VINTAGE NOT RETRO: The Secondhand Social Life of Christian Material Culture

In this chapter, James S. Bielo demonstrates how material Christianity operates in capitalist exchange. This chapter explores the marketing and sale of Christian material culture through the networked assemblage of estate sales, thrift stores, flea markets, antique booths, auction houses, eBay, and Instagram. The ethnographic focus is on resellers who scavenge secondhand venues in search of donated, discarded, and passed over items. The analysis centers on the categories resellers use and refuse in classifying their inventory: from “kitsch” and “junk” to “treasure,” “collectible,” “curiosity,” “oddity,” “upcycled art,” “vintage,” “antique,” and “retro.” The diverse array of terms and their divergent, inconsistent uses reveal the unregulated, centripetal character of this economic assemblage. In the context of material religion scholarship, this analysis examines the power of classification in a system where meaning and performative function are unfixed and constantly negotiated.