When I was a kid, my Saturday morning entertainment consisted of cartoons (which introduced me to classical music) and cowboy movies. The westerns were rather formulaic—the formula being one or more desperados riding into town to intimidate and harass the townsfolk; the impotency of the local law enforcement and citizens to address the problem; the appearance of a non-local good guy (always in a white hat); the good guy teetering on the brink of failure; and a turn of events in which the good guy wins and the desperados are vanquished. (There was also the oddity that the good guy never lost his hat in a fist-fight—not sure what that was all about). Throw in a heroine or love interest and you have all the ingredients you needed for 99.9% of the westerns. 

These early cowboy shows were, in fact, morality plays. Just as the cartoons attuned me to the Poet and Peasant Overture and the Hungarian Dances, so the westerns sought to reinforce the idea that there was, indeed, evil in the world, but that in the end, good would always overcome evil. I cannot recall a single western in which the “bad guy” won. I suspect that my fragile, pre-pubescent psyche would have recoiled at the thought that evil might, in fact, conquer good.

I was an adult before it registered with me that (a) evil is a persistent and unrelenting force in the world; (b) there are times (more frequent than I care to think about) when no “good guy” in a white hat comes to the rescue; and (c) the disrupters are often (rightly) confident of their ability to intimidate and harass with impunity. My early western-watching days did not adequately prepare me for the world I was to inherit and inhabit. 

There was at least one western, however, that altered the basic formula of the white-hatted hero. It was the 1970 movie, Barquero, starring the ubiquitous cowboy, Lee Van Cleef. This movie had its harassing intimidators, its heroine, its suspenseful near-success of the desperados, and its good conquers evil ending. What it did not have was a deus-ex-machina type hero coming to the rescue. Rather, the hero (or heroes) was the townsfolk banding together as ordinary citizens to resist the intrusion of fear, injustice, and intimidation. When the character played by Van Cleef, a ferry operator providing the only means to cross the border river in the town, refused the demands of the desperados, the townsfolk supported his principled stand and worked with him to confound the bullying of the intruders.

This movie probably did not gain much traction at the box office, but it does seem to me to be a parable for our time. The symptoms of evil are always with us—mean-spiritedness, divisiveness, injustice. And the likelihood of a white-hatted hero riding to our rescue is about the same as evil having a change of heart. That leaves us with choices. We can, like the citizens of most westerns, cower in the perception of powerlessness and capitulate to the demands of injustice. Or we can come together, in small ways and large, to support the principled stands of each other—to bear witness in opposition to those forces that work against Christlikeness. There is no guarantee that our efforts will be successful in thwarting the devices of wrong-doing (evil does have its short-term victories), but our actions are not guided by success—rather, they are guided by faithful adherence to God revealed to us in Jesus. As the writer of the letter to the Ephesians encourages us, remain faithful to your calling as people of God, “so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” 

David Yeager,

Sr. Warden