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| Photo by Ama Baker |
Rachel Wagner is the author of the new book Cowboy Apocalypse: Religion and the Myth of the Vigilante Messiah. She also has written the book Godwired. She is Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Ithaca College.
Q: What inspired you to write Cowboy Apocalypse, and
how was the book’s title chosen?
A: I’m writing this from Buttermilk Falls Park in
Ithaca, New York. I’ve been living and writing in Ithaca for 20 years now. I
say this as a preemptive salve to Cowboy Apocalypse’s dark nature.
I wrote the book to understand the world as-it-is,
filled with guns and a proclivity to war. But my purpose was to contribute to
the call for something else, for a way of engaging with one another that is not
violent, that understands the interconnectedness of ourselves with nature and
each other. I can hear the water in a nearby creek rushing by, and the bees are
finally out.
My first book was about religion and media (Godwired:
Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality, 2012), and grew out of a desire to
understand my own kid’s fascination with video games.
I had a sense that video games have a ritual quality
to them that was worth exploring, especially since that ritual so often
involves virtual violence. What does it mean to enter into a virtual space in
which your objective is to gesturally shoot other people, over and over again?
Were critics right that video games make people into mass shooters?
When I started reading and writing for Cowboy
Apocalypse, it was over 10 years ago. I started out looking at video games but
found that it was the story some games told that I wanted to understand. And
why were guns so central to that story?
Over time, I began to see the story of many
first-person shooter video games as a story of violent conquest, with the gun
as a sort of little apocalypse and the shooter as a symbolic savior via
violence.
Instead of relying on God to intervene in human
history, as Christian apocalypses do, this story made God a passive observer to
the violence enacted by the shooter.
And then I realized that this story—of the salvific
good guy with a gun—was not just told in video games, but in all sorts of
media, ranging from novels to films to TV shows, and including interactive
modes like video games, larping, and even real-life actions like the raid on
the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
I called this story the cowboy apocalypse, because it
relies on recycled tropes of the myth of the American frontier in presenting a
man with a gun who must protect the world around him by shooting his enemies.
This myth has been around since America’s beginnings,
when it was used to justify attempted genocide of Native American peoples and
to develop the police force that originally was used to terrorize freed slaves
in the 19th century.
The myth lives on in contemporary media where it
justifies the use of gun violence by white men who see themselves as having a
quasi-religious purpose in defeating “evil” with bullets. We can see the story
unfold in shows like The Walking Dead, in video games like the Fallout series,
and in films like The Young Ones.
In the decade it took me to write the book, America’s
reliance on guns as a symbol of “self-reliance” and “freedom” has only
increased. This is a book about what guns mean in the American consciousness,
at least for some people.
Q: The author Gary Laderman said of the book, “It is a
rowdy and illuminating look at a profoundly vibrant mythology in America
centered around guns, cowboys, and the end of the world. Part of its
achievement is the way it ties this mythology to popular cultures, religious
sensibilities, and political realities.” What do you think of that description?
A: I think Gary Laderman’s description is accurate,
and I love the use of the word “rowdy.” The book is rowdy, in its exposure of
how American gun mythology has become enshrined in popular culture in ways that
we don’t even necessarily pay attention to until it is pointed out.
In my research and teaching, I work a lot with
implicit religion, that is, things that work in some ways like religion but
which might not be immediately identified as religion. American gun culture has
this quasi-religious quality to it.
The myth of the frontier, with its fetishization of
the gun as a symbol of “self-reliance,” “freedom,” and “justice,” is played out
in hundreds of ways in American culture, as I show in the book. The myth of the
frontier is so powerful that it has been situated in American popular culture
as a desired destination in the imminent future; that is what makes it
“apocalyptic” in today’s world.
In reality TV shows like Doomsday Preppers, in video
games like The Last of Us, and in novels like Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars, the
future is shown to be a return to the frontier past, and a way of life that
celebrates the man with a gun.
In the book I highlight the strong tendency of these
stories to celebrate whiteness alongside a kind of heightened masculinity and
violence as the core strategy for survival.
The story of a nostalgic frontier past and a
yearned-for post-apocalyptic frontier future can also resonate in the present,
in the here-and-now, as people who wish for a simpler way of life hoard weapons
and bullets as a way of anticipating the future they want.
Not all gun owners buy into the cowboy apocalypse, but
plenty do. In such cases, fandom becomes a form of actual embodied belief and
the gun can become a symbol of the world-to-come.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn
anything that especially surprised you?
A: All of my projects begin with the same set of
questions: “Why is this thing happening? Why are people interacting with it
that way? Is this thing doing religious work?” Or, put more simply: “What is
going on with this thing?”
In the case of Cowboy Apocalypse, I wanted to
understand media violence better. I started with an interest in video game
violence.
I have written
in the past about how video games resemble
apocalypses in some ways, most notably in the idea that the player (like
ancient seers) can be understood as “entering” another world, where rules are
more clearly defined, a Designer can be presumed to have made that world,
and—most critically—where violence is seen as a means to judge one’s enemies.
Just as ancient seers described a vision of the
afterlife in which their foes suffer, so video games offer a “vision” of
another world in which their foes suffer. What’s more, in video games the
player takes on the role of the Punisher themselves, usurping that role from
God.
In Cowboy Apocalypse, I call the gun a “little
apocalypse” in that it represents the person holding it as able to enact
singular judgment upon someone they have deemed “evil.” Accordingly, one can
read the “good guy with a gun” slogan as an apocalyptic narrative in miniature.
As Wayne LaPierre put it, “Only a good guy with a gun can defeat a bad guy with
a gun.”
The world is filled with forces of good and forces of
evil. The good guy saves the world (or at least his world) by violently
defeating evil. This is a story of divine judgment, and it makes the gun holder
into a sort of self-declared messiah figure.
The book unfolded from my interest in video game
violence and took shape as I followed the lead of the gun as symbol.
The blended themes of apocalyptic judgment and
frontier imagery showed up in media ranging from books to television shows to
films to live-action-role-plays (larps) to the raid on the Capitol. It also
shows up in less overt ways in any storytelling that presents a gun-wielding
guy as the means to “save” the world.
I followed the material where it led me and discovered
the core narrative of the cowboy apocalypse sitting squarely right in the
center of American culture, as if it were just a fun story for gamers, or a
quirky reality TV show. But stories have real power, since they can tell us who
we are and how to be in the world.
I found myself led from books like The Turner Diaries
(a 1978 novel that is a violent form of the cowboy apocalypse celebrating
antisemitism, sexism, and racism) to zombie movies like Zombieland (2009) to
mid-20th century school textbooks that celebrate American history as a story of
conquest against presumed “savages” in a wasteland.
Only some people wear cowboy hats and boots as a form
of identity today, and only some of those people would identify with the cowboy
apocalypse as a meaningful myth in their lives; but the gun—it has taken a
foundational place in American self-understanding so basic that we won’t give
it up.
Indeed, to give up the myth of the “good guy with a
gun” is to admit to the horrors of (ongoing) attacks on Native American
peoples, and the way that guns became connected to the policing of Black bodies
in the decades after slavery was abolished.
We cannot face the scariest questions: “What makes a
guy with a gun ‘good?’ What makes a guy with a gun ‘bad?’ Who gets to decide?”
Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book,
and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: This book was very, very hard to write. Reading The
Turner Diaries was incredibly painful, and my copy is littered with hard
scribbles and angry marginalia. I found shockingly racist storytelling in my
own fifth grade history textbook from Arkansas. I learned about a white
supremacist survivalist community operating not far from where I grew up.
I decided early on to take my cue from writers I
admire a lot—like Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison—and write from my own social
position, knowing that this meant I would write as a white person in America.
As bell hooks and others have pointed out, the stories
we tell are not neutral. They come from a particular perspective. So mine does
too.
I wanted to do some of the work that non-white people
have been telling white people we need to do to educate ourselves. I wanted to
write a book that other white people might read to understand how and why we
got to a culture where police can shoot a Black person in their own home and
not be sentenced with murder, and where Native American people can still have
their land and water polluted without consequence.
However, I would like my book to be part of the work
of understanding better, not all of it. I hope that when people finish the
book, they go read Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison and bell hooks. They go read
more about critical race theory (and yes, it absolutely still matters).
They will, I hope, find themselves seeing the cowboy
apocalypse ricocheting around them in popular culture and ask themselves why in
the hell this story gets told over and over again, and what purpose it serves.
I hope it encourages people to see the symbolic and
material role the gun plays in America’s larger mythic consciousness, and that
they question whether or not this is the story we want to tell. We have a
powerful example of a self-proclaimed “good guy” with violent power running our
country right now. Elsewhere I have written
about how he himself is a kind of “gun,” firing at anyone who
questions him.
So I hope the book makes people think. I hope it helps
them understand—and therefore challenge—the role of the gun in American
culture. The gun is not just a tool. Or if it is a tool, it is a tool being
used for ideological purposes to encourage division and an apocalyptic view of
the world.
It shuts down the possibility of real connection, real
conversation, real dialogue as it functions only and always as a threat, a
perimeter, a wall, a boundary.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: As a way of thinking about what we could do instead of worshipping the gun,
I have been teaching, reading, and writing about hope. With my students, I’ve
been reading excerpts of books and essays by scholars considering what hope is,
and how it can help us with the challenges in the world today.
We’ve read biologists, poets, anthropologists,
journalists, naturalists, and religion scholars. We’ve read Indigenous writers,
Black writers, feminist writers, and artists.
Over several years of talking about the material, a
set of what I call “kin concepts” have emerged: imagination, belonging,
uncertainty, storytelling, love, wonder, joy, and repair.
When I talk about hope now, I don’t see it as a
passive thing. Instead, I see it as a perspective and a set of actions. The
perspective of hope is purposefully opening up the array of ways that the
future could turn out, and refusing to be limited by what other people say is
“likely” or even “possible.”
So if we think of how the future is likely to turn
out, we might think of a straight line consisting of what the events of the
present seem to be leading toward. But we can crack that line apart into a wide
opening of possibilities, some which might seem “impossible” but are actually
just really unlikely at the moment.
How do we make those better outcomes more likely? This
is the action part: We do it through love. We envision the world we want, and
we move toward it with love. That is no guarantee that it will happen, but it
does shift our sense of what is possible, and slowly, we make our way toward a
better world.
I’m trying to write this up, with a list of resources
for more reading about hope, so people of goodwill and good hearts can see they
are not alone, and that there are so many people out there doing the work of
trying to make the world better. I have a new blog that I’ll be putting some of
my thoughts on relating to this: thoughtsandprayers.earth
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I poured my heart into this book, and I hope it
finds its way into the hands of people who want to really understand how we got
here, and what guns have to do with the state of things in America right now.
Guns are a symbol—not of freedom or justice—but of the
suppression of America’s history of grave injustice toward non-white people.
Handling guns differently in this country may depend, first of all, on telling
the truth about our violent history.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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