Patrick Jane Forums | Anthropology & Theology

Christian Hero Stories As the Teaching of Christian Morality
Bernard Pyron

The Christian Hero story has been a way to communicate Christian Morality to earlier generations of Americans.  But the teaching of morality by the Christian hero story began to end by about 1950, and certainly by about 1975.. The Baby Boomer generation and later  generations, born after 1946, were less influenced by the Christian Hero Story than were the Americans born from about 1900 to 1945.

Of course,  Frankfurt School Transformational  Marxist Political Correctness opposes the Christian Hero Story
even more than does the Image Culture. For Marxist political correctness, the Christian Hero Story Formula is a big part of that culture supporting Christianity and the Family which must be abolished in order for Marxist collectivism and totalitarian government to dominate. The Western Cowboy Hero story was in part taken over by the American Culture of Image, from the Hollywood Celebrity Culture before the Cowboy Hero Story finally ended.

Historically, the Christian Hero Story Formula can be seen to have come out of  Geoffrey of Monmouth's work on the King Arthur stories. Then the Arthurian Christian Hero Story Formula may have been more easily translated into the Cowboy Hero Story in part by the influence of the American Cavalier Tradition, for example in.the work of Walter Scott, which supported the Virginia Cavalier Culture.  The more general narrative was the Horseman as Hero.

 Its interesting that the Southern Cavalier strand of Christian Influence upon American and Western culture in the Christian Hero Story was opposed politically and culturally by another American Christian tradition, that of the New England Puritans.

See: https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/144668

"Do Americans have a national epic (like Britain’s Beowulf, Spain’s Don Quixote or Egypt’s Story of Sinuhe)? Do Americans have ancient characters doing heroic deeds, like King Arthur and his Round-Table Knights?"

"But what Americans do have are stories—sometimes more legend than real—about the "Wild West" and the "American Frontier." Some of those stories originated when the nineteenth-century U.S. media spun tales about heroic cowboys fighting-off Indians and animals in the "Old West."

With their reckless individualism, these cowboys drove cattle, braved all kinds of elements and sometimes got into serious trouble. When they did, fearless and heroic lawmen would take them down at high noon on a dirt-covered street in some western town."

The American Cowboy of Myth - and of reality -  came out of the South Texas Cowboy or Gringo Vaquero culture more that out of the California  version of the American adaptation of the large scale Mexican cattle handing tradition. The South Texas Cowboy Culture was spread north, and west by the Texas Trail Drivers.

From 1940 to 1960 one fourth of Hollywood films were Westerns. Many of these Western movies followed in part the formula of the Christian Hero Story, which is seen in some of the King Arthur myths. Yet Hollywood was wrecking the Christian Hero Story in this period.

But in the best days of  the Western Cowboy Hero Story there was always a clear and vigorous opposition to transgressive behavior by a villain and the affirmation of the defeat of that  villain and his  evil behavior by the Cowboy Hero.

The Western narrative became one of the main, most popular myths of the United States
and for this reason Christian morality could be taught to people in our culture by the Western Story Formula.

In addition, in the Western hero story basic Christian morality could be taught to young people in America by this story formula because it made very clear, in great detail what kinds of behavior is immoral. A formula story is one in which which types of evil - or transgressive behavior by villains - is repeated over and over in different settings and situations, and by different villains.. This teaches morality to readers and viewers, especially to children.

The Range War Western Story formula could make readers and viewers clearly aware of the kinds of evil transgressive behavior which could be carried out by community insiders as immoral big ranchers, bankers, politicans or businessmen.

Among Western writers,Ernest Haycox developed the types of transgressive behavior carried out by the insider and respected villains, as in Chaffee of Roaring Horse (1929). Haycox also developed the formula actions and characterizations of the Cowboy Hero in the Range War Western.

There was a Range War Western Story Formula narrative carried out by the Bureau of Land Management in the very real
Range War Western fought between Clive Bundy and his family and the
Bureau of Land Management of the Leftist Obama  Administration. 

The Cowboy Hero in the Western operates within the American Frontier Culture, and he is shaped by that culture.

Two important American historians were  interested in the idea that the American Frontier experience shaped our culture.

Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), professor of History at the University of Wisconsin taught that the American Frontier shaped the American mind and culture. Turner said that the spirit and success of the United States was due to its Western frontier culture. As each generation of pioneers moved farther west, they abandoned European and early American Eastern practices, institutions and ideas, and found new solutions to new problems created by their new environment. Over several generations in the 19th century the frontier changed the European and American Eastern "civilized" urban culture to a rural and small town frontier culture of informality, democracy, initiative, freedom and self-reliance that the world saw as "American." That frontier culture also enforced its right to self defense. There were some real outlaw gunslingers in the Old West, yet the gunslinger figure is exaggerated in fiction.

The cowboy image is a better representation of the character of the Old West frontier on the Great Planes. He carried guns and was capable of using then in self defense, but few cowboys ever fired a gun at another man.

In the fictional Cowboy Story the Cowboy Hero applies  his skills in the use of guns to defeat the villain and the  threat  of the villain to others in society.

Walter Prescott Webb (1888-1963), as a boy lived on what he later defined as the Great Planes, in Eastland county in west central Texas.   In his 1931 book, The Great Planes, Webb described and exalted the culture of the Great Planes. He said that in Texas -and on north to Canada - the 98th meridian marked the division between the wet area to the east, with its forests, from the dry area to the west, which did not get enough rain, and tended to be open planes with few larger trees. The 98th meridian runs through Meridian, Texas, which is in the middle of Basque county. If you draw a line due north from Meridian, it would run west of Tarrant county, or Fort Worth, putting it and Dallas in the "wet" east. A line going due south from Meridian would run through Gonzales county, Texas, which puts San Antonio clearly in Webb's Great Planes West.

Webb pointed out in The Great Planes that the region west of the 98th meridian is different from the land east of it, and that in adapting to this different environment the pioneers of the West had to change their institutions and way of life. One of the ideas of The Great Planes is that the environment itself had an influence upon the culture of Webb's West - the great planes - which emerged from the experiment of Americans adapting to life in the West.

The people of the Great Planes West were "lawless," said Webb, not meaning that they were all outlaws, but that they became unconventional, mavericks and more resourceful by the cultural standards of the civilized East. Webb’s idea that history is "a branch of literature"put him in opposition to the conventional academic historians of the Ivory Towers.

Walter Prescott Webb in The Great Planes (1931) said that the great distances and sparse population of the West encouraged self-reliance. 

Webb  said of the settler and cowboy on the great planes that "When he made that perfect adaptation he departed farther and farther from the conventional pattern of men, and as he diverged from the conventional pattern he became more and more unusual: He made a better copy for news-writers, artist and cartoonist" (The Great Planes, 1931, p. 245).

When the Americans of the 19th century "came out of the woods" they grew out of the culture and personality traits of the more urban and "civilized" East, and grew out of both the Northeast Establishment and the Southern Tradition.

The culture and personality
traits described by Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb,
historians of the frontier and of the great planes, is useful in understanding
the difference between the older American generations and the Baby Boomers.

Walter Prescott Webb left his legacy in the University of Texas at Austin Department of History.  Other native Texan historians, in the Department, like Tuffly Ellis followed Webb's trail blazing.  I was allowed to take an individual graduate level  reading course under Ellis at UT in 1979, `even though I did not have  an academic background in history.  Webb died in a car wreck in 1963.

The Cowboy in the role of the hero who fights for the rights of others and  defeats the bad guys  in  fictional stories is unconventional.  is a maverick, is resourceful and is  self-reliant as a member of that Western Frontier Culture. He was the American Myth for many decades, even in some movies during the fifties, sixties and seventies.

Cast a cold eye On life, on death.  Horseman, pass by." "Under Ben Bulben" by William Butler Yeats


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I am interested in whether or not the Internet search engines are bringing viewers to this sub-forum.

I looked in https://duckduckgo.com/ for ""from the desk of Bernard Pyron" and it brought up:  https://3169.createaforum.com/from-the-desk-of-bernard-pyron/ which is the sub-forum with access to about 20 posts.

Six posts of the 20 have many more views than the other posts:  Christian Hero Stories, 1521, New Collectivism and the Dialectic 1395, Take A Closer Look At Romans 11: 26, 1531`, On Breaking Down The Recent American Generations. 1079, Dispensationalism's View of Galatians 6: 15-16, 952 and The Waco Event, 1496.

New Collectivism and the Dialectic is a little surprising, having 1395 views. I would predict this post would not have that many views because its on  a topic that most do not understand.

From this I do not know for sure whether search engines are bringing viewers to this sub-forum, or the views are almost all from members of the forum.

About 1500 views would probably mean that the search engines are bringing in people to view certain posts on this sub-forum who are not members of this forum.

Your threads do well