Cowboy Eschatology: Make Eschatology Democratic Again

I. Cowboy Conservatives 

Long after the American frontier was “settled” (colonized), the archetype of the cowboy remained an important figure for those looking to conquer other frontiers. In the 1980s, as conservative evangelicals took a more prominent role in the Republican Party, they repurposed the figure of the cowboy to embody their conservative political values. This remade cowboy, Kristin Du Mez argues, was embodied above all in Ronald Reagan. “Fresh off his California ranch,” Du Mez says, “he looked to be a real cowboy… With his ruddy face, easy manner, and staunch conservatism, he was perfectly cast for his role as hero of the Religious Right” (2020, p. 104). Reagan often referred to “America's eternal frontier spirit,” framing things like space or technology as “new frontiers” (Reagan, 1986: Reagan, 1984). Perhaps most significantly, he brought this cowboy attitude to free market economic reforms that dismantled the New Deal social state. 

The conservative figure of cowboy masculinity propagated a neoliberal conception of democracy.  David Murdoch summarizes this cowboy mythology, saying that “the West was won by individuals. Imbued with a hardiness of spirit, pioneers were forced to rely upon themselves” (2001, p. 2). Whenever they needed to cooperate with one another, cowboys would band together in limited and provisional “democratic” structures. Murdoch says that “pioneers expressed their egalitarianism in creating basic democratic forms of government. Thus democracy was reborn again and again on the frontier” (2001, p. 2). This represented the Republican’s ideal for a new age of American democracy: individualism, hard work, and limited government. 

II. Frontier Eschatology and Agonistic Democracy

The use of cowboy mythology here is not eschatological in the traditional sense of having to do with the “last things”—traditionally death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Instead, it is eschatological in a structural sense of opening up the present to be transformed by another reality. As Catherine Keller points out, eschatology is not just about the “end” but is also about the “edge” or the furthest boundary of something (2021, p. 8). Perhaps we could even say that it is about “frontiers.” The word eschatos gets used in places like Acts 1:8 to talk about the “end of the earth,” itself drawing on the Septuagint’s use of this word in Isaiah 48:20 and 62:11 as “ends of the earth.” 

My presentation argues that the conservative figure of the cowboy is eschatological in a way that is undemocratic. The key animating force of democracy is the creative and productive power of a people (the demos) to collectively constitute their shared life together. The strand of contemporary democratic theory that does the best job of maintaining this priority of the demos is agonistic democracy. The three main ideas in agonistic democracy, as summarized by Marie Paxton, are contestation, contingency, and interdependency (2019, p. 12).

One prominent theorist of agonistic democracy, Chantal Mouffe says that “to institute an order, frontiers need to be drawn and the moment of closure must be faced” (2013, p. 15). But the frontiers and closures do not come from outside politics but are “the result of a political decision.” As we saw earlier, the word eschatos can also mean something like an edge or “frontier.” According to Mouffe, then, every configuration of power in a hegemonic structure rests on some kind of an eschatology. 

But the conservative myth of the cowboy draws on nostalgia to make its picture of rugged individualism a default or a given that bypasses any process of politics. The kind of identity it offers and the accompanying norms and laws it authorizes are not the result of contestation and revision through shared democratic processes. As such, the conservative version of cowboy eschatology is undemocratic as theorized by agonistic democrats.

III. Cowboy Eschatology: Riding the Range

The last section of this presentation articulates an eschatology, following Catherine Keller’s work (2018), in which we participate with God in an ongoing creation of the world. Most of the ways the American cowboy is imagined are historically inaccurate. Cowboys were, if anything, paradigmatic queer figures. To live on the frontier, the cowboy eschewed heteronormative ideals of settling down and raising children, instead living on the move with a close community of chosen family (Packard, 2016). The queer cowboy is on the frontier of norms, riding the range (a version of “cruising”) of expressions of gender, friendship, family, and love (cf. Muñoz, 2009). Around the same time that Republicans were repurposing cowboy mythology for their right-wing projects, others used this alternative figure of the queer cowboy to resist and subvert “Reagan’s straight-shooting cowboy dreams on a queer frontier” (Le Coney, 2009, p. 165). An example of this contestation is the International Gay Rodeo Association (IGRA) creation of an alternative space for queer cowboys (Villanueva, 2024).

The figure of the queer cowboy, not exclusively heterosexual or cisgender, represents a continual eschatological redrawing of frontiers in a way that is open to the contestation, contingency and interdependency required by agonistic democracy. Cowboy eschatology is thereby repurposed as a theological resource for democracy.