Myths of Violence: How Guns Became Sacred in America

Brad Onishi: This past weekend was one of tragedy. Yesterday we heard the news that Rob Reiner and his wife Michele had been killed in their home. Before that, there was a mass murder on Bondi Beach in Australia at the hand of gunmen. To add to what happened this weekend at Brown University, a shooter attacked the campus, ending the lives of at least two students and injuring many more. It was just another reminder that handheld killing machines are an unregulated menace on our public square, that our children, whether they're in preschool or at Ivy League university, have to live in fear that they may have to shelter in place and run from somebody who's entered their campus with a gun. We learned that several students who were sheltering in place on Brown's campus had survived other mass shootings in the past across the United States, including one Parkland survivor. We live in a country where our kids may be the survivors of multiple mass shootings on their campuses.

Today, I speak with Dr. Rachel Wagner, who's written a book called Cowboy Apocalypse. That is all about the myths that surround guns in American culture. She explains, through Christian Apocalypticism and conspiracy theories, how we got the idea of a cowboy Messiah, a good guy with a gun who can end all the violence and unrest and disorder in our society. The price we might have to pay, of course, is that we live in a society surrounded by people with handheld killing machines at all times.

I'm going to be really honest with you. I recorded this interview with Dr. Wagner a couple of weeks ago, and I wasn't sure when we were going to be able to publish it on the feed. We're always trying to manage content and schedules and this and that, but when I heard the news about what happened at Brown, I couldn't help but think that we have to run this now. We have to talk about how we got a myth in our society that guns are the things that will save us, that somehow the supposed good guy with the gun is the Messiah who will make everything better. It's just not true. We saw in Australia on Bondi Beach that the man who eventually disarmed the gunman was unarmed himself. The idea of a good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun is not what happened.

I personally hate talking about this. I personally don't like thinking about it. I personally don't like the fact that when I dropped my kids off at preschool today, all I could think about was Brown, Parkland, and so many other tragedies in between. But we have to talk about it, and we have to figure out the myths and the stories and the ideals that inform a culture that is more willing to revere guns than their own babies.

So with that in mind, I present to you my interview with Dr. Rachel Wagner, who's professor of religious studies at Ithaca College and has written a great new book called Cowboy Apocalypse. We're heading into the end of the year, and if there's any way you can support us, it would help us tremendously. You can find a donate button in the show notes. You can subscribe for $3.65 a month. We're going to expand this show next year, add more content, more ways to connect, more voices to the mix. Can't wait for that. For now, here's my interview with Rachel.

Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. As I just said, I'm joined today by a first time guest who's written what, for me is a really, really, really helpful book for understanding something that is, unfortunately, in my view, at the very center of American culture, and that is guns, handheld killing machines, as I like to call them. And so I'm joined by a first time guest, and that is Dr. Rachel Wagner from Ithaca College, professor of religious studies, chair of the philosophy and religion department there. Rachel, thanks for being here.

Dr. Rachel Wagner: Oh, I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brad: Here's the book, people. It is called Cowboy Apocalypse, and it is enthralling, if not harrowing, to read as somebody who lives in the United States. The book is called Cowboy Apocalypse, and on page three, you kind of unpack this, I think, in the book, talking about the kinds of ways that a certain kind of apocalypse has already hit the United States in the minds of many folks who are gun lovers, gun owners, gun culture participants, and there's in that Apocalypse a messiah figure who emerges and kind of the cowboy Messiah. So let's just start there. What is the cowboy Apocalypse, and how does this Messiah play into it?

Dr. Wagner: Well, I'm gonna say that I began writing this book being really interested in Apocalypticism in media, but cowboys kept showing up, and I got really annoyed, and I said, Okay, I'll look at what the Cowboys are doing. And then guns kept showing up, and that was equally annoying. I don't want to write about guns. I am, you know, it's not something I had thought a lot about before, except in terms of fear of violence. So the idea of the cowboy Apocalypse emerged over years of looking at this material. But what it boils down to is a sort of story, a narrative, a mythology, if you like, in the American context, that imagines an idealized past. It's usually pictured as the frontier, when pioneers with their guns and cowboys, you know, roamed the wilderness and killed their enemies and they were presumed to be the good guy. Now, history itself does not confirm that reading, but it's a mythology. And so that story really never left us, but it is coming back again with a vengeance right now. And so the apocalypse piece is the more contemporary piece, and that's the idea that the world could end right at any moment.

Brad: So one of the things that modern day men, and they're a lot of men, there's some women, seem to think, is that the apocalypse is now because of things like globalization, the ways that we are so connected, in addition to feminism, in addition to, you know, the ways that there's more and more immigrants in the country, like the apocalypse is now theme is here, is that right?

Dr. Wagner: That's absolutely right. There's that notion of the shit hits the fan, right? They're afraid that there's going to be this sort of radical transformation. And so that is very much an apocalyptic idea. And so the gun comes to play a role in that too, as that which sort of walls off that apocalyptic experience.

Brad: So the gun is the way. You know, if I put together the two pieces nostalgia and apocalypse, there's a sense of this past that was ideal, the frontier, freedom, power, glory, men in control, women knowing their place, absolutely. People of color, black people either out of the picture or knowing their place, or an enemy, and now the whole world is upside down, and every piece of the social order has been toppled. And for many of us, that feels like progress, for the people who are imagining this in the way that you describe in the book, that feels like apocalypse, right?

Dr. Wagner: Absolutely. And so there's this figure that I identify, called the cowboy Messiah. And these stories are almost exclusively white, and they do celebrate masculinity, men's roles in society. And so you imagine the quintessential good guy with a gun, that's actually a micro narrative that points to the larger cowboy Apocalypse as I see it. So the good guy with a gun has a little apocalypse in his hand. He's taking on God's role as the judge of those who are evil. And there's no need to sort of figure things out, have conversations with people, talk about feminism, sort of, you know, critical race theory, all of that stuff is off limits. It's also unnecessary in this story, because it's just presumed that the white guy with the gun knows what's right.

Brad: And so there's a sense here of like, you know, folks who are old enough or have watched these movies, the John Wayne Western, who needs the law, who needs a trial? Who needs a court? Who needs due process? I am just deciding it's time for you to be shot or something else.

Dr. Wagner: So one of the most remarkable things to me is that for many of the men who take on this narrative, I think it betrays a sort of lack of belief that God's going to intervene and God's going to take care of whatever they see as problems in society, that they have to do it themselves, right? And so the Colt right in frontier times was called a peacemaker, and there are still people who use that kind of reasoning today about guns.

Brad: Does this have influence from Christian theology? Is there a Christian End Times motif that is part of this whole puzzle?

Dr. Wagner: I mean, there is, but a lot of the stuff that I look at is very popular culture, and so I feel like I'm sort of looking at one part of the picture, certainly Apocalypticism, certainly the expectation of a messiah who's going to come and judge your enemies, certainly the idea of good versus evil insiders and outsiders. That stuff is just saturating our culture right now in both religious locations and in secular ones, right? So you can see this story of the good guy with the gun killing the bad guys in you know, so many of our video games, so many of our films, books, fandoms, role play games, all of those things. It's all over the place. It has a kind of resonance in that it's a simplification, right? As you were saying, of the complications that exist in a world where we all depend on each other and we know it, and we have to.

Brad: Yeah, that's, I know I'm going to jump ahead here, but to me, just in those first few pages of your book, I think people can gain an understanding of why, when something like Uvalde happens, and people will say from all corners of the country, hey, do you think maybe we should curtail the presence of guns in our society in some way? Right? You know, the NRA and others will come to the fore and say, look, no, right? I don't care how many kids are killed, right? You're not going to take away my means of being the Messiah who will control the order in society. Is that a fair assessment?

Dr. Wagner: I think so. And actually, I think this is really interesting, when you get into some of the stuff that I think that you've been thinking about too, which is Christians interested in Dominionism, right? People who talk about controlling the entire Earth, right? Guns are sort of a symbol of that idea for control, but also the dualism and the battle right between good and evil. So I think the answer would be, of course, we care about the children, but there are demonic forces out there, right? There are evil forces in the more secularized, I guess, form of the cowboy apocalypse. And so we need the guns to protect them, and that's why they want more guns. The more evil, the more guns you need, because that is the way to defeat it.

Brad: So chapter one is really great, because you have these, like, 13 ways of looking at a gun. And I love this, because if people listen to the show, and I recognize most of you out there have not listened to every episode of this show, but whenever I talk about guns, I say, look, a gun is a handheld killing machine. And if you just break it down that way, it starts to make sense that the gun has one function. And you point this out in the book, like, if you have a shovel, can I use a shovel as a weapon? Of course, I have a two year old. Sometimes that two year old's fork is used as a weapon against me. That happens. But you can also use a fork to eat food, right? A gun is used to kill or maim an animal or a human. That's it. And so the third in your chapter, the third way of looking at a gun, is a gun as a symbol. And one of the things that I so appreciated here is that the gun represents different things to different people. It's kind of like the American flag. You know, sometimes when you roll up to a place and there's six big trucks, and they all have an American flag. If you're a white MAGA man, you're like, oh, cool, patriotism, right? My people. And if you're a person of color, if you're a woman, if you're an immigrant, you're like, I'm not safe here, right? Is it kind of the same dynamic with a gun?

Dr. Wagner: Oh, I think that it absolutely can be. I think that people recognize one another, right? If I've got a gun and you've got a gun, then we're like, oh, you know what? We probably share some other beliefs as well. So yeah, I talk about the symbolism there, and a lot of people will say, oh, yeah, a gun, you know, represents masculinity or empowerment, and that's why women can carry them too, because it equalizes things if a woman's got a gun. And I suppose you could say that, but then I think there's also an implicit buy in, right to this good versus evil. You need the gun because bad things might happen, right? And people might attack you. But yeah, also the gun to the parents of the kids at Sandy Hook is horrifying, right? And so, you know, some of those parents are now involved in some quite committed anti gun activism. So the gun has this very powerful role in American consciousness. But I think, and in my book, I'm saying there's also a story that we're telling, right? And this story does have religious implications. It absolutely has apocalyptic implications. And even those of us who don't, and I don't own a gun, who don't own a gun, are not, you know, invested in gun culture. We live in a gun culture, right? And so we have a right to say this is what I think. I don't have to be a master marksman or markswoman, if I can say that, right, to have an opinion about whether I want guns around me every day.

Brad: This is going to be a weird example. Hang with me for a minute. I remember, like 10 years ago, I got—I'm a really bad cook, but I was trying really hard to be a better cook, and I started with my, like, 15 recipes in the slow cooker. And I was telling my colleague, Amanda—Amanda, if you're out there listening—I was telling you about this and how excited I was about my slow cooker and the things I was making in it, and this all sounds like the world's most boring thing. Why are you saying this, Brad? Because to me, the slow cooker was like, this great thing. I was like, hey, in the morning, I put it all in the slow cooker. Eight hours later, we have dinner. Everyone's really happy, right? And Amanda was like, I'm from the Midwest, and I'm a woman. The slow cooker, to me, represents like the thing that I was supposed to be, I was supposed to be, like, a domestic, housebound lady, right? I don't want anything to do with a slow cooker, you know? Get that thing away from me. And that's kind of how, you know, it's a silly example, but that's kind of how I felt when I was reading your work about the gun. There are folks who think of this as like a rite of passage, right? Or this is how I'm going to raise my son. His first gun is a big deal, right? And then there's others who are like, this is the scariest. This symbolizes terror, right?

Dr. Wagner: Absolutely. Yeah. I grew up in Arkansas, so I grew up in the American South. And, you know, in the book, I tell a couple of stories about that, right, going riding in a pickup truck with some guy that I'm dating who I have absolutely nothing in common with, and he's got a gun rack right behind me in the truck. And, you know, kids would drive to school with guns in their vehicles. However, I do think that gun culture has shifted in recent decades. I'm in my 50s, and, you know, in the book, I talk some about how the NRA originally was a gun safety group and that, yeah, and so now, you know, they're much more politically engaged, and they're much more invested in this apocalyptic narrative, and I trace that in the book as well. So even though I look back and I say, oh my gosh, guns were everywhere as a kid, that's absolutely true, but I don't think they symbolize quite the same thing that they symbolize now, in large part because of the globalization, right? That you were talking about the way that we're so tightly connected, and this simplified narrative gives people an easy way out of the hard conversations that we need to have about how to live together.

Brad: Yeah, this is a separate conversation, and we don't have to get into it today, but the NRA, in my memory, transformed during those Obama years. And it's like, you know, if you think about that frontiersman again, the white cowboy, right? And now there's a black man in the White House with a Kenyan father, I might need a gun because the world has lost its mind, and the social order is completely upside down, right?

Dr. Wagner: Well, the gun today has very much become also a symbol of white supremacy, right? So you know, you were interested in the idea of a gun as ritual object and a symbol, and also as this sort of glue that holds a group of people together, right? So if I go to a gun show, I'm finding this group of people, maybe not all of them, but many of whom are gonna see the gun having the same kind of symbolic power, and it's also going to be not completely but predominantly white.

Brad: So the gun is a network, you say later in the book, or later in the chapter. And you know, this is a way to make friends. This is a community. This is an identity. This is a like, you know, me and Ron are going to go down to the gun show and meet up with others and make new friends. And this becomes a culture. I want to stay in the NRA. So gun is ritual object is number five. And let me give you a quote, and I'll let you just respond to this quote. This quote kind of floored me as I read it in your book, page 33. You would get a far better understanding, Warren Cassidy of the NRA says, if you approached us as if you were approaching one of the great religions of the world. So a high ranking official in the NRA is like, no, the NRA and gun culture in general, is more like a religion than anything else. And if you can get that through your thick skulls, you might understand who we are and what we want, right, and owning it, right?

Dr. Wagner: Like, just coming out and say it, like, yeah, this is who we are. This is what we are. My gun ownership identity is so important to me that it's a religion. I'm just gonna say that.

Brad: Yeah. So I teach a lot about, you know, the difficulty of defining religion. I find it endlessly fascinating. And the place where we usually land is that some things work like religion, and it might not be so fruitful to try and decide what belongs and what doesn't, but what we can say is that he is saying it belongs, right? And so then we might say, okay, in what ways does gun culture work like religion? And we've already covered some of those, in terms of, sort of building a sense of community, right? Creating symbols. There are also rituals, right? Like coming of age, initiation type things. And there are other ways too. One of the ways that I'm really interested in is this idea of certainty. It's a kind of fundamentalist impulse, right, which is all over our culture, as well in traditionally religious groups, as well as in groups, you know, like the NRA, where they want to live in a world where the rules are clear, right, where we know who people are, where everyone at least pretends to believe the same thing, right? Where there are insiders and outsiders. And one sense of history that we don't have to do this perspective thing, right, that a certain group of people will tell us how things have unfolded and how they ought to unfold. And we will say, well, absolutely. And they'll say, well, God said so. And we'll say, of course. So I think that desire, that desire for simplicity, also shows up in nostalgia. And religion has plenty of room for nostalgia, this imagination of an ideal past and an idealized future, right? And so especially in so far as the NRA buys in to Apocalypticism, which it absolutely does. This expectation of the future is one in which it might be going to happen eventually, but before that, it's going to be white men unquestionably back in control, with their guns by their side, and everyone doing what they say.

Brad: The good guy with a gun is the answer to everything. And one of the things I've maintained over the years has been, well, when I wake up in the morning, me, Brad, I sometimes feel like I'm a good guy. Sometimes I don't it just, you know, mornings are hard. And I think if you asked people out there, there'd be people that were like, Brad Onishi, yeah, good guy. There's a bunch out there that would probably be like, maybe not sure. And as a parent of young children, sometimes I'm at my best with my kids, and I'm patient and there's moments of like being flustered. Here's what am I driving at? The certainty of being a good or a bad guy is ridiculous. We are all complex people in every hour of our lives. So you know, I think that's why this leads me to a really, you know, dorky theoretical question that I really loved about your book. And folks, if you want to nerd out, get ready. So if you're doing the dishes or driving to work, get ready for the really wonky section here. It seems to me that nostalgia is a certainty about what was, and it makes you feel a sense of relief and not having to deal with the complexities of your society, your community, yourself, right, whatever, right? And then a sort of sense of apocalypse, where you're going to deliver the world from the apocalypse and arrive at the ideal future is also about certainty, because it's like, well, right now we're in the mud, right now we're in the mix, right now it is all a mess, but someday it won't be. Is that fair? That nostalgia and Apocalypse both work to affirm certainty and erase complexity?

Dr. Wagner: I think that nostalgia and Apocalypse both affirm certainty, right? Yes. I absolutely agree with that. And actually, religious scholars talk a lot about, you know, beginnings and endings, right? The Christian story is about things beginning in Genesis and things ending in Revelation, right? And the things that happen at the end of the world are supposed to somehow evoke or remind us of the things that happened at the beginning. But these are all stories that we tell, right? There's stories about how we want to imagine things are, or how we would like to imagine they should be. And so this is, in some ways, a sort of classic religious storytelling, except it's fueled by white supremacy and misogyny, and that's a problem, right? But it has a lot of those earmarks to it. So yeah, certainty is seductive, and I think the more complicated our world gets, the more seductive it becomes. And the gun offers certainty, right? It is meant to kill, not always. I have friends who have guns for self defense, right? Some people do enjoy target practice. I am talking about a very large subset of American gun culture that engages in this. It becomes a symbol of absolutes. It becomes proof of your own good guy status to have it, because you're poised to shoot the bad guys when they show up. And if you've got unrecognized racism going on in there, right, you're going to shoot someone who didn't do anything. They were just there in front of you, and they became the symbol of that which you hate.

Brad: And it begs the question, who do you perceive as the good and bad guys as you walk down the street, and enter a social situation? Who in your mind have you interpreted as a threat, right, or a friend or an enemy? You just said something that really brought to the fore, I think, something that's in the news right now, and we're taping this on December 3, 2025 and we are right in the middle of Pete Hegseth being kind of cornered about what is happening with Venezuela and the attacks on boats and fishermen in the Caribbean, right? And one of the things that has come out about those attacks is that supposedly there were some—reportedly, there were survivors of one of the boat attacks. And Pete Hegseth allegedly gave the order just kill them all, right. And then yesterday, on the news, Greg Gutfeld of Fox, who is prone to saying these things quite often, said, look, it's just better if we kill them. And if they're shark feed, then we know they're dead. And I think, Rachel, you know, when I think about what you just said about guns and certainty, and then those comments from Hegseth and Gutfeld, that's exactly it. They're saying, look, our weapons are guns, right? They're dead. We don't have to deal with courts, trials, process, any of that? No. Does that make sense?

Dr. Wagner: It does make sense because the goodness of their actions was presumed beforehand and reinforced afterward, right? Any use of a weapon for righteous purposes, whether that's a more secularized form of righteousness or not, right, especially if they perceive themselves as acting for God or for some divine force or for some abstract notion of patriotism or goodness, right? Then, yeah, it's already determined that they've done the right thing before they even do it. And it is the same thing with guns. I have a piece you can look it up, called "Trump is a Gun" that I wrote a few months ago, just his mouth, right? That he can say anything and do anything. And so in some ways, he sort of lifted up and used as a prop himself, a sort of gun that can shoot whoever they want to shoot. But fundamentally, I mean, there's a lot more going on, but fundamentally, there is this refusal to engage with the rest of the world, right? One of the ways I look at the gun is as excommunication, which is, I will not engage with you, right? And the bullet is a way of saying, shut up. And if you won't shut up, I will kill you, right? I will not have a conversation with you. And so we've got that story going on in our culture. It's going on in more explicitly religious ways as well, especially in the Dominionist Christian groups. But then we have this other group of people who are like, yeah, let's talk about complexity, right? I want to hear about queer theory. How can that be helpful to me? I want to learn about critical race theory, right? Because that acknowledges our complex embodiments. But of course, they don't want us to have those things. They don't want us to have nuance, right? Because it's easier, and it's not even like a sort of conspiracy thing. It's more like, oh, they're wrong, because the world is very simple. There are good guys and there are bad guys. It's that simple.

Brad: I want to read a little bit from page 214 and I'll embarrass you, because I'm going to read some of your writing. But I think this passage kind of sums this up, and I'm curious to get your thoughts further on it. You say guns are emblems of the cowboy apocalypse. For some Americans, they signify freedom and patriotism. They offer safety and protection. They are a means for the good guy to beat the bad guy and restore equilibrium. What if the guy holding the gun isn't a good guy, but is flustered by old hate in his bones from the legacy of the lost cause? What if the young black man on the other side of the barrel is a teenager eating Skittles? The cowboy apocalypse has force because it grew from a mean history yet to be discarded. And then you bring up George Zimmerman, the man who killed Trayvon Martin. And I was thinking of that example as you were speaking just now about I'm not going to have a conversation with you. I'm going to stand my ground, the Stand Your Ground law, right? And either I shoot or that's the end of this encounter, there will be no dialog or working this out in any way, right?

Dr. Wagner: And what a shame. I mean, I think that that is one of the most beautiful things about being human, is relationship and encounter with one another. And it's nonsense to say that we can move into a fraught future without learning better how to care for one another, a minimum of tolerance, yes, but love and care would be so much better.

Brad: It seems to me democracy is based on endless conversation and dialog, and so the bullet is sort of the antithesis to that, at least in some context, perhaps not everyone. All right, we have to go to maybe the most for me, fascinating chapter, and that is chapter nine, and that is live action role play, real players, real bullets. That's what it's called. And you begin with something that I have talked about endlessly on this show and in my work. And that is January 6, 2021 and the raid on the US Capitol. You talk about the ways that folks who went to J6 were LARPing. They were live action role players. You say that it was a violent parody of fan convergence. They enacted an apocalyptic LARP. So how does seeing January 6 as a kind of live action role play help us understand what happened that day and why people were willing to act in the ways that they did?

Dr. Wagner: Oh my gosh. What a huge question. Yeah, so this chapter came later too. It was one of the last ones I wrote, because January 6 happened, and I said, oh, I have to deal with that. So the book as a whole moves from the least interactive forms of media to the LARP, which I see as the sort of most embodied form of engagement with the cowboy apocalypse, right? It doesn't mean that the others don't have dangers. They absolutely do, and I deal with those in the book, but a LARP, Live Action Role Play, is when a person enters into a game-like environment, they're given certain rules. They're given a role, right? Some people may have lines if they're there to sort of help the thing run, there's, you know, maybe an ending that people are trying to get to. So it has a kind of game-like quality to it. But the platform is real life. You're there in your actual body, in real life. So, you know, people sometimes like, I follow a group that does Wild West reenactments, right? And they go on Saturday in their cowboy clothes, and they shoot their guns, right? And of course the women dress as women supposedly should dress in that time too. So if we think about January 6 that way, then we look, oh my gosh, all of these people were in costumes, right? They had, you know, colorful clothing. They were carrying symbolic flags. They were engaging with various memes, right? Like Pepe the frog, etc. So there was a sort of playful quality to it, and yet there were these deadly serious things happening. And so what I see going on there is maybe even a step beyond a LARP, like a LARP gone real, or suspension of disbelief turned to belief, right? And I think it's really interesting to say, at what point does someone's role play become an identity or something that they claim and own fully, even if just in that moment or in their entire lives? So someone might play cowboy Messiah, right? They might go to the mall and shop with their gun by their side, thinking there might be a shooting, and then they might go on January 6, thinking, oh, I'm a tough guy. I've got my gun as my prop. And then things turn serious, and I can't say how or why they cross that line, but they do. And then the play becomes something with real consequences, and people are so invested in it that they can't distinguish between a game and real life, and then it is very much like religion as well.

Brad: You know, for me, one of the things I've maintained for a long time is that the prayers that people said that day were ways for them to reinforce the story of why they were there. So it was like, yes, you know, God, thank you for bringing patriots to save the country. It was never this suspicion of, like, are we traitors? Are we doing things that are illegal? Are we going to go to jail? Right? It was never that, right? And like, the LARPing thing, plus the religion phenomenon, it really helps explain why people got into this mindset of, like, I'm an upper middle class real estate agent, but I'm gonna get in here and destroy Nancy Pelosi's office or whatever, right?

Dr. Wagner: Because they believed the truth that they were embedded in, right, about the theft of the election. So there's this question, I deal with it a little bit in the book, about which reality, right? And if you're playing a video game, it's possible you could get too immersed in it, but it's on the other side of the screen. VR has greater dangers for that reason, but you can usually tell it's digital, and you can feel all the equipment, right. But when you're playing a LARP, it's harder to tell, right? Which reality is the most fundamental, and I think that's part of the reason that conspiracy theories can be persuasive, because they're possible, right? And religion itself requires this leap of faith, and the less God seems immediately present in our environment, then the more people are going to look for proof or evidence. So I'm thinking about some of the charismatic groups that say things like, well, I declare, right? I declare this, I declare that, and that's a way of sort of manifesting the truth that you want and that you believe, and maybe that you want to believe. And there's that funny line again, so I think it's the same kind of thing to say, I'm in this, and I believe Trump is our Savior, and rooted deep, deep down in there, there's a whole lot of racism going on, right? That's not at the surface. I mean, it's acting on the surface, but it may not be acknowledged, right, as part of that belief system.

Brad: I remember being, you know, an evangelical. I converted to evangelicalism when I was 14, and by 16 I was a really, really, really devoted disciple. I was the star youth group kid, and I really believed Jesus was coming soon. And I'm not making fun of people who believe that. Now what I'm trying to explain is that because I really believed that, I reoriented every aspect of my life, because that, to me, was the reality, even though my surroundings and my society and my school and my parents didn't see that. So I would like, you know, when I was on the basketball team, somebody said, do you want to get a varsity basketball jacket? And I said, why would I do that? It's like $100 I'm going to spend that $100 on Bibles to give to people who've never heard about Jesus. Or, like, do you want to go to college? And for some time, I was like, I'm not going to go to college. I'm just going to be a missionary. Jesus is coming tomorrow, people. Why would I go to college? I don't need a 401K. And why am I bringing all that up? I'm bringing all that up because that was a moment in my very fundamentalist religious experience of making what I thought was reality and imposing it on the surroundings around me. And then, you know, later in my 20s, I was like, I actually don't think this is real, right? And I had to kind of wake up. So again, I'm not making fun of people who are religious, but what I'm trying to say is, I think the LARPing frame helped me understand the idea of imposing a role and a story onto real life and believing that it is actually how that works. I'm not sure if you think that's fair or not, but—

Dr. Wagner: Well, I mean, yeah, belief is a leap, right, in whatever context, right? That's what it is. And people who are invested in and are okay with the fact that they're making a leap. And I don't, you know, I have no problem with that. I mean, it's not my business, right? What other people believe or don't believe, unless those beliefs, right, hurt other people. And so you were talking about Jesus is coming soon. And when I think about January 6, I think change is coming soon, right? Reversion to frontier culture, reversion to white supremacy, is coming real soon now, right? And so they were helping to bring that about. So it does have a quasi-religious structure to it, and it is an element of belief.

Brad: I'm going to read one more page because I think this is just really, really helpful. You say on page 220: LARPs involve the intentional projection of a fictional view of reality and acting in accordance with the projected representation while being aware of its counterfactual nature. When LARPing, we map our mental representation of a fictitious state of affairs onto our concrete surroundings. And I think that, you know, this explanation of J6 but also, and I'll just expand it out, I think it helps me understand why somebody's identity could be so wrapped up in a handheld killing machine that even when kids are massacred and people say, hey, do you think we should change this a little bit? Should we not sell these at Walmart? Should it be harder to get a gun than it is to vote or get a driver's license? They will say, absolutely not, because if you do that, you infringe on the reality and the role they are playing in that reality. And then I think it's the same with Trump, you know, like, one more example. Yesterday, Trump fell asleep at a Cabinet meeting, and I posted a video of it, and I just said he's clearly asleep while Marco Rubio is next to him talking, and some Trump supporters commented on my YouTube video and said, he's not sleeping. He's concentrating. I've seen this many times. He's a very deep thinker. And it was one of those moments where you're like to admit anything outside of the idea that Trump is a Messiah who will save this country would so threaten your identity that your reality would fall apart, right?

Dr. Wagner: Right? Yeah. I have some thoughts on that. I think that's absolutely right. And I think that that is one of the ways that LARPing is helpful in letting us understand that. So I was thinking about this concept called the magic circle. The magic circle is a magic circle of play—games take place inside it. So when you enter into a magic circle, you're agreeing to certain rules, right? You're agreeing to look at the world a certain way while you're there. And so then that gives you a way in which to compare the in-game space and the out-game space, but with pervasive games, with LARPing and with January 6, that line becomes very blurred, right, very fluid. So you're right. You take the rules of the imagined world, which involves, right, Trump fandom, it involves, typically, white supremacy. It involves guns as a symbol of that whole worldview, and they spill over right from social media, from the books you've been reading, they spill over into real life, and then it's hard to tell the difference, right? And you may become committed to those rules in life writ large. But something else that I thought of when you were talking was, I am never and I don't think we ever can be quite sure what people actually believe, right, in religious or secular contexts of this sort, but people may act like they believe. They may perform belief because it does them favors. It helps them out somehow, right? So refusing to admit that Trump is sleeping, is refusing to admit that he's declining, is refusing to admit that their whole project could be in jeopardy and is being run by someone who can't stay awake, right? And so there's an investment. It is a kind of, you know, performative belief. And so it doesn't surprise me that people are going to dig in their heels because of the commitment to the larger narrative and worldview going on behind the scenes.

Brad: You know, there's a lot here. I'll just say that when I left evangelicalism in 2005, many of my colleagues and contemporaries, you know, in the youth group and my Christian college, they were also kind of not sure. And so many of them found really high church traditions to be very attractive. You know, high church Anglicanism, Catholicism, orthodoxy, and I have so many friends and colleagues in those traditions. This is by no means me disparaging those traditions and trying to look down on them. But what I am trying to describe is that I think that for many of us in that moment, the idea that you could go into a liturgical space where you would go to church in a cathedral, rather than in a mega church, like, strip mall kind of set up, or warehouse, like, hey, I'm in a cathedral. The priest is wearing vestments. There is incense. I'm entering a world, a sacred world. I'm entering a world that feels like—and I think in some instances, that's pro-social and it's beautiful, and it shows you the complexity of human belief and interaction, and the worlds we long for, which might be good worlds, worlds, at least from my view, full of justice, full of care. But the attraction there is the magic circle. And don't get me wrong, I think that again, if you're listening friends and you're Episcopalian or a Catholic or something, this is not me just saying, oh, your religion is nothing but make believe. What I'm saying is there's a sense in which the magic circle, the place in which the world feels as it should be—sacred and transcendent—is so seductive, but it can turn into in the worst forms, the kind of LARPing and violence that you discuss in the book as it surrounds guns, right?

Dr. Wagner: Yeah, we all long for community. We all long for narrative, right? We all want to tell stories about the world and what makes it meaningful. That's part of being human, and it can be a quite beautiful thing. I think it's interesting, though. I mean, I don't know the answer to this, so I'll just say I wonder. I wonder to what extent a high church environment, right? Where you walk in the door and you immediately know you're in a church. You've got the stained glass, right? You've got, you know, the beautiful wood, right? And you were talking about costume, so it's really elevated. And then if you enter into, you know, the strip mall church or the mega church that's taking place in a football arena. Does one or the other of those have greater likelihood to get confused with the secular world, right, and its rules or its games or its play? Does that sort of fixedness of architecture and experience, right? And decoration—just like the elevated sense of it—does that in any way provide a protection, because Eliade called what I call the magic circle, he called it the sacred, the sacred and the profane, right? And so some spaces and some games are more insulated from real life than others. If you shoot at orcs, it's probably less damaging than if you shoot at people who you know are—you're told they're from Iran, but they all look identical in the game, because that's how games work, right? So how thick or how thin is that magic circle, or that border between the sacred and the profane?

Brad: That's right. That's so profound, and it really illuminates so much of this. There's this line in the film Dumb Money which is created by the guy who created Succession, and it's about tech bros and this character who's ostensibly a kind of Elon Musk character, at one point, says to another character, hey, do you actually think other people are real? Oh my gosh. And this is the guy who's created something like Facebook or something similar, right? And what he's saying is, and he actually says in the film, I'm not really sure there's actually like 8 billion people. Do you believe that? Because I don't. And it just reminded me of what you just said, of like you start to think of others not as real. They're characters you're shooting at. They're characters that are in a game or in a LARP. They're enemies to be overcome, you know, and that border between the real and the imagined breaks down at some point.

Dr. Wagner: Yeah, and thinking about people who have been victimized as victims of white supremacy, gun aimed at them and assumptions made about their character. And you know, one of the things, one of the reasons, I guess, I wrote the book, was I wrote it mostly for white people, as I say, who should know better, or who should know these things, right? Because 2016 Trump was elected, and I had a black colleague visit my class and she said, yeah, things won't be that different. I know you're upset, but you know, we've been dealing with this for a long time. And I thought, what do I not know yet, right? And I was diving into the book. So the book is about our inability to acknowledge complexity, but to acknowledge, specifically, the complexity of our history of racism and violence. And you know, the fact that we allow these stories to be perpetuated in our media and consume them uncritically is a sign of all of the work that we have to do. We can't deal with guns until we deal with racism. I mean, I would hope we could outlaw them, but there's a root issue that we're ignoring.

Brad: Yeah, and if the bullet is the antithesis to a conversation, what you're saying to the person at the end of the barrel is you're not human enough for me to have a conversation, right? And so I'm not going to do that. And so, yeah. Well, I could keep going here. I could keep asking you questions for three hours. I'm not going to do that. I really learned so much from this book, folks. Cowboy Apocalypse. Here it is, and we can't end—all right. So I totally forgot this is one more reason you should subscribe to our YouTube channel, not just our podcast feed. Rachel, can you show me the game? Oh, yes, the game. So I have never seen this game. This game is called Storm the Capitol: Insurrection in a Box. And it's like a board game. I have no idea what this is. Would you just stick around for like two more minutes and tell us what this is like? Is this—do you play this game if you're like, think J6 was awesome? Is that what it is?

Dr. Wagner: I've had my students play around with it. We haven't done a full play. There's a hostage map, so a little bit like Clue.

Brad: Oh my god. So like the different congressional hostages or potential—

Dr. Wagner: And here's some of the characters. My apologies for the offense.

Brad: Oh my. There's police who are running scared and angry rioters. You can be different characters.

Dr. Wagner: And here's various cards. They're all, you know, equally offensive. I think there may be mirrored—so you can pause if you want to look at some of those. And various weapons, baton, rubber bullets, tear gas. So you play out the game and I have watched my students play some of this. Nobody wants to play the whole game. I mean, why would you? But we can sort of look at how it works, and it's interesting because it doesn't come down on one side or the other. It's like equal opportunity attacks. So I mean, although if you look at the game as a whole, it is suggesting that violence is just play and that I object to, right?

Brad: Got it. Yeah. Okay, you showed me that before we started recording, and I was like, I had to compose myself, because I'd never seen the insurrection in a box board game, which is horrifying, and it's just something altogether. What a time to be alive, as the kids say. All right, people, go buy the book Cowboy Apocalypse. Rachel Wagner, it is out now. Would you mind telling us where people might find you online or other places where they can keep up with any work you're doing, or appearances, or anything like that?

Dr. Wagner: Yeah, I have a blog that is brand new, so it's thoughtsandprayers.earth, so you can go there, and I'm putting some stuff up there. I can also share this coupon. If you want 30% off the book and you go to NYU press, you can get a discount. I'm on Bluesky. I don't do Twitter. It's not good for—it's not good for me, so I don't do it.

Brad: Yeah, not good for anyone who wants to keep their mental health in any way intact. So, all right, friends, as always, thanks for being here. We'll be back Wednesday with It's in the Code. We'll be back Friday with the weekly roundup. Be on the lookout if you're a subscriber for our next live recording and bonus episode, and also my live streams that I'll be doing here in the new year. We appreciate all of you, and thanks for joining us today. We'll catch you next time.