The self-appointed cowboy messiah

This spring, a movie poster began showing up across my social media feeds. It features Sydney Sweeney sporting blue jeans, a leather belt with a large buckle, cowboy boots, and long bangs that frame her serious, determined expression. Behind her, Halsey leans back against an old, orange muscle car as Paul Walter Hauser approaches the passenger door. Sweeney, striding forward through a dozen arrows planted in the ground around her, holds a black pistol in her right hand. The movie is Americana, tagline “Welcome to the New West.”

In Cowboy Apocalypse, religion scholar Rachel Wagner examines this new West—a powerful and prevalent American mythology of a “post-apocalyptic space in which the self-­appointed cowboy messiah sees himself roaming a refreshed frontier, armed to the teeth, defeating evil and protecting his family.”

Wagner names two foundational influences behind this ideology: Christian apocalypticism and American frontier mythology. Together, they provide “a contemporary story that accounts for America’s beginnings and its endings.” In this story, the West is at once an empty, unsettled expanse ready for the taking and a savage land filled with dangerous animals and Indigenous peoples who threaten the settlers’ way of life. Thus, characters like Buffalo Bill and John Wayne are both explorers and heroes, purifying the Wild West of contaminants as they roam the open plains.