Yes, I’m aware of the book, highly favored among ex-evangelical readers, whose title says that John Wayne is the problem for modern evangelicals. But ride with me for a bit and consider another take:
These last few weeks, watching things unfold in Caracas and Minnesota, I’ve wondered whether evangelicals need to watch more cowboy movies, or at least pay better attention when they do. In a cowboy movie, when heavily-armed strangers ride into town, kill a bunch of people, and abduct the mayor, people who watch cowboy movies know those heavily-armed strangers aren’t the good guys.
When they show up in the next town and gun down an unarmed woman, people who watch cowboy movies know those strangers aren’t the good guys.
And when they find a man who’s legally armed but never brandishes his weapon, and when a lawfully-armed free man is such a threat that they gun him down too, people who watch cowboy movies know that those strangers aren’t the good guys.
Perhaps there are worse things than cowboy movies.
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