Ches McCartney, prophet and goat man

Writing about a world growing more secular, more rational and less religious, O'Connor depicted people with a fervor for faith, a fervor which couldn't find any place in a cleaned-up and sentimentalized society. She wrote that "traditional Protestant bodies of the South are evaporating into secularism and respectability and are being replaced on the grass roots level by all sorts of strange sects."

One of those strange sects, for O'Connor, was McCartney's Free Thinking Christian Mission, in Jeffersonville. [Professor] Copeland says the author looked at the itinerant prophet and felt a kinship, felt like they were both resisting respectability, adhering to a fierce faith.

The professor says she met McCartney, long after he stopped traveling with his signs saying "PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD."

She asked him if he knew O'Connor, but he said he didn't remember.

CSU professor connects Ga author, legendary 'Goat Man.'