The Passion Play and the Seven-Story Jesus

Rising on a hilltop above Eureka Springs is a seven-story statue of Jesus Christ with arms extended wide toward the Ozark horizon. It is called the Christ of the Ozarks, and it was dedicated in nineteen sixty-six at the instigation of Gerald L. K.

Smith, a preacher and political organizer who moved to Eureka Springs in the nineteen sixties with a vision of creating a large-scale Christian cultural center in the Ozarks. Smith's public life was long and controversial. In the nineteen thirties he had been a prominent figure in Louisiana politics, a close ally of Huey Long, before drifting toward a politics that historians have documented as openly anti-Semitic.

The civil rights movement and the mainstream of American political life had largely passed him by when he arrived in Eureka Springs to build his monument. Whatever the complications of his personal history, Smith succeeded in creating something that outlasted him. The Great Passion Play, an outdoor theatrical reenactment of the final days of Jesus performed on a hillside stage with a large cast, opened in nineteen sixty-eight and has been running every season since.

It has drawn millions of visitors over the years and is regularly described as one of the largest outdoor religious dramas in the United States. The Christ of the Ozarks statue and the Passion Play exist today alongside Eureka Springs' equally prominent identity as an arts town and an openly welcoming community. The coexistence of these different energies in one small town makes Eureka Springs one of the more genuinely complicated places in Arkansas.