What I call the cowboy apocalypse is a fictional trope, seen in movies, video games, and other media. It is drawn from a dark fantasy of the American frontier blended with a desire for return to that frontier environment after an apocalyptic transformation. In the cowboy apocalypse, America’s frontier past is idealized, depicting white gun-toting cowboys, individually meting out justice against enemies, who are depicted as an evil horde demanding what is not theirs. The cowboy apocalypse draws on an earlier idealization of the frontier, which showed up in cowboy novels of the nineteenth century, in old Western films like High Noon, and even in twentieth-century school textbooks, in which Native Americans are depicted as “savages” in need of conquering. But in the cowboy apocalypse, this vision of the past is blended with a vision of the future in a resurgent frontier.
In today’s cowboy apocalypse—as seen in media like the Red Dead Redemption games, the Fallout franchise, and The Walking Dead franchise—enemies can again be defeated, and the wilderness tamed, but only by employing more gun violence. As in the fictional frontier past, the cowboy apocalypse of today depicts salvation in the idiom of armed white men accustomed to being in charge. The past, present, and future are woven together in a quasi-religious myth of what has been, what is now, and what its proponents think should be again. It’s a repackaging of the frontier past, cast into the future, but with more advanced weaponry.
The cowboy apocalypse shows up all over, once you know to look for it. You can find it in books (Pat Robertson’s End of the Age, William Forstchen’s One Second After); videogames (the Fallout franchise, the Red Dead Redemption series), television shows (The Walking Dead, Doomsday Preppers), and movies (Red Dawn, Zombieland). While some people dabble in the cowboy apocalypse for fun, the mediated myth of the cowboy apocalypse can also take on real-life form with potentially violent consequences. This story, enlivened by renewed right-wing control of America’s government, has brought what were once fringe apocalyptic notions to mainstream attention, emboldening some apocalyptic Christians to see themselves and their guns as acting for God.
The gun serves as a sacramental object in the cowboy apocalypse, able to exist at once in the past (as a relic of idealized history); in the present (as a sacred object capable of enacting salvation against enemies); and in the future (as necessary for survival in a transformed world). While most of our belongings would be lost in societal collapse, the gun remains central in the cowboy apocalypse’s imagination of the future. The gun is a symbol of certainty, a kind of materialized absolutism. The cowboy apocalypse promises simplification of complex social problems in the form of conviction in what is right and what is wrong, in beliefs about who deserves to live and who should die. After apocalyptic transformation, white men will again be in charge of their families and their communities. Their guns become proof of their virtue.
I talk about the gun as “a ritualized way of asserting dominance, and a means of imagining oneself tasked with saving the world.” To think of a gun sacramentally is to see it as a link between here and a desired world beyond. For some Christians, bread and wine can work sacramentally, as they actually become the body and blood of their sacrificed messiah, a sign of the alignment of heaven and earth. For others, guns can function as a tangible authentication of mystical beliefs about a desired future in which white supremacy is again unchallenged. To shoot can be to act as Christ, to enact judgment on earth before Christ’s triumphal return. Every gun is a little apocalypse.
The cowboy apocalypse is not just a story; it is a foundational myth concealing deeper grief that has yet to be addressed about the attempted genocide of Native Americans and the history of slavery in America. It has deep roots in racist literature from the nineteenth century, penned by representatives of the Ku Klux Klan, and it shows up still today in racist-inspired portraits of zombie hordes attacking more prepared, more civilized, gun-toting white men. The cowboy apocalypse can be expressed in religious or secular forms. And while I didn’t have a name for it, it has always been a part of my life.
In his book History and Presence, religion scholar Robert Orsi talks about how sacraments like the Eucharist can work as a “capillary of presence” that binds an unbearable present with a wished-for future. He says:
The work that heaven does in culture seems as clear as the work that death does, if for the opposite reasons. Heaven grounds the realness of the otherwise contingent worlds that we humans make for ourselves in the face of the nothingness, chaos, and oblivion…. Our short lives acquire not only purpose but also grandeur and drama when they are set against the horizon of sacred history.
Sacraments are manifestations of an elsewhere and an otherwise within the here and now. They are evidence of things to come, and can be viewed as harbingers of desire. To see the gun as a sacrament is to see violence as fundamentally implicated in America’s future, and as woven inextricably into its past.
A few hours from where I grew up in Arkansas, a white supremacist community called The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) set up a prepper compound in 1971, led by an elder named Kerry Noble. An FBI report from 1982 describes their beliefs: “[T]he United States will suffer a collapse of economy or nuclear war. As a result, there will be chaos, and the panicked masses will roam the country looking for food and protection. Those who are not prepared will be a threat to those who have been preparing…. But, if people come to loot, the CSA will kill them.”
The group stockpiled weapons and supplies and offered military training to residents. They taught survivalism skills like foraging and territorial protection. They also taught “Christian martial arts” and “Christian military truths.” At least once a year, I piled on a school bus with other kids to go to high school football games near the CSA compound, where I’d march with the band at halftime. Less than an hour away at the compound, police found thirty gallons of cyanide, enough to poison an entire town.
In a jaw-dropping interview with Susan Ketchum in 1985, still viewable on YouTube via Ozarks’ History, Noble explains the scriptural basis for his racist and antisemitic views. In his languid Southern drawl, Noble refers to George Hawtin, a twentieth-century prophet in the charismatic Latter Rain movement, a group that has deeply informed the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), an organization now frequently in the news for its connections to the Trump presidency. In a recent article for The Atlantic, Stephanie McCrummum describes NAR beliefs:
[T]hat God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets. That demonic forces can control not only individuals, but entire territories and institutions. That the Church is not so much a place as an active “army of God,” one with a holy mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom as humanity barrels ever deeper into the End Times.
Imperialism is given religious sanction, and the apocalypse is imminent. To object to Christian domination is to expose oneself as demonic.
Noble also sees conquest as a divine imperative. In the 1982 interview, Noble justifies stockpiling guns at the compound by explaining that God has chosen the “white race” to dominate other races: “It’s been part of the heritage of our people for generations and centuries to be a warlike defense people. Our people have been a conquering people. We established new lands. We went through places where no other race could go, conquering whoever was there, whatever was there.” Noble turns selectively, and sometimes inaccurately, to the Bible to cherry-pick verses in support of his views. In the Psalms he finds justification for firearms: “Lord, teach my hands to war, my fingers to fight.” In biblical battle accounts, he finds evidence that God loves violence. “That is God’s nature,” Noble says, “to be defensive and warrior-like and to bear the sword, so to speak. And because we [white people only] are sons and daughters of God, that’s just part of our genetic nature also.”
The racism embedded in Noble’s theology is breathtaking. He says Adam and Eve were white, as were their descendants. This means, for Noble, that the descendants were not Jewish. Jesus, as the descendant of a “ruddy” red-haired David, was white too and not Jewish. The Israelites were all white, and not Jewish at all. In fact, Nobles sees Jews as demonic throughout history. Instead of being descendants of Adam and Eve, they come from the serpent in Eden: “They are the race that has…from the time of Adam persecuted those who are of the spirit…we see Jews as the destroyer race, the Antichrist race upon the earth…who is out to destroy Christianity.” The echoes of George Hawtin are reflected in the Dominionism flaring into the open of his NAR theological descendants today, when they claim a right to rule over other humans due to their own grace-endowed status.
Noble claims he is misunderstood. Being better than other races is not really what white supremacy is all about.” Instead, he says, white people should “have dominion on the earth…[T]he other races are good but that the government is given to us.” Noble then praises Hitler for cleaning up German cities of drugs and crime and denies that gas chambers killed any Jews. Noble agrees with Hawtin’s claim that Black people are not fully human but were decreed by God instead as “beasts of the fields” to be dominated by white people. In a paper describing the “sacred purge” intended by NAR eschatology, Steve Montgomery writes:
[A]ll end-time events will be achieved through the actions of an elite group of Christians. This includes (1) taking dominion politically to establish the kingdom of God on earth (2) becoming perfected Christians often referred to as the “manifest sons of God” and (3) executing the “written judgments of God” through the human agency of the “army of the Lord” in a physical, literal removal of those deemed to be the ungodly.
Such reasoning makes gun-owners potential vessels of God’s will, rooting out evil in the world at-large. Dominionist theology can make shooting people interpretable as a manifestation of God’s will. One’s righteousness is verified not by theology alone, but by one’s willingness to use force.
In 1985, Noble calls Christians to violently enact the cowboy apocalypse by becoming what I call a “cowboy messiah”:
As a Christian…if you see evil…or if you see sin in the world…you’re commissioned to help judge those sins…and so you come to crossroads in your life…[if] I see problems in the educational system or the government or the religious systems or the financial systems of our country, what are my responsibilities as a Christian to see correction in those areas?
Like Latter Rain beliefs, NAR theology leans on the work of seventeenth-century mystic Jane Lead to develop the idea that righteous humans can function as what Montgomery calls the “deified ‘corporate Body of Christ’ prior to the literal, physical, personal return of the individual Jesus Christ.” Christians must judge people on earth before Christ returns.
The attempts at white supremacist control taking place today aren’t new—though they are more frightening for their growing popularity. Apocalyptic fervor has been an integral part of American consciousness for centuries. While it is certainly reflected in the religious justifications of the NAR and Latter Rain groups, it can also be seen in more secular forms all around us. In one of my classes, we recently discussed Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and found its story riddled with biblical references, including the claim that Furiosa is the “Fifth Rider of the Apocalypse” who has come to exercise violent retribution. While her rage is directed against the men who oppressed her, the solution is the same: Kill them all. For some, it is enough to believe that the world is unrecoverably tarnished and needs renewal.
Hawtin, as one of the founding voices of Latter Rain theology, makes violent expectations for the future explicit in Treasures of Truth, when he calls for the righteous to go “through the city and smite.” They should “slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children and women.” Apocalyptic vengeance is required now, in this eschatological moment of anticipation when God’s elect act for God on earth. It would be reassuring to think that the views of someone like Hawtin—writing in the middle of the twentieth century—had faded in time. But they haven’t. Instead, as McCrummum explains, such beliefs are growing, fueled by interpretive schemes that see Donald Trump’s ascendance as a sign of the end times. She quotes evangelical preacher Lance Wallnau as saying: “Buckle up, Buttercup. Because you’re going to be watching a whole new redefinition of what the reformation looks like as Christians engage every sector of society. Christ is not quarantined any longer. We’re going into all the world.” In order for the final judgment to take place, God’s agents will first spread–like kudzu–over the world.
The ideas percolating quietly just a few miles away from where I twirled a baton and marched at the Mountain Home football field have resurfaced again, in a swell of anguish and rage. The cowboy apocalypse may seem entertaining, but it is not just meant to entertain. It is an American ritual of rage and a symptom of denial and disease. America was built on murder and theft, on racism and white supremacy. The cowboy apocalypse offers an alternative myth of redemption, performed by righteous white men with guns. But the cowboy apocalypse is not grounded in the truth of what actually happened. So it is bound, ultimately, to fail. The rising anger of those who feel threatened by making space for LGBTQIA people, non-white people, Muslim people, Jewish people, and disabled people will not erase those people, no matter what theological justifications are attempted. Nor will messianic rage erase those of us who love people in these groups. We are too many. And love is its own moral directive.