Defending the Christianity of The Structure of the Campy Western

The Polarity of Image Bearing Doesn't Appear to be Disposable

Westerns have gotten a bad rap in some progressive EEvangelical discourse lately @kkdumez but there is something deeply Christian in the shape of the Western and the loss of that story shape gets into the decadence of our time @roddreher @DouthatNYT

There's plenty to critique about the campy genre but the real contrast should be James Bond. It appears to be a similar story arc but unlike the generative telos it is a sterile world of eternal recurrence.

.@mbird12 recently wrote a substack on the crisis of Masculinity, and it is in crisis. We are flailing about partly because the old forms have been disrupted by technology since the Industrial Revolution. https://michaelfbird.substack.com/p/the-case-for-post-patriarchal-manhood

What a lot of modern story telling is groping towards is the degree to which men and women are interchangeable... What ISN'T interchangeable is their polarity flowing out of the image of God in Genesis 1.

The crisis of Masculinity follows the crisis of the feminine which is ongoing but sublimated by the substitutionary narrative. See @PageauJonathan

What is happening in cultural story telling is exploration. Can we simply swap female heroes for males? Are we simply interchangeable in story structures? @TheCriticalDri2 has his doubts.

Storytelling is important. It's a way we explore reality through our imaginations. It's a way to let bad stories die so human beings don't have to.

But if satisfaction in storytelling is going to server as a secularish navigational system for those for whom "God is Dead" people are going to have to own up to the realities of structure in this created order.