The elevation of Magnetic Mountain can’t compete with the Brazilian peak of Corcovado at Rio de Janiero, and its 67-foot statue is not as tall as the Cristo Redentor that clearly inspired it.
Still, Christ of the Ozarks represents an inescapable fact: Jesus is big in Arkansas.
Arkansans are more likely to be identified with a religious organization than the average American, and those that do are exceedingly likely to be identified with an evangelical Christian denomination. Other major religions are certainly represented among Arkansas’ 2.9 million residents, but all the Jews and Muslims claimed by synagogues and mosques in Arkansas combined would be outnumbered 2-to-1 by the Sunday morning crowd at First Baptist Church of Springdale.
According to the American Religious Data Archives, maintained by Penn State University under a grant from the Lilly Foundation, Arkansas has the 17th highest rate of religious “adherence” among the 50 U.S. states. In 2000, an average of 571 out of every 1,000 Arkansas residents is either a member or a regular attendee of an organized religious group in Arkansas.
Of those 571 adherents, about 431 were claimed by “evangelical” groups — including Southern Baptist and other Baptist subsets, Pentecostal and Assembly of God congregations, Churches of Christ, Cumberland Presbyterian and a host of other denominations — giving Arkansas the single highest concentration of evangelical Christians in the country. The Southern Baptist Convention alone counted 665,000 Arkansas adherents, a quarter of the state’s population.
By contrast, Arkansas’ “mainline” Protestant denominations — Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian Church U.S.A. and the Disciples of Christ — claimed 88 of every 1,000 Arkansans. Catholic churches laid claim to about 43 of every 1,000 Arkansans — lower than all but five other states (slightly lower even than Utah).
All told, according to ARDA stats, there are some 5,900 religious congregations in the state — one for every 450 residents and one for every 260 adherents. The 2000 Census found 7,235 Arkansans whose primary occupation was religious in nature — clergy, religious education directors, church workers and the like. (There were 5,640 bankers and only 675 print journalists.)
All that evangelical Christianity can’t help spilling over into almost every facet of daily life in Arkansas.
“The first thing every newcomer who comes to Arkansas is asked by someone who has learned of his recent arrival is, ‘Where do you go to church?’ — asked with a gleam in the eye,” said Michael Dougan, a historian and history professor at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro.
Most Arkansas counties — 43 of 75 — are “dry,” a condition unheard of in many other states. Even the wet counties limit Sunday alcohol sales to restaurants. (Only in Eureka Springs are liquor stores allowed to open on Sundays.)
Many schoolteachers forego assigning homework on Wednesdays since a sizable percentage of their students will presumably be attending mid-week church services. Our governor is a former Baptist preacher, and the religious affiliation of our legislators — most of them, anyway — is listed on the Arkansas General Assembly’s Web site. That’s not the case in, say, New York or California.
The state doesn’t operate a lottery, a revenue source that has become virtually ubiquitous outside its borders, although recent opinion polls have found waning resistance to the idea. Attempts to expand legalized gambling beyond the current constitutional limits of Oaklawn Park at Hot Springs and Southland Greyhound Park at West Memphis have met with overwhelming opposition fronted by religious organizations (and bankrolled by out-of-state gambling operators).
The state’s discomfort with gambling is inextricably linked with its religious culture, as the University of Arkansas’ 2000 Arkansas Poll disclosed. More than three-quarters of the respondents who said they went to church more than once a week opposed an amendment expanding legalized gambling, compared with 27 percent of those who said they didn’t attend church at all.
Church building projects routinely show up on lists of the largest construction projects around the state, and a handful have crept up into eight digits. The priciest single church construction project, Immanuel Baptist Church’s west Little Rock replacement for its century-old downtown location, opened just before Christmas after a $32 million investment (more than $10,000 per member).
To Dougan, First Pentecostal Church beside Interstate 40 in North Little Rock, which in 2002 opened a second, $9 million sanctuary with a steeple that towers nearly 200 feet, is an even more remarkable statement on evangelical Christianity in Arkansas.
“A hundred years ago those people were called Holy Rollers and met in basements. Now they’ve climbed into the land of Hummers,” he said.
In the News
Arkansas’ religious culture has garnered occasional national attention, both positive and negative.
In 1981, the Arkansas Legislature adopted a law requiring schools that taught evolution to also teach “creation science.” After a nine-day trial that drew comparisons to the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial” in Tennessee, U.S. District Judge William R. Overton ruled the law was an unconstitutional violation of the constitutional requirement of separation of church and state.
In 2001, the Arkansas Baptist State Convention voted to denounce the wildly popular “Harry Potter” series of children’s novels about the adventures of a boy wizard.
The state has also been recognized from without as one of the most generous.
Despite having one of the lowest per-capita income levels, Arkansas has been repeatedly recognized as having one of the highest rates of charitable giving in the country — a measurement buoyed by much higher than average church contributions.
For the past three years, Boston-based Catalogue for Philanthropy has ranked Arkansas No. 2, behind Mississippi, on a “Generosity Index” that compares average income with the average charitable contributions reported by residents who itemize their federal income tax deductions.
Agricultural Roots
Why Arkansas should have the highest concentration of evangelical Christians in the country is not clear, but Dougan said part of the explanation could be the collapse of the agrarian economy that deprived Arkansas of a more prominent Jewish population.
In the first half of the 20th century, he said, “two-thirds of Main Street in the Delta was Jewish.”
Jews in Arkansas were “overwhelmingly professional,” he said, “merchants, bankers, doctors, lawyers.”
But tractors don’t buy goods and services, and automation gradually eliminated 80 percent of the ag-related jobs in the Arkansas Delta. Jewish children were educated “to leave the state,” Dougan said. “And, of course, Judaism is not an evangelical religion.”
Many Christians left the Delta, too, but those who stayed often did so because of their ties to family and community — “and that includes churches,” he said.
As a result — and contrary to popular belief — the highest rates of religious adherence in Arkansas and the highest concentrations of evangelical Christians are not in northwest Arkansas. Instead, they tend to be in the state’s rural south and east — Dallas, Grant, Ashley and Cross counties in particular.
In fact, the ARDA’s statistics indicate that, of the state’s 75 counties, booming Benton and Washington counties in extreme northwest Arkansas rank No. 59 and 68 in concentration of evangelicals per 1,000 population. Pulaski County is No. 60, and Garland County — home of Oaklawn — is 53rd.
“Northwest Arkansas’ deserved reputation (for evangelical Christians) may not be statistical, but just compare the per-capita income and power of those evangelicals to those of Dallas County,” said Dougan, a Methodist.
Indeed, evangelical Christianity, particularly the Southern Baptist denomination, has become closely identified with conservative, Republican politics — not just in northwest Arkansas, and not just because Mike Huckabee made the leap from the pulpit to the Governor’s Mansion.
So how to explain the fact that Republican politics have not become as dominant in Arkansas as in neighboring states with somewhat lower concentrations of evangelicals?
“It will happen,” Dougan said. “We’re just slower than everyone else. That’s the history of Arkansas: Whatever the trend is, we’re 25 years behind everyone else. Give it 15 more years.”
Christ in the Ozarks
The intersection of religion and politics brings us back to Christ of the Ozarks.
Few of the half-million people who stop to pray or meditate or merely gawk each year know that its financial backer was a fiery Disciples of Christ evangelist and political activist of the Depression Era named Gerald L.K. Smith.
A close associate of Louisiana Gov. Huey P. Long, Smith was an outspoken proponent of wealth redistribution and, in particular, the new Social Security system. Journalist H.L. Mencken called Smith “the greatest orator of them all. Not the greatest by an inch or a foot or a mile. But greatest by at least two light-years.”
This excerpt from one of Smith’s “Share the Wealth” sermons is included in the official government history of Social Security, and it’s enough to give pause to Christian Republicans in northwest Arkansas who have assumed a spiritual kinship with the philanthropist who brought Christ of the Ozarks to Carroll County:
“Let’s pull down these huge piles of gold until there shall be a real job, not a little old sow-belly, black-eyed pea job but a real spending money, beefsteak and gravy, Chevrolet, Ford in the garage, new suit, Thomas Jefferson, Jesus Christ, red, white and blue job for every man!. . . Lift us out of this wretchedness, O Lord, out of this poverty, lift us who stand in slavery tonight. Rally us under this young man who came out of the woods of north Louisiana, who leads us like a Moses out of the land of bondage into the land of milk and honey where every man is a king but no man wears a crown. Amen.”
Even more radical were what the Social Security history delicately calls Smith’s “alleged fascist sympathies” and what Glen Jeansonne’s 1997 biography, “Minister of Hate,” described as unabashed anti-Semitism. Smith was publisher of a periodical called The Cross and the Flag, and he ran for president three times.
“To those of us of broader mindset, the contrast of the historic background of Smith and his publication as opposed to the simple and sincere faith of the people who (visit Christ of the Ozarks) has always put us in something of a quandary,” historian Dougan said.
The statue, unveiled in 1966, was created by Emmet Sullivan, one of the sculptors of Mount Rushmore. It is the centerpiece of a Christian tourist mecca operated by the nonprofit Elna M. Smith Foundation, named for Gerald L.K. Smith’s wife. The whole complex occupies more than a square-mile and includes “The Great Passion Play,” an outdoor dramatization of the last days of Jesus’ life, and other religious attractions.
The passion play has drawn 7 million people through 35 seasons, but attendance has dropped from its 1992 peak of 300,000 ticketed visitors to about 130,000 last year. Joe Gies, CEO of the nonprofit Smith Foundation since 2002, has launched a $500,000-plus marketing campaign in several major markets in hopes of reversing the trend.
The foundation itself enjoyed 11.3 percent revenue growth from $3.15 million during 2001 to $3.51 million in 2002. (The foundation won’t file its 2003 results with the Internal Revenue Service until June.) Helping 2002’s bottom line was an estimated $200,000-plus gift from The Walton Foundation in Bentonville, which declined to comment.
The heavily publicized release last month of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” could help Gies’ marketing campaign. It has also prompted Jewish leaders to recall the historic connection between passion plays and anti-Semitism. But nothing about the Smith Foundation’s operation smacks of its founder’s radical politics; the religious language of its promotional material is general and neutral.
Even Gerald Smith, who died in 1976, seemed to know that his brand of religious politics wasn’t selling by the 1960s. But there is this one thing, Dougan said: Unlike the classical Cristo Redentor, whose arms stretch out over Rio harbor, Christ of the Ozarks resembles the Assyrian war god Assur.
“We have an Assyrian proto-art-deco Jesus,” Dougan said. “Considering that the man who caused the statue to be erected was engaged in a holy war against the Jews, it’s appropriate that the style of the thing would reflect his militaristic view of Jesus.”
Selected Church Building Projects*
Immanuel Baptist Church, Little Rock — $32.0 million
Central Baptist Church, Jonesboro — $14.0 million
Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church, Little Rock — $9.5 million
First Pentecostal Church Sanctuary, North Little Rock — $9.0 million
Full Counsel Church, North Little Rock — $7.8 million
St. Vincent De Paul Catholic Church, Rogers — $6.5 million
First Baptist Church, Benton — $6.3 million
First United Methodist Church, Texarkana — $6.1 million
First Methodist Church, Fort Smith — $5.5 million
First Baptist Church, Siloam Springs — $5.4 million
First United Methodist Church, Springdale — $4.1 million
*Begun or completed since 2001.
Most Religious Arkansas Counties
Ranked by number of religious “adherents” per 1,000 population
Rank — County — Adherents
1 — Dallas — 853
2 — Cross — 810
3 — Ashley — 799
4 — Grant — 788
5 — Logan — 742
6 — Arkansas — 699
7 — Bradley — 698
8 — Sebastian — 688
9 — Clark — 684
10 — Poinsett — 682
11 — Union — 674
12 — Prairie — 673
13 — Howard — 659
14 — Sevier — 656
15 — Sharp — 647
16 — Craighead — 647
17 — Drew — 646
18 — Independence — 644
19 — Columbia — 642
20 — Miller — 641
21 — Mississippi — 633
22 — Ouachita — 626
23 — White — 625
24 — Desha — 622
25 — Cleveland — 616
26 — Greene — 615
27 — Lawrence — 608
28 — Nevada — 604
29 — Pike — 598
30 — Garland — 597
31 — Calhoun — 594
32 — Pulaski — 591
33 — Woodruff — 590
34 — Polk — 590
35 — Hot Spring — 585
36 — Randolph — 578
37 — Scott — 574
38 — Lonoke — 571
39 — Conway — 569
40 — Jackson — 567
41 — Faulkner — 565
42 — Monroe — 560
43 — Izard — 555
44 — Clay — 549
45 — Boone — 547
46 — Lafayette — 547
47 — Van Buren — 544
48 — Benton — 538
49 — Little River — 533
50 — Crawford — 529
51 — Montgomery — 529
52 — Baxter — 514
53 — Hempstead — 508
54 — Stone — 508
55 — Pope — 507
56 — Perry — 507
57 — Washington — 501
58 — Saline — 498
59 — Franklin — 486
60 — Yell — 485
61 — Johnson — 480
62 — Jefferson — 478
63 — Fulton — 461
64 — Chicot — 455
65 — St. Francis — 451
66 — Cleburne — 441
67 — Carroll — 436
68 — Phillips — 434
69 — Crittenden — 417
70 — Lincoln — 396
71 — Marion — 361
72 — Searcy — 357
73 — Madison — 350
74 — Lee — 344
75 — Newton — 240
Source: The American Religion Data Archives (www.thearda.com), based on 2000 survey results.
(Additional reporting by Laura Bruegge.)
Sign up for Daily E-news
