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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