“Law and order” were sacred values in our part of cowboy country. Those cowboy stories didn’t leave much ambiguity about who were the good guys (the white hats) and the bad guys (black hats). [And I’m not even referring to the association of white with good and black with bad – yet.] But in the city where I live today, it’s not always so clear who are the heroes and villians. In today’s paper there was a story about a young man accused of committing a terrible crime. Seems he was also a loving member of a church-going family. Some of the best leaders in our city’s urban churches have stories about their own time “banging” with gangs, or doing time in the local youth detention facility.

In every L’Amour novel I ever read (and I read a bunch), if the hero “did time” it was because he was falsely accused. L’Amour’s heroes were bigger, stronger, and better looking than anyone else – and usually came from a long line of people equally gifted by nature. Social Darwinism – the survival of the fittest – was a strong subplot present in most of the stories. Each book took our hero to the point of desperation, usually because he was badly outnumbered by the bad guys. But eventually he (and it was always a he) triumphed through superior strength and intelligence.

Though he preferred to be alone, the hero would ride into town to save the helpless town-folk from some kind of nasty villain. And then he would quietly leave the corrupting influences of the city to return to his place of solitude. The individualism in western culture came through loud and clear: heroes don’t need other people. They have what it takes on their own.

Certainly individualism is one of the strengths of western culture. For better or worse (and probably a good deal of both) it has become a key undercurrent within contemporary western Christianity. Part of the strength of evangelicalism is its insistence upon each individual having a personal encounter with God. The Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard (a fellow Dane, so I’m genetically predisposed to like him) insisted that the authentic person must be willing to stand naked before God, unafraid to step away from “the herd” (apparently he had been reading cowboy stories, too) to do business directly with the Creator. I have drawn tremendous encouragement from Kierkegaard’s provocation throughout my Christian journey.

Here is my problem, though: It’s hard to get beyond putting a Louis L’Amour overlay on top of the Bible when I read. I keep wanting to make each story into a straightforward battle between good guys and bad guys, in which the good guys win because they are…good! I can’t help but try to find in each story the “moral” about how, if I just imitate those great Bible heroes, I can rise to the top, save those helpless townfolk, and ride off into the sunset… a hero!

The story of Jesus and the experience of the early Christian community evoke something virtually the opposite of the hero of the western novel. God uses the weakness of unlikely and scandalous people, and a community of the forgiven, to accomplish God’s purposes. We are placed within a family of faith called the church, without whom our spirituality is incomplete. The Bible is not primarily a story about heroic individuals. It’s much more interesting than that: a wild and unpredictable tale about what happens to “a people” (plural) when they become part of God’s story.

“My heroes have always been cowboys,” Willie Nelson sang. I’ve got a whole childhood of these images in my head. They captured my imagination, and I’m sure they unconsciously shape the way I read the Bible. I’ll bet you’re glad nothing like that could happen to you!