Today’s debates about gun culture in America often feature a character called “the good guy with a gun,” a figure who can save the day by being ready to shoot the bad guys, however they are defined. Rachel Wagner, a religion and philosophy professor at Ithaca College, explores and explodes this idea in her new book, Cowboy Apocalypse: Religion and the Myth of the Vigilante Messiah (NYU, Feb. 2025). The book, says NYU Press senior editor Jennifer Hammer, offers “not only new ways of looking at the underpinnings of gun violence in the U.S., but new ways to respond.” Wagner spoke to PW about the intersections among Christianity, frontier pioneerism, masculinity, power, and gun culture.
What is the cowboy apocalypse?
If you imagine the idealization of the frontier with its celebration of the individual, the “man with a gun,” and you pair it with an apocalyptic expectation of an end to things as they are, the gun becomes a weapon of quasi-divine force, with elements of white supremacy and patriarchy baked into it. The book is the story of what I call a cowboy messiah who, instead of saving the world, saves his world. It’s a response to a kind of panic about diversity, in which the gun becomes a symbol of rejection of difference.
How does this tie in with Christianity?
Apocalypticism offers a ready-made notion of good and evil, insider and outsider, us and them. I think of the passage in Revelation where Jesus has a flaming sword coming out of his mouth. Violence is a means of expressing judgment against those deemed evil. The gun is a sort of proxy mouth. It speaks. I call it a one-key typewriter. Anybody, including Christians, can find such a thing appealing.
How did writing this book influence your thinking about American gun culture?
I needed to confront my own whiteness and place myself within the larger conversation. The gun is not race-neutral—in America, the gun is often about the expression of white power, as it has been throughout America’s history. We all have not just a right but an obligation to have an opinion about the gun debate in America.
Are you confronting the cowboy apocalypse myth with a particular audience in mind?
We have to recognize the affiliation of white supremacy with violence in America. We have to look at our past squarely, at the history of slavery and violence against Black people in America and what happened to Indigenous peoples in the land that was stolen from them. I hope seeing how pervasive this myth is in our culture gives us a better chance of deconstructing the myth and moving forward.
