Cowboy Apocalypse

Religion and the Myth of the Vigilante Messiah

De: Rachel Wagner

Narrado por: Dina Pearlman

In the midst of widespread mass shootings in America, a common motif stands out: the perpetrators of these attacks often view themselves as vigilante saviors, whose job it is to regulate society in a way that exterminates their enemies.

In this critique, Rachel Wagner makes the case that this unfortunate phenomenon is best understood through the idea of the cowboy apocalypse. She shows that across US media, from video games and movies to novels and TV, a story arc has been created that provides a complete myth about the end of the world and the future after that. In these stories, the cowboy messiah is envisioned as a good guy with a gun. But he doesn't save the world. He just saves his world: he protects his family and others he deems worthy while embracing the chance to wipe the global slate clean and start fresh.

Wagner illuminates the links between Christian apocalypticism, American gun culture, and the romanticization of the white male-dominated American frontier, showing how the vigilante has come to be regarded as a savior figure, out to protect the world for white supremacy and patriarchy. She offers ways to respond with other powerful cultural myths, making use of media to tell other stories. Cowboy Apocalypse offers a new means of making sense of how guns shape American life, and how we might engage with them otherwise.

©2025 New York University (P)2025 Tantor Media

This explains something very important about us

[Disclaimer: I know the author of this book. However, I believe this gives greater weight to my review, because I have had more chances than most people to really wrestle with its content. I wasn't always convinced by everything in it. With only trivial exceptions, I very much am now.]

Since this is an audio book review, I should say something about the quality of the narration: Dina Pearlman's reading is solid, clear, and easy to listen to. She lacks the dramatic flair that you'd get in narration of a potboiler, but that's not appropriate to this book.

The book itself needs to be read/heard. It explains something very important about us, "us" being mainly the United States in 2025: How did we become a country that loves the "freedom" of our guns so much that we look away from the regular gun-driven massacres of children? How did we come to love guns and what they stand for, often above everything else?

Cowboy Apocalypse answers forcefully with this: we have ALWAYS been that country, because we have always needed the underlying mythology that drives our fetishization of guns. This myth is primarily the image of the courageous, self-sufficient man, who expertly uses violence to defend the innocent from violent marauders. He is someone who must sometimes act outside of legal or conventional moral frameworks, but he does so only because he has the strength and courage to act for a higher good. In other words, the "good guy with a gun", or, as Wagner calls him, the "Cowboy Messiah".

Her book situates this heroic image in a mythology that is fundamentally apocalyptic, showing the ways in which it has developed and spread through the storytelling media of our time: books, movies, long-form television, immersive video games, public discourse (especially the NRA and their control of those narrative inpolitics), and live action role play events.

I found myself utterly convinced of its answer to the secondary question of why as a culture we treasure and even seem to NEED this myth of a vigilante savior. Namely, it has served for the past 150 years as an alternative to the series of moral injuries we sustained through slavery, genocide of native peoples, and Jim Crow lynchings. It is what allows us to avoid reckoning with that legacy, to paint ourselves -- especially the white, male, and otherwise-privileged among us -- as inheritors of a heroic legacy, instead of the uglier, more complicated truth of who we are. It is what leaves us with no form of reckoning except for the twisted, de-humanizing "souvenirs" with which we sometimes mark atrocity: scalps of murdered Native Americantls, family photographs at lynchings, ears of dead Japanese soldiers, the gun that killed Trayvon Martin. Without real alternatives to this false narrative of our heritage, we won't break free of the apocalyptic myth. Yet those alternatives are there, if we have the courage to hear them.

It's a truly magnificent work, which has the potential to start a conversation that is now a century and half overdue.