A Statue in the Ozarks and the Passion Play Beneath It

On a hilltop above Eureka Springs stands Christ of the Ozarks, a seven story white concrete statue completed in 1966, one of the largest depictions of Christ in the country and visible for miles across the surrounding hill country. It anchors the Great Passion Play, an outdoor drama depicting the last days of Jesus that has run seasonally since 1968 on a purpose built hillside amphitheater, drawing evangelical pilgrimage tourism to a corner of the Ozarks that frontier camp meeting revivalism had already marked as devotional ground more than a century earlier. The statue and the play sit within the same folk evangelical culture the state's small rural churches and homecoming gatherings grew from, a landscape tradition translated into monumental scale and staged spectacle rather than a break from it.

The site's continued draw, tens of thousands of visitors across a single season even now, reflects a state where Evangelical Protestant identification runs to fifty percent of adults, the highest single figure Pew's 2023-24 study recorded for any tradition in Arkansas, a concentration the Ozark hill country's revival culture helped establish and a landmark like this one keeps visibly renewed rather than merely historical.