the conflicts between anti-individualistic
institutionalism and anti-conformist individuality. After being
introduced to a beguiling range of his lifelong flea market friends
and their composite, Cochise, the book slips up on you like a few
cold beers on a hot summer afternoon." --Jay Demerath, University
of Massachusetts, Amherst Author Biography: Arthur E. Farnsley II
is Research Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana
University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. He is the author of
Southern Baptist Politics (1994); Rising Expectations: Urban
Congregations, Welfare Reform and Civic Life (2003); and Sacred
Circles, Public Squares: The Multicentering of an American City
(2004). His stories have appeared on the cover of Christianity
Today and The Christian Century. He is also twenty-two-time knife
and tomahawk champion of the National Muzzle Loading Rifle
Association.
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