The European Journal of American Culture published Dr. Mike Piero’s “A Far Cry from Greatness: Christian Fundamentalism, Liberty Porn, and the ‘Good People’ of Trump’s America in Far Cry 5,” in a special issue edited by Dr. Marc A. Ouellette on “Games, American Culture, and the Trump Presidency,” vol. 43, no. 2, 2024, pp. 109-125. Special thanks to Marc Ouellette, John Wills, and Christopher Lloyd for supporting this important piece.

Abstract:
This article offers a close reading of Ubisoft’s Far Cry 5 (FC5) (2018) in the context of apocalyptic rhetorics and evangelical Christian nationalism during the Trump Era. Building upon my previous work with video game chronotopes (2021) and Sören Schoppmeier’s analysis of the retrotopic, ‘nostalgia time’ in the game (2022), I analyse the doubled temporality of nostalgia time and apocalyptic time as deployed spatially in the game in combination with the game’s wanton use of ‘liberty porn’: undisciplined appeals to liberty and freedom through narrative, iconography and cutscene to instil respect and favour for the largely imagined plights of the right-wing inhabitants of the game’s fictional Hope County. Drawing heavily on examples of right-wing violence, attacks on civil rights and Christian fundamentalism during the Trump Era, this article draws concerning parallels between FC5’s rhetorical achievement and Trump’s embrace of white supremacist narratives – like ‘replacement theory’ – and militia groups, fashioning them as ‘good people’, a rhetoric similarly deployed throughout the game. Ultimately, this article argues for more corporate responsibility among game studios when it comes to deploying right-wing narratives and a bolder refutation of such reactionary games by game studies scholars, especially when parodic value is limited or largely absent.