What supposedly made white American men different from their former British countrymen was that they also had a tinge of “red” and a bit of the “savage” in them. The first symbol of this white American masculinity was not the “cowboy” but the “scout,” the frontiersman who ventured into the wild, learned the ways of the “Indian,” and absorbed a bit of “savagery” in the process.26 The figure of the scout, in other words, was the first heroic embodiment of the individualistic ethos that is at the heart of white Christian nationalism and its holy trinity of freedom, order, and violence.
