Christ of the Ozarks

Fascists, fanatics, and a real-life war on Christmas

It was four days before Christmas, and the vultures were attacking Jesus.

We stood under Christ of the Ozarks as he towered, arms outstretched, over Arkansas. He was white and plain and implacable. Below him stretched a parade of simple, smiling Biblical characters that looked like an overgrown child had drawn and cut them out of gigantic paper. They held a banner that said PEACE ON EARTH, but most of the letters were blocked from view.

Jesus ignored them like he ignored the scavengers circling his head. He lives above the fray: that’s what happens when you are 67 feet tall. Christ of the Ozarks has the polite blank expression of someone pretending not to hear a sales pitch.

I like supersized Jesus. What he lacks in style he makes up for in scale, which is the American way.

Christ of the Ozarks is the tallest Jesus in the USA. He has topped Magnetic Mountain since 1966, looming over the artsy town of Eureka Springs. In 1972, The New York Times quoted a local “longhair” who said Christ of the Ozarks resembled “a milk carton with head and arms.”

The hippie was not wrong. But milk is wholesome and good for you. And Christ of the Ozarks is, technically, the biggest longhair of them all.

We entered the evangelical mega-complex early to beat the crowds, only to find we were the only people there. This complex is where the Great Passion Play, a live production reenacting the final days of Jesus Christ, is held every summer. The play was on hold for a while, but in a manner befitting its subject, had risen from the dead.

“The Devil thought he had killed the Great Passion Play…HE WAS SO WRONG!!!” bragged a brochure clipped to a self-addressed envelope where I could mail a check.

At the entrance, a friendly man asked if we had children in the car. We did, and he excitedly told us to look for a red X near Christ of the Ozarks, because if the children stood there, they would hear something no one else would.

This is the same thing we were told the first time we visited in 2019. Both times we could not find the red X, and felt a little stupid, as it should not be so hard to find things in a shrine to the gargantuan. I also do not know if my children are supposed to have special hearing, like dogs, or if I, too, would be enlightened by the mystery of the red X.

I have convinced myself that this man is a genius who has designed a purposefully futile quest that forces visitors to wander, contemplating the meaning of God and life. But he is the same man who gave us a coupon for Ozark Mountain Ziplines saying we could get 10% off with the code word PASSIONPLAY, so who knows.

Christ of the Ozarks is the main attraction of the area, but it is not the strangest. The sprawling megaplex has recreations of Biblical sites, some of which are fun for kids, like a Noah’s Ark petting zoo full of real animals. There are biking trails with names like “Holy Roller” and “Exodus” and “Vengeance (Downhill Only)”.

There are sites that are less fun, like a Crown of Thorns and a faded Ten Commandments. There are others that are not supposed to be fun but are, like a Biblical well, from which my children slowly crawled out, pretending to be the demonic girl from The Ring, until I told them to stop.

As pilgrims, my family was less than ideal. But when you put a two-million-pound Jesus on a bucolic peak and surround it with items ranging from rare ancient Bibles to Christmas ornaments that can be purchased on the “Decorative Concrete Honor System”, you’re going to get weirdos like us.

*          *          *

Eureka Springs has been a magnet for weirdos, good and bad, since its inception. In addition to being an evangelical hotspot, it is also very gay. Its Victorian streets are decorated with pride flags and rainbow stairways. The evangelical and LGBTQ communities have had a largely peaceful coexistence since the 1960s, resulting in a variety of flamboyant pageants.

The town’s progressive bent has clashed with its religious tourist industry, but folks are used to it. In 2021, local activists draped Christ of the Ozarks with a banner saying “God Bless Abortions” in response to state attacks on reproductive rights. The proprietors of Christ of the Ozarks condemned the sign but enjoyed the free publicity.

Eureka Springs is famous for being haunted, both by both paranormal spirits and real-life sinners, whom I detail in my book They Knew. Every year I visit before Christmas, crashing for a night to break up the drive to my sister’s house in Texas. Every year I emerge disoriented. No street is at a right angle, and its history feels like that too, curling and captivating, pulling you into a dream world underlain by nightmares.

Eureka Springs gained prominence in the 19^th century as a resort town claiming its springs had magical properties, like the ability to cure drug addicts. Town residents, high on cocaine and laudanum, vouched for the claim’s veracity. Then they did things like dip metal in the springs and proclaim they had invented magnets.

In its cruelest form, the belief in magic attracted one of the worst con men of the 1930s: Norman Baker, a Depression-era right-wing radio demagogue who ran a lucrative fake cancer clinic in what is now the Crescent Hotel and hid the corpses of his victims on the grounds.

Every year I gaze at Jesus from the Crescent’s fourth-floor balcony and think of all the murders these mountains saw before the statue was built.

At night, Christ of the Ozarks looks reassuring, a beacon refusing to bow. He has the steadfast stare of an eternal witness.

*          *          *

I had another reason for returning to Christ of the Ozarks. I was bothered by something I saw in 2019, and wanted to make sure I remembered it right.

I have seen so many atrocities in the intervening years that I’ve begun to resent my own memory. It feels like an invader who poses as a guest, one I let enter my mind like a vampire through a window, leaving me drained after every visit. But I’d rather live like that than with lies, so I continue cataloguing the world’s crimes. I’ve got that bad curiosity that some call a conscience.

The last three months had left me reeling from Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians, including over 10,000 children. My sorrow is nothing compared to the anguish of those enduring this horror — people losing limbs and family and homes.

But what I am supposed to feel, according to the American government, is literally nothing.

Like many Americans, I weep from afar and am reprimanded for my grief. I am supposed to be apathetic or bury the most basic moral impulse – horror at child murder -- in abstractions. I will never understand this loss of humanity, in every sense of the word: neither the brutal slaughter of Palestinian civilians nor the cold-blooded defense of it.

I have studied authoritarianism for decades. I started my career examining the cover-up of a massacre of civilians by a dictatorship. But I have never in my own lifetime seen such murderous impunity, such enthusiastic countenance for a regime slaying children, as I do now.

As Christmas approached and the Israeli military destroyed churches along with mosques, as it murdered Palestinian Christians along with Palestinian Muslims, I thought condemnation from Western governments would finally come.

But it did not.

I went to Christ of the Ozarks looking for answers. The complex is full of clues: a moral puzzle, a money trail. I never found the red X, but I did not need to. What better place to contemplate the annihilation of the Holy Land than an ersatz one in Arkansas?

*          *          *

The drive from St. Louis follows the highway parallel to Route 66 before veering onto rural roads near the Arkansas border. This means I am able to track the flags: an incomplete but interesting way to gauge political sentiment.

When I moved to Missouri in 2006, the main flags I would see were American (ubiquitous), Confederate (infrequent but reliable in certain regions), “Don’t Tread on Me” (an Obama-era hit), and a local specialty: the half-American, half-Confederate flag. This absurd amalgamation reflects Missouri’s history. Missouri never decided what side of the Civil War it was on, with the result that it was drenched in blood during the war and overrun by vigilantes after it.

In 2016, some Confederate flags came down amid anti-racist activism. But new ones replaced them. The black and blue police state flag. The Trump 2020 and Trump 2024 flags.

And the one that I saw on the way to Arkansas in 2019: the half-Confederate, half-Israeli flag.

I wish I had taken a picture, but the flag was on the lawn of a home that proclaimed visitors would be shot on sight, and I wasn’t taking chances. I have not seen this flag sold in stores, so I am guessing it is a homemade invention by the kind of folks who do tailoring for the KKK.

In the Ozarks, I have seen homes flying the Confederate and the Israeli flags while not flying the American flag at all, and I am saddened by the sight. I would not be surprised to see the Confederate-Israeli hybrid again in the future, as it represents the worst of all worlds, and shows how much they have in common.

*          *          *

Near the entrance to the Christ of the Ozarks complex is a marble grave surrounded by an iron fence. This is the tomb of Gerald L.K. Smith, a right-wing crusader who moved to Eureka Springs in the 1960s and oversaw the creation of Christ of the Ozarks and the accompanying Holy Land complex.

The statue is his largest legacy, but not his most enduring. Smith was a proud peddler of hate.

“I'm a bad, bad fellow,” Mr. Smith said in 1944. He was running for president that year, under a party whose name he coined himself.

 “I’m the organizer and leader of the America First party,” he continued. “Oh, I’m a rabble‐rouser. Put that down—a rabble‐rouser. God made me a rabble‐rouser . . . of and for the right.”

Gerald Smith hated Jews. He also hated Blacks, communists, immigrants, liberals, and Catholics, but none incurred his wrath more than Jewish people. Before forming America First – the party whose name Donald Trump revived for his campaigns – he founded the Christian Nationalist Crusade to mass distribute Henry Ford’s antisemitic newspaper, The International Jew, from his base in St. Louis.

Smith praised Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan. He called for Black and Jewish Americans to be deported. In the 1950s, he proclaimed that US officials were implicated in a sweeping Jewish plot and that Dwight Eisenhower was unfit for office because he was an undercover “Swedish Jew”.

Smith was open about his tactics, which were lucrative, rendering him a wealthy purveyor of hate speech. He bragged that his organization produced 200,000 pieces of propaganda every day. He confessed his strategies, much as Trump and his accomplices do.

“Religion and patriotism — keep going on that,” Smith advised. “It's the only way you can really get them. Certain nerve centers in the population will begin to twitch and the people will start fomenting…and then a fellow like myself will have the people with him: hook, line, and sinker.

“I'll teach them how to hate!”

Smith died in 1976. The Christian Nationalist Crusade was disbanded a year later. Its tenets live on through the myriad Christian fascist hate groups that infiltrate American politics. Christ of the Ozarks has continued as an evangelical pilgrimage site, and there is no evidence of Smith’s hateful ideology anywhere.

With one exception. The Christian compound created by an American fascist is now backed in part by Israel. And with that backing comes Zionist military propaganda in the middle of a child-friendly area otherwise dedicated to nature and God.

It’s a Biblical tale. Desperate for cash, the guardians of Christ of the Ozarks seem to have made a deal with the devil.

*          *          *

In December 2012, Christ of the Ozarks went dark for the first time since 1967. In October 2012, the Passion Play closed after a 45-year run. The lights went down on Jesus because he was in the midst of foreclosure proceedings following the 2008 economic crash.

Even secular residents of Eureka Springs were shocked. Their beloved milk carton man had faded away. But where locals saw loss, Benjamin Netanyahu and his backers saw opportunity.

*          *          *

It is December 2023, and I am standing inside a bomb shelter to protect me from Hamas. But the shelter is not in Israel. It is in the Christ of the Ozarks complex, across from the concession stand.

The bomb shelter looks like a brutalist porta-potty. It is sorely out of place in this land of whimsical Biblical recreation, and therefore requires a sign explaining its presence.

A billboard tells the tale. “Great Passion Play receives unique donation from Israel,” it says.

Sometime between 2012 and 2015, when the bomb shelter arrived in Arkansas, Great Passion Play CEO Randall Christy went to Israel. He was invited by Earl Cox, a “dear and personal friend” of Christy who also serves as “Benjamin Netanyahu’s ambassador to the evangelical Christian world.”

According to the billboard, in Israel, Christy was introduced to “the owner of the makers of these shelters, Rabbi Bowman, who donated these shelters to our organization.”

The billboard portrays Israelis as under constant siege from Gaza-based Palestinians, and Israel as a land where “ducking for cover” is routine. In a somewhat ham-handed attempt to link the Israeli bunker to Arkansas, Cox notes that it makes a splendid tornado shelter.

This is the object that I had struggled to remember from my 2019 trip, because it seemed too surreal to be true, even for Eureka Springs. I had taken a photo of it but lacked the backstory. There is very little on the internet about the negotiations that brought it to America.

But the lights are back on at Christ of the Ozarks. And unlike my 2019 visit, buildings are plastered with signs promoting organized tours to Israel while, in the gift shop, an audio guide gushes about Israel on a loop.

Gerald Smith’s original vision has come full circle. It is not ironic that Netanyahu’s cohort has partnered with an evangelical organization conceived by an antisemite.

In 2015, Netanyahu defended Hitler, claiming he didn’t mean to exterminate the Jews. In 2007, Netanyahu helped create Breitbart, the right-wing outlet criticized for antisemitism, after inviting journalist Andrew Breitbart to Israel. In 2013, Netanyahu and a multinational Jewish propaganda team created the George Soros demonization myth, the kind of antisemitic propaganda Smith would have loved.

Years later, the propagandists admitted their Soros plan had gotten out of control, with the result that innocent Jewish people worldwide were being targeted with threats of violence. But they did not particularly care. The Zionist agenda trumped all.

Netanyahu routinely works with hard-right evangelicals rooting for the Rapture, an end-times prophecy requiring the return of Jews to Israel. His extremist partners in the Israeli parliament, political heirs to the racist terrorist Meir Kahane, do the same, spouting their own toxic brand of supremacy. The Kahanists are dedicated to what Kahane biographer Shaul Magid calls “militant post-Zionist apocalyptism.”

In other words, there are multiple groups tied to Israel hoping to end the world, and they have the money and the means to do it.

*          *          *

Here are some of the things the Israeli military did around the time I was visiting their bomb shelter in Arkansas:

* Shot to death two Palestinian Christian women, Nahida Anton and her daughter Samar Anton, “in cold blood” while they were walking to a convent

* Bombed the Holy Family Catholic Parish in Gaza so heavily that even the Pope called it terrorism

* Hit the Convent of the Missionaries, which shelters 40 severely disabled children who cannot move, with a rocket

* Prompted the little town of Bethlehem to cancel its Christmas festivities in protest of Israel’s mass murder of children. Bethlehem’s Evangelical Lutheran Church built a nativity scene of Jesus lying in a pile of rubble after watching Gaza’s children crawl out from under collapsed buildings. “[Christmas is] a story of a baby who was born in the most difficult circumstances and the Roman Empire under occupation, who survived the massacre of children himself when he was born. So the connection was natural to us,” Reverend Munther Isaac explained.

* Destroyed some of the world’s most ancient Christian sites, an assault that accelerated in October with the bombing of Gaza’s oldest church, the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Porphyrius, and killed Palestinians sheltering inside, including relatives of former US Congressman Justin Amash

* Prompted worry that Palestinian Christians will be exterminated, though many vowed to stand their ground. “I will not leave the church except to the grave,” said Diana Tarazi, who was sheltering in the Holy Family Church in November. It is not clear if she is in the church or the grave now.

I could go on, or you could read South Africa's 84-page filing alleging genocide.

After these horrific actions, the US government pledged Israel billions of dollars.

I have long stopped expecting my government to express concern for Palestinian Muslims. For my entire life until the invention of smartphones, the US government and media portrayed them as terrorists and little else.

It was not until Palestinians were able to relay their own plight through social media that Westerners gained greater understanding. Suddenly, millions had access to the daily lives of Palestinians: families, children, teachers, all struggling to survive an apartheid state that had turned Gaza into an open-air prison. We heard from Palestinian poets, philosophers, peace activists.

And now we log on to our devices and watch them die.

I was naïve to think that the US government would care any more about the plight of Palestinian Christians than they do Palestinian Muslims or, for that matter, Jews whose own safety has been threatened by Israel’s actions. None of this has anything to do with God. As was the case with Gerald Smith and his crusade, this is a matter of politics. A matter of power.

That is why empathy is so threatening, as it crushes the lying logic of this equation. It unbalances it by giving equal weight to Palestinians as human beings.

I stepped outside and looked at Christ of the Ozarks. His back was turned against the bomb shelter.

The vultures were circling him again.

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A local longhair

The entrance to the Noah’s Ark petting zoo

A big fan of Jesus!