In the opening pages of Rachel Wagner’s latest book, Cowboy Apocalypse: Religion and the Myth of the Vigilante Messiah, there is a photo of a bright-eyed—and seemingly armed—toddler grinning up at the camera. The image depicts the author herself at the age of two with a large toy gun tucked in a holster at her waist, a perfect replica of her grandfather’s Colt.
“I'm looking at the camera in defiance as if I know the gun is powerful and it makes me powerful, too,” writes Wagner in her introduction. “But to my eyes looking back, I find the gun horrifying, a sign of how embedded guns are in U.S. culture and how easily guns and toys get mixed up together.”
Rachel Wagner Confronts American Gun Violence in New Book
By Kim Nagy, February 20, 2025
Ithaca College professor’s Cowboy Apocalypse investigates and challenges “good guy with a gun” myth.
Personal photograph of author Rachel Wagner as a child holding a toy gun in a holster. (Photo courtesy of Rachel Wagner)
In Cowboy Apocalypse, Wagner, professor and chair of IC’s Department of Philosophy and Religion, investigates both the horror and the embeddedness not only of guns but especially of the “good guy with a gun” myth in U.S. culture. It is a narrative, she suggests, that is pervasive in video games, movies, novels, and TV shows—and a story that rejects difference, shuts down dialogue, and encourages a postapocalyptic reset.
Wagner observes that, while modern communications mean we are more connected than ever, we’re also more at odds than ever, facing polarizing issues like climate change, declining fuel reserves, war, and displaced refugees. Jennifer Hammer, senior editor of New York University Press, the publisher of the book, praises 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 describes the book as “ambitious and wide-ranging,” calling it “a thought-provoking dissection of one of America’s founding stories and its lingering effects.”
Wagner has spent decades steeped in the study of religion and culture. She traces her interest in religion back to her early years growing up Lutheran in a predominantly Southern Baptist context. “People didn’t know what to do with us. We were Christian but not that kind of Christian.”
Her parents started a local Lutheran church where she grew up in a small town in Arkansas. Every Sunday, between the ages of 10 and 12, she got up at five in the morning and headed to a rented building where her family set up chairs like pews and covered up tables to get ready for the service. “I understood very early on that religious practice was a construct,” observes Wagner. “It is something that people did to make a place feel sacred. So, that's what I do now: I look at the constructs that make something feel special, apart, or sacred, or religious.”
Publishers Weekly describes the book as “a thought-provoking dissection of one of America’s founding stories and its lingering effects.”
Wagner’s first book, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality, explored the ways in which religious practices intersected with video games and other digital media. “I wrote that book actually over the course of several years,” notes Wagner, “and a lot of my research grew out of conversations with students.” As she investigated virtual violence and first-person shooter video games, one of the trails she kept finding and following was the concept of video games as apocalypses. As her research progressed for Cowboy Apocalypse, the frontier kept showing up.
“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 writes 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.” As examples, Wagner points to figures like John Wayne making the town safe—but only for people like John Wayne—or modern-day television shows like Doomsday Preppers and The Walking Dead.
She points out that during the time she wrote her first book, she and her students wrestled with ideas together. But for Cowboy Apocalypse, where her research brought her face-to-face with racist and antisemitic literature, she wanted to be more cautious about what she shared. “I didn’t want students reading toxic materials,” she says. “For all of my readers, I had to be intentional about drawing a point, but not being excessive, in terms of exposure.”
Wagner clarifies that she does not at all believe that everyone who owns a gun is buying into this mythology of a “resurrected frontier.” “There are lots of reasons to have guns,” says Wagner. She contrasts a former belief in collective military action for a greater good, such as serving as a soldier in World War II, with a cowboy apocalypse approach, a self-appointed drive towards vigilante behavior. Significantly, in the cowboy apocalypse framework, gun ownership is “a ritual of difference” and “of defining oneself as good and those who differ from oneself as evil.”
“I call the gun a one-key typewriter in the book,” notes Wagner. “And what it says is, no. It becomes this symbol of refusing connection and refusing communication with people one doesn't want to know.”
Wagner joined Ithaca College in 2006, excited by the opportunity to teach religion in a secular context and equally drawn by the religious diversity of IC’s students, who hold a special place in Wagner’s heart. “I find that our students have a kind of enthusiasm for what matters,” says Wagner. “Our students are socially aware. They want what happens in the classroom to teach them something about what it means to have purpose in the real world.”
In the spring of 2022, when finalizing the manuscript of Cowboy Apocalypse , Wagner invited students into the writing and editing process in a one-credit course: “Those students are named in the acknowledgments because their input prompted some revisions and rearrangements!”
Reconsidering Hope
Looking ahead, Wagner is already working on her next project, a book about hope, inspired by a course she teaches at IC called Reconsidering Hope. In it, she plans to explore the concept of hope with a similar approach to the one she takes for her course.
In the class, she has students listen to interviews with people working on issues like climate change, mass incarceration, and discriminatory policies. They also read excerpts from books written by people addressing these challenges, including Valarie Kaur’s See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy, and Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life. “The class is an interdisciplinary, emergent encounter with the writing of authors engaging with hope and its kin concepts like belonging, joy, wonder, imagination, and love,” Wagner says.
“Use this time to figure out who you are. You can make the world better from any career.”
Rachel Wagner
“I'm a white person writing about whiteness in America, but I'm certainly not the first person to write about these problems,” Wagner says. “So, my hope is that when people finish my book, they'll go read some Afrofuturism, which is about imagining a different world in the future.”
When her students ask what they can do to make the world better, Wagner urges them to lean into their time as a student. “The best thing that you can do is be a student—be the best student you can be. Learn everything you can while you're here. Dive into the texts, wrestle with them, ask your professors hard questions. Just read and read and read. Use this time to figure out who you are. You can make the world better from any career.”
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