Who is the “good guy with the gun”? Professor and chair of IC’s philosophy and religion department, Rachel Wagner has unraveled the roots of the cowboy messiah myth in her latest book, Cowboy Apocalypse: Religion and the Rise of the Vigilante Messiah, published this year by New York University Press. In her book, she asserts that this narrative—spanning video games, movies, novels, and TV—rejects difference, shuts down dialogue, and encourages a postapocalyptic reset.
Wagner joined IC in 2006. Her first book, Godwired: Religion, Ritual, and Virtual Reality, explored the intersection of religion and video games while investigating religious practices in a digital age. During her research, she examined virtual violence and first-person shooter video games. One of the traits she discovered was the concept of video games as apocalypses. During the 10 years she researched and wrote Cowboy Apocalypse— initially focusing on virtual violence and apocalypticism—the theme of the frontier repeatedly emerged. “
In this new version of the frontier story, non-white enemies can again be defeated and the wilderness tamed but only by employing more gun violence,” Wagner wrote in her introduction. “The cowboy apocalypse depends on a self-proclaimed gun-wielding messiah who performs radical salvation with a gun. He doesn’t save the world. He saves his world.”
Wagner observed that we are more connected than ever yet also more at odds, facing issues like climate change, declining fuel reserves, war, and displaced refugees. NYU Press senior editor Jennifer Hammer praised Cowboy Apocalypse for offering “not only new ways of looking at the underpinnings of gun violence in the U.S. but new ways to respond.” Publishers Weekly described the book as “ambitious and wide-ranging,” calling it “a thought-provoking dissection of one of America’s founding stories and its lingering effects.”