David Pryor, a natural-born politician who spent thirty-four years in public offices, including governor, the state legislature and both houses of Congress, died April 20, 2024 at his home in Little Rock at the age of 89.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture called him “arguably the most popular Arkansas politician of the modern era,” although the description might have covered a much longer stretch of history. He ran for public offices 13 times between 1960 and 1996 and lost only once—a 1972 race for the U.S. Senate against Sen. John L. McClellan. 

After McClellan’s death before the end of the term in 1978, Pryor defeated two other rising political stars for the Senate seat—Congressmen Jim Guy Tucker and Ray H. Thornton Jr., both of whom would be elected to other major state offices. Pryor would hold the seat until January 1997, when he retired, owing to heart problems and his dismay over the rising partisanship, wrath and extremism in Congress and national politics.

In 2002, years after he retired from the Senate, Pryor’s son Mark, a former state representative and attorney general, won his seat by defeating Senator Tim Hutchinson and served two terms.

His nearly 35-year career in the state and national capitols were marked by passionate and sometimes lonely efforts for better and affordable medical care for the elderly and poor, peace, public safety in the nuclear age, the direct election of American presidents, reform of the state’s ancient constitution and, perhaps most markedly, for collaboration among political foes and parties.

Former President Bill Clinton, who got his inspiration for politics and public service as a 20-year-old Georgetown University student in 1966 from the “Young Turk” state lawmaker from a couple of rural counties east of him in south Arkansas, said he and his wife, Hillary, were deeply saddened by the death of their friend and collaborator, who was always “honest, compassionate and full of common sense.”

In every office he held, Clinton said, Pryor “fought for progressive politics that helped us put the divided past behind us and move into a brighter future together. He was always one of America’s greatest advocates for the elderly, waging long battles to lower the cost of prescription drugs, and to improve nursing home and home care to help more people live in dignity.”

“David made politics personal—from his famed retail campaigning to his ability to calmly and confidently explain tough votes to his constituents,” Clinton said. Clinton was Arkansas’s attorney general in Pryor’s last two years as governor. He was elected governor in the same election that voters promoted Pryor to the US Senate.

“I first met him and Barbara in 1966 when David was running for Congress and over the next 58 years he would be my mentor, confidant, supporter and, above all, friend. Having him and Dale Bumpers in the Senate when I was president was an extraordinary gift. I never felt far from home, and I always trusted the unvarnished advice he gave, especially when the going got tough. I’ll always be grateful that he served as the inaugural dean of the Clinton School of Public Service, where his very presence embodied the nobility and joy of public service.”

David Pryor lived a mythical life of politics and public service, said his longtime aide in Congress, Carmie Henry—starting with his election as president of the third grade. He defined retail politics in Arkansas as a campaigner and in public office, cementing personal bonds with everybody in both parties and in every executive office, including the security workers all over the Capitol. He became easily the most beloved member of the Senate and also with Arkansas voters.

“If any one person’s career marked the changing of an era in American politics, it was David Pryor’s,” Henry said. “There are no David Pryors in Washington anymore.”

Pryor was a liberal Democrat long before it became a term of opprobrium. He was stirred to enter politics, first as a crusading weekly newspaper editor at Camden and then as a candidate for the legislature, by the rise of racial hatred and discord after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954 outlawing segregation in the nation’s public schools. A senior and student leader at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Pryor traveled to the Capitol in February 1957 to testify at a dramatic public hearing on a bill creating a state sovereignty commission that would stop racial integration and find and punish people and groups that supported integration—or “race mixing,” as it was commonly called. He thought the bill was a flagrant violation of the federal and state constitutions. He was blocked from testifying, he would learn, at the instigation of university officials, notably the president, who feared a backlash against the school. The passage of a raft of bills to maintain white supremacy and Gov. Orval E. Faubus’s signing them into law in early 1957 and then Faubus’s dispatch of National Guardsmen to prevent nine Black youngsters from entering Little Rock Central High School that fall turned Pryor and his new wife, the former Barbara Jean Lunsford, into crusaders and reaffirmed his notion from early childhood that politics was the best way to spend his life.

David Hampton Pryor was born Aug. 29, 1934, in Camden, the third of four children of William Edgar Pryor and Susan Newton Pryor. His father ran a car dealership, was Ouachita County sheriff for four years and was always politically connected and influential. Governor Ben T. Laney (1945–1949) was a neighbor and family friend, although Laney’s leadership of the Southern white-supremacy  movement and his disloyalty to the Democratic Party in 1948 disturbed young Pryor, whose hero was Gov. Sid McMath from next-door Magnolia and Hot Springs, who had thwarted Laney’s Dixiecrat party and carried Arkansas for President Harry S. Truman that year. Pryor’s mother, who was known as Susie, had been a champion of women’s suffrage, and was the first woman to run for public office in Arkansas, losing a race for circuit and county clerk in 1926. She later won a school board race.

His autobiography, A Pryor Commitment, published in 2008 by Butler Center Books, gave a self-effacing and often humorous account of growing up, pursuing popularity and providential encounters with famous political figures that would shape his destiny. He was an unusually gregarious child who sought friendship with everybody and was attracted to politics almost from the time that he could read, perhaps owing to his father’s engagement in politics and with politicians. (The elder Pryor raised the money in 1942 that kept Congressman John L. McClellan from leaving the US Senate race, which he won in a Democratic runoff primary with Attorney General Jack Holt. McClellan was later shocked and embittered that his patron’s son would run against him. He had expected Pryor to succeed him when he retired.) 

Pryor wrote that he ran for president of Mary Bragg Wheeler’s third-grade class at Camden and that the teacher sent him and the other two candidates into the hall while the class voted.

“Sweating under the tension,” Pryor remembered, “I promised God that if He would let me win this election, I would never again run for political office. Our teacher called us back into the room. I had won! Before I sat down, I was already planning my race for fourth-grade president.”

His boyhood hero was the Razorback and Olympic star Clyde Scott from Smackover, 16 miles down the road from him, to the extent that 50 years later he stuttered trying to talk to the sainted old man, by then a retired insurance executive for Jackson T. “Jack” Stephens. Pryor was a football star for the Camden High School Panthers—a triple-threat tailback who made the all-district team. His memoir, however, confessed that he actually hated football and every minute of practice and the games, but social pressure forced him to stay with it. “Any Camden boy in the 1950s who entertained the slightest interest in peer acceptance—and who could circle the practice field in a heavy uniform without crumpling to earth—went out for football,” he said. Pryor dreaded “the 200-pound linemen” who smashed him to the ground nearly every play. 

Pryor wrote that after seeing the 1950 movie Born Yesterday, starring William Holden and Judy Holliday and set in political Washington, he ran home and sent a letter to Congressman Oren Harris of El Dorado, a family friend, asking if he could be a congressional page that summer. Harris agreed. Pryor drove to Washington, finally found the Capitol and reached the House doorkeeper’s office, where he was rebuked for being late and sent to the Senate, where there was an emergency—an all-night filibuster after all the Senate pages had gone home. When he reached the Senate floor, Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin (the anticommunist conspiracist who was later censured by the Senate) snapped his fingers at Pryor, scribbled a note, fished out a ten-dollar bill and handed him a ring of keys. 

Pryor’s account: “Here, son,” he said. “Get a taxi and go to this address, and on the floor of the closet in the bedroom you’ll find my bedroom slippers. Bring them to me.” It was David Pryor’s first act of public service. 

After Pryor enrolled as a freshman at Baylor University at Waco his father died suddenly and he canceled his enrollment and went instead to Henderson State Teachers College at Arkadelphia, 45 miles up Highway 7. When he arrived on campus late he was greeted by a sign in front of Womack Hall, the men’s dormitory, saying “David Pryor for Freshman Class President.” He was elected. After a year, he transferred to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He took a horse with him and put the colt in a stable at a farm south of town. He wrote that it had been a stupid thing to do because he rarely found time to ride the animal. He figured that he had done it because the last time he had seen his father alive was when the old man was astride a horse in the 1952 Ouachita County Fair parade.

As the spring semester was ending in 1954, Pryor got a note to call Gov. Francis Cherry, who had defeated his hero Sid McMath two years earlier. Cherry wanted him to be his driver while he was campaigning for re-election in the Democratic primaries against Faubus and two other men that summer. In his autobiography and two oral histories late in life Pryor gave poignant accounts of Cherry’s grace and caring and the agonizing dilemmas the governor had faced in the historic confrontation with Faubus in the runoff primary; Cherry had decided to question Faubus’s patriotism by making an issue of his attendance at a socialist self-help school at Mena, Commonwealth College, and subsequently lying about it. It was to be an evening television speech at the KARK studio, which Pryor called “the speech of Cherry’s political life.” Pryor said he waited in the car for Cherry to leave the mansion for the studio and the governor veered into the shrubs next to the car and vomited. After his stumbling and wooden speech, Cherry returned to the car solemnly and said, “How’d I do, kid?” Pryor said he congratulated Cherry but began to realize that the speech had been a terrible mistake.

It occurred while the country, including Arkansas, rebelled against “McCarthyism,” which had been exposed as a fraud the previous month in the Army-McCarthy hearings before a Senate committee, including Arkansas’s John McClellan. It ended with Army attorney Joseph Welch’s famous putdown of Joe McCarthy, whose bedroom slippers Pryor had fetched four years earlier, for relentlessly attacking a young lawyer at the hearing: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough! Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Pryor concluded that the very decent Cherry had been a poor politician who did not sense the great shift in public attitudes and was unable to rally voters against a smart but unprincipled politician. An even bigger mistake had been the unfortunate campaign line “we’re going to get the deadheads off the welfare rolls.” Faubus made him look cruel. 

After Cherry’s humiliation, a bitter Pryor decided that politics was miserable business and changed his major from political science to business administration. He took courses in accounting, banking and statistics but found them tedious and boring. Then he became violently ill with a strange malady that required multiple surgeries—he withered to 130 pounds and partially lost his eyesight—that cost him a year of school. 

He returned to the university in 1955 as a government major again. From his arrival, he was active in student government, including serving as a senator. Led by Pryor, Ray Thornton and others who would later seek state executive, legislative and judicial offices, the students took a special interest in the conflagration over integration that was growing at Little Rock, which was under federal court orders to desegregate its schools in the fall. A number of punitive bills to head off the desegregation consumed the lawmakers in the January–March session—notably the creation of a state sovereignty commission, which was based on the long-repudiated theory of John C. Calhoun that states could interpose their sovereignty between the federal government and the people. Pryor and one of his many college roommates, Kenneth C. Danforth of El Dorado, the editor of the campus newspaper, The Traveler, and later a journalist for the Arkansas Gazette, Time magazine and The National Geographic, drove to Little Rock to carry the students’ message to the lawmakers and the state that the legislation trampled upon the human rights of American citizens, who would be criminalized for even expressing the view that Blacks and those who might sympathize with them were entitled to equality and free expression and assembly. Pryor was embittered by the experience that day but, according to his memoir, the stayover at the Marion Hotel and association with the legislators and lobbyists, sharpened his understanding that politics and government—in Ouachita County, Little Rock, or Washington, D.C.—did not follow the examples in civics textbooks.

He left Fayetteville with his degree but could not find a job. The Gazette would not hire him, even when he volunteered to work free for a few months to prove his worth. Later, as a lawmaker and law student, he would be the Gazette’s Fayetteville correspondent. He married Barbara Jean Lunsford of Fayetteville, a classmate, and in late 1957 started a weekly newspaper, the Ouachita Citizen, with a printing press acquired from a local businessman. His wife and mother wrote weekly columns and reported, and Pryor sold advertisements and wrote editorials, often criticizing local government officials but mainly Gov. Faubus and legislative houses that went along with everything Faubus sought to do. The city’s daily newspaper, like most others around Arkansas after the school crisis, rarely took issue with the governor and the legislature. Faubus took pleasure in taunting Pryor and his little paper. At a big rally at Camden in his 1958 race against the meatpacker Chris Finkbeiner, whom Pryor supported, Faubus held up copies of Life and Time magazines and Pryor’s little paper, all of which had made Faubus look bad. 

“Life is for people who can’t read,” Faubus said. “Time is for people who can’t see, and the Ouachita Citizen is for people who can’t think.” The crowd roared and Pryor crawled in his car and went home.

But in 1960 Pryor told the county’s representative, a family friend, that if he did not begin to oppose Faubus on legislation he was going to run against him. The representative demurred and Pryor ran against him. He was 26 years old. Pryor’s memoir said he got elected mainly owing to the relentless campaigning of Barbara, carrying their infant son, David, with her as she went door to door across the county asking people to please vote for her husband. The family briefly moved to Little Rock. They sold the newspaper in 1962. He was elected twice more, in 1962 and 1964, while attending law school at Fayetteville when the legislature was not in session. He finished law school in 1964.

Except for his votes, Pryor’s legislative record was unremarkable, which was not unusual for new legislators. A Civil War buff, Pryor read about battles in South Arkansas and at his first session in February 1961 he introduced and passed a bill creating Poison Springs Battlefield State Park about eight miles from his home. It was the site of one of the Confederates’ few big victories in Arkansas, a victory most notable for the slaughter of a Kansas infantry regiment that included former slaves. The Confederates took no prisoners and used wagons to crush the skulls of the captured Black men. 

Pryor became one of a handful of liberals who jousted with Faubus and the legislative “Old Guard” on a wide variety of reforms. Called “the Young Turks” in the media, Pryor, Virgil Butler, Sterling R. Cockrill Jr., Jim Brandon, Hardy W. Croxton, Ray S. Smith Jr. and Hayes C. McClerkin introduced legislation outlawing the poll tax, reforming election laws, overhauling county purchasing and spending (Pryor had been on a grand jury investigating government fraud in Ouachita County), convening a constitutional convention, and overhauling highway administration. They got nowhere with the legislation. In 1961, Pryor introduced a bill to require competitive bidding on county purchases of more than $300, but he could get only few votes for it each year. Faubus had another legislator, Harry Colay of Magnolia, put his name on a similar bill in 1965, it passed, and Faubus signed it.

Pryor opened a law practice in 1964 at Camden with his friend Harry Barnes. He liked to mention a case where he represented a man in a dispute over who owned a coon dog. It was finally resolved by bringing the disputed mutt into the courtroom, which wandered around until it spotted Pryor’s client and put a paw on his knee. The judge immediately awarded him custody. For a different reason, the Arkansas Gazette cartoonist George Fisher later always put a happy coon dog at Pryor’s side. But Pryor never got to practice a lot of law.

Faubus’s enmity toward Pryor took a bizarre turn in the summer of 1965. Late in life, Faubus and Pryor would cement a friendship, and he told Pryor that one of the joys of his life had been setting in motion the events that year which sealed Pryor’s long career. In law school at Fayetteville, Pryor had become a close friend of Faubus’s son, Farrell, a shy, portly and tormented young man who would take his own life in 1977 at the age of 36. Farrell had felt shunned and ridiculed by the other students and some of the faculty. The two students studied, played golf, drank beer and got their law degrees together.

In July 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Congressman Oren Harris to a federal judgeship, creating a congressional vacancy that Faubus was supposed to fill for the last 16 months of Harris’s term by calling a special election. It was Pryor’s dream, but there was no time to put together a campaign organization throughout the large Fourth District. State Auditor Jimmie “Red” Jones, who was known to every voter in the state, would be the automatic winner. Pryor mentioned his dilemma to his friend Farrell. He would learn later that Farrell told his dad that Pryor had helped him get his law degree, was the only person at the university who befriended him and about the only true friend he ever had.

Faubus dawdled about calling the special election for weeks and finally announced that the district did not really need a voting representative for the next year and a half, so he called the special election for the same day as the general election in November 1966. Voters would simultaneously fill the seat for the last two months of the year but also the following two years—two elections for the same seat on the same day. It gave Pryor more than a year to build a campaign organization. Red Jones then chose not to run because he would have to give up his safe lifetime job at the Capitol for a risky congressional election. Pryor won the special election and the general election handily. He defeated Richard S. Arnold of Texarkana, a future federal district and appellate judge, and three other prominent politicians from around the district, John Harris Jones of Pine Bluff, Charles L. “Chuck” Honey of Prescott and Dean Murphy of Hope. 

Pryor’s three terms in the seniority-driven House of Representatives were hardly notable, except for a controversy that he engineered—a crusade over the mistreatment of the elderly and disabled in nursing homes—and his personal dilemma over the Vietnam War, which he eventually came to oppose. 

His mother told him that after visiting friends in nursing homes over the years she had concluded that the warehousing of people in the profit-driven industry had to be a national scandal rather than a local one. Now that her son was a congressman, he ought to do something about it. Having little else to do as a freshman, Pryor started volunteering on weekends as an orderly in nursing homes in the District of Columbia and suburban Maryland and Virginia, and recording the lack of staffing and lapses in medical care that he saw. His mother was right. Nursing homes often were just profitable warehouses for those waiting for the grave. Government inspectors often gave owners notice of their inspections, which rarely found lapses and, when they did, nothing was done about them. The industry had lobbyists who kept Pryor’s congressional colleagues and other government monitors at bay. 

Pryor made a speech on the House floor revealing his secret work. He said he had encountered only two nursing homes where he would put his mother, but he couldn’t have afforded either one on his $42,500 salary. He was attacked by Maryland’s state mental-health director and people in the industry. Pryor called for the House to create a select committee on nursing homes and homes for the aged. A majority of the House voted for his resolution, but it was non-binding and Congress did nothing. The House, led by the 80-year-old Mississippian who headed the Rules Committee, would not provide space or staffing for the committee. Pryor decided to do the work himself, after finding a vacant lot beside a gasoline station near the Capitol. The station’s owner found two house trailers that became the site for Pryor’s investigations and hearings. Pryor tried and failed to set up a permanent Committee on Aging, as the Senate had done in 1959. President Richard M. Nixon joined Pryor’s cause in 1971, deploring conditions in nursing homes and proposing to end payments to substandard homes.

In 1974, two years after Pryor left, the House joined the cause and established the Select Committee on Aging. For the next 50 years, Congress, federal and state administrators and the industry would wage a continuous battle over standards of care for the aged and the degree of regulation that government should provide.

When Pryor went to Washington, the Vietnam War had engaged the United States for ten years. (President Eisenhower sent the first US troops in 1955 and Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had raised the commitment.) After the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Congress gave Johnson new authority to dramatically expand America’s commitment, still without a declaration of war. By 1968, congressional and public opposition to the war had grown. Vice President Hubert Humphrey asked Pryor to make a short speech to the riotous Democratic National Convention in Chicago—Humphrey was the presidential nominee—in support of the Vietnam plank, an oblique statement that neither endorsed nor opposed the war effort. Pryor went to the convention as an Arkansas delegate and had already alienated other Southern congressmen, especially Mississippians, by voting as a member of the Credentials Committee to seat Mississippi’s Freedom Democrats—Blacks and liberals—instead of the white delegation picked by the party in Mississippi. In his two-minute speech, he urged an end to the war but called for unity and wisdom. Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright had already decided America’s war policies were improvident and conducted hearings that began to turn public sentiment against the war.

President Johnson, who had had misgivings about the war from the first, had then made himself the champion of the war against communism after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He became more and more sorrowful and morose as tens of thousands of Americans a year died, but he could not become the first president to lose a war. In 1967, Johnson asked Pryor to fly to Texas with him for rallies to pump up flagging support in his home state. Pryor would write that Johnson seemed glum and introspective the whole trip. Pryor understood why. As they were flying back to Washington at night in Air Force One, Pryor looked out the window and figured that the lights below were his hometown of Camden. 

“Mr. President,” he said, “it looks like we might be flying directly over Camden, Arkansas. That’s my hometown. If you look straight down at the ground, you might see Jim’s Café on Washington Street.”

The president leaned across him and looked out the window. He slumped back in his seat and shook his head.

“God a’mighty!” he sighed. “I wish I was at Jim’s Café right now.” He was silent the rest of the trip.

For Pryor, the climax to the moral struggle over the war was more personal, as he would recall in A Pryor Commitment and oral histories. On an airline trip from Washington to Arkansas he fell into conversation with a young serviceman from his district who was headed to Vietnam. Many months later, he got on a plane for the same flight back home and recognized the young man, in uniform. He asked the soldier about his tour of duty. The soldier pulled back a blanket across his lap, which showed that he had lost a leg in combat.

 “Congressman Pryor,” the young man said, “I would not have minded losing my leg, if only someone had told me why we were there in the first place.”

Pryor sent constituents a newsletter announcing that he would thereafter oppose any further funding of the war and calling for troops to be brought home. It was not an altogether popular step. At a fishfry at the Carlisle High School stadium soon afterward, a man ran out of the crowd, jumped on Pryor’s back and began hitting him and calling him a traitor. Mayor Bobby Glover, later a state representative and then a senator, pulled the man off Pryor. Two decades later Pryor would write a letter to his son Scott, explaining his dilemma over the war and the consequences. He likened it to the contemporary dilemma over the American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. 

In 1972, McClellan, by then chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, which had funded the development of the navigation dams on the Arkansas River in Arkansas and Oklahoma, announced he was running for a sixth term. His hearings on labor racketeering had made enemies of organized labor. Unions representing wood, paper, oil, chemical and electrical workers in South Arkansas had supplied much of Pryor’s political strength. He announced that he was running for the seat, too, along with Ted Boswell, a liberal trial lawyer, and Foster Johnson, a book salesman who for the third straight Senate election went around towns wearing clanging metal campaign signs over his shoulders. 

Pryor survived a rough campaign in which he was accused of being a friend of draft dodgers and a supporter of gun control. (As a freshman legislator, he had sponsored a bill making it illegal to carry a loaded weapon in a vehicle inside city limits—a reaction to a neighboring boy accidentally killing himself with a loaded shotgun on a Safeway parking lot.) But Pryor was a close second in the preferential primary and entered the runoff as a heavy favorite, certain to get all the votes that had been cast for the more liberal Boswell. W. R. “Witt” Stephens, the gas baron and investment banker, summoned a meeting of the state’s banking and business leaders with McClellan in the board room of the Union National Bank at Little Rock where everyone ponied up tens of thousands of dollars for McClellan or pledged to collect it.

The two-week runoff ended with the famous televised debate. McClellan, wearing a white suit, taunted Pryor for his support by unions, particularly “labor bosses” from outside the state. Pryor responded that the money reported on his campaign finance forms came from the cookie jars and overall pockets of hardworking men. McClellan responded that Pryor had gotten $79,000 from “bosses” from outside the state. 

“David, David,” he taunted, shaking a finger, “this is no cookie-jar nickels and dimes!”

Pryor’s campaign gifts paled alongside the money from businessmen and bankers in McClellan’s campaign, but McClellan’s commanding performance showed him as anything but a doddering 76-year-old man. But his victory in the election the next week depended more on the massive get-out-the-vote effort by political leaders commanded by Witt Stephens. Pryor got only 20,000 more votes than in the first primary, McClellan 22,000 more. On election night, Pryor faced the TV cameras early, conceded and said the voters had elected the right man, a typical Pryor reflection on his opponents.

Witt Stephens was watching television that night and was struck by the Pryor’s magnanimity. Two years later, when Gov. Dale Bumpers announced he was not running for a third term as governor but instead for the Senate—against Fulbright—Stephens picked up the phone and called Pryor, suggesting that he run for governor. Pryor said he was about to call Stephens and urge him to run (they had served in the House of Representatives together as freshmen in 1961). Stephens said no, he was serious, and promised his full organizational support if Pryor announced. He did, and so did former governor Faubus and Lt. Gov. Bob Riley. Faubus, making his second comeback attempt since retiring in 1966, was shocked to discover that nearly his entire political machine marshaled by Stephens had been diverted to Pryor. Pryor won without a runoff. For the rest of his life, Faubus remained bitter about his old friend and supporter’s betrayal while also warming to the young man whom his son Farrell had asked him to help. 

Providence seemed always to shine on Pryor at election time—but with actual governance, not so much. Bumpers had raised income and motor-fuel taxes and closed tax loopholes. Furious economic growth filled the state treasury so that Bumpers could enhance public schools and higher education, build many state parks, improve highways, expand medical care and build hospitals and college classrooms. Bumpers called a special legislative session to spend the big surplus that had accumulated in the treasury. The moment that Pryor moved into the Governor’s Mansion the nation was hit with a long recession complicated by inflation, and the treasury was depleted. Pryor had to slash budgets and freeze hiring even for filling job vacancies. In his four years, Bumpers had carried out all the reforms prescribed by the liberal group Democrats for Arkansas during the late 1960s—nearly everything but a new state constitution, which became Pryor’s biggest goal. It was never fulfilled.

Pryor proposed a dramatic refashioning of state spending—a 25 percent reduction in state income tax rates and empowerment of local governments to implement the income tax themselves to address all the problems of cities, counties and schools. The Arkansas Plan, as it was called, consumed a legislative session. Pryor traveled the state promoting the plan, explaining to a group at Jonesboro that he was cutting state taxes and allowing people locally to use it in whatever way pleased them—jokingly suggesting that if they didn’t want to levy taxes to build roads and streets they could spend the money on “a new coon dog.” Gazette cartoonist George Fisher labeled it the “Coon Dog Plan” and thereafter always put a grinning mutt at Pryor’s side. The Arkansas Plan failed.

Another passion was litter. Pryor hated the trash along the state’s streets and roads. He started a “Pick Up Arkansas” campaign and proposed a bill levying a small tax on soft drinks, pet foods, newspapers and plastic wrappers to discourage littering; the money would be used for highway and street cleanup. Local governments were encouraged to dispose of solid waste like abandoned cars and refrigerators. The bill passed, but a letter from the state Revenue Department to businesses on how to collect the tax warned that they might go to prison for failing to remit the litter tax. Legislators who had voted for the bill heard from merchants and demanded that Pryor call them back into session to repeal the bill before it took effect on July 1. He did but always regretted it when he saw sandwich wrappers and soft-drink containers strewn along streets and on the roadsides.

Constitutional revision, an obsession with an aging legislator who had been the leader of the Young Turks, was Pryor’s biggest failure. Voters had defeated a liberalized constitution drafted by a popularly elected convention in 1970. Pryor decided to try again after taking office in 1975. The solution had to be to avoid the pitched battles over a few issues such as the state’s antiunion law (the Right to Work Amendment), usury, judicial elections and county-government reform. He offered a bill calling for the appointment, by the legislature and the governor, of 35 delegates who would write a new constitution but leave those and a few other features of the 1874 constitution untouched and then submit the document to the voters in September. On the day the delegates convened, the state Supreme Court voted four to three to abolish the convention because the delegates were prohibited from changing some parts of the constitution. It had to be all or nothing. In 1977, Pryor tried again with a bill that called for the election of 100 delegates in 1978 and a vote on the document in 1980. But voters defeated that new constitution decisively. 

McClellan died in November 1977 and Pryor appointed Kaneaster Hodges of Newport, a lawyer and minister, to finish his term, which ended Jan. 1, 1979. Pryor soon announced that he would run for the seat. So did US Rep. Jim Guy Tucker of Little Rock and Rep. Ray H. Thornton Jr. of Sheridan. It would be a race between three friends and philosophical triplets. A. C. Grigson, a Texarkana accountant, joined the race claiming to be McClellan’s philosophical successor. Pryor barely led in the first primary and Tucker edged Thornton for the second spot. The runoff would also be amiable until its final days when Tucker accused Pryor’s campaign manager of trying to persuade a friend on the state Public Service Commission to approve a rate increase for Witt Stephens’s western Arkansas gas company in exchange for the Stephens family’s support in the runoff. Pryor won by a safe margin. Tucker later shrugged off his defeat. No one, he said, was going to believe that David Pryor did anything even slightly deceitful, and wouldn’t blame him if he had.

The Senate years were Pryor’s most pleasurable. His Arkansas colleague, Dale Bumpers, was a close friend and an ally on most but not all issues. After their retirements, they became a popular team for television and political events, taunting and telling tall tales about each other.

During the eight-year administration of President Ronald Reagan, both senators opposed much of the Reagan program, including the tax cuts for the wealthy in 1981 and later the big binge of military spending. Bumpers, a deficit hawk, publicly opposed the tax cuts, and Pryor finally joined him by voting “present” on the roll call, the same as a no vote. The month after the tax cuts passed the nation fell into a deep 14-month recession with double-digit unemployment, the deepest since the 1930s, although the charming Reagan was never blamed for the longest and deepest recession in modern times or the staggering budget deficits and debt that he ran up for eight years or for the repeated tax increases that the Reagan administration described as “revenue enhancements” instead of taxes.

But Pryor also became a leading critic of Pentagon spending, calling attention to such excesses as the orders for thousands of ball-peen hammers and toilet seats at hugely inflated prices. He also veered from Bumpers and the state’s four congressmen in his opposition to the development of binary chemical weapons. He opposed developing and storing the chemical weapons at the Pine Bluff Arsenal. Vice President George H. W. Bush, a friend who went to Congress the same time as Pryor, went to the Senate to cast the tie-breaking vote for the arsenal.

Even before Reagan’s election, the Pentagon already suspected that Pryor was not a votary, especially after he called attention to the perils of the Titan II missile system after a series of dangerous failures around the country and two catastrophes in Arkansas. When the Defense Department developed the Titan II system—54 underground intercontinental missiles with nuclear warheads—US Rep. Wilbur D. Mills agreed to vote for President Kennedy’s tax cuts if he agreed to put a ring of 18 of the new missiles in Arkansas. A fire in a silo with a nuclear warhead near Searcy in 1965 killed 53 workers who were retrofitting the missile’s fuel system. In January 1978, a fuel transporter at a missile silo at Damascus overheated and sent thousands of gallons of deadly nitrogen tetroxide vapor over the countryside. In 1979, after more such leaks in the Arkansas and Kansas missile networks, Pryor and Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas were regretting having Titan sites in their states and talked about whether they should be anywhere near American citizens. 

After rumors of incidents at the silos, Pryor in the summer of 1980 did his own secret investigation and found nine major incidents in the previous 14 months that could have endangered Arkansas lives around the silos. Clearly, the Air Force had been lying about the safety at the Titan sites in Arkansas, Kansas and New Mexico. Pryor gave the detailed results of investigation of the eight incidents to two Arkansas Gazette reporters, who described the incidents and Pryor’s conclusions. Surrounding residents were never informed about any of them, despite an Air Force vow that residents would always be informed.

Pryor and Dole went to Congress to push an amendment to the Defense Department appropriation that called for an early-warning system around all the silos. The amendment passed. Three days later, on Sept. 18, 1980, the missile in a silo at Damascus exploded, blowing the nuclear warhead and two technicians into the air. One of the men died almost instantly and the other’s health was permanently impaired. Two years later, the Pentagon decided to abandon the Titans for more advanced, and perhaps safer, missile systems. But Pryor’s negativity about defense weaponry and spending took a political toll, at least nationally.

The payoff came in 1984, when the White House and the party leadership persuaded Congressman Ed Bethune of Searcy—the Pryors and Bethunes were social friends—to run against Pryor with the promise of financial backing. More than 20 Reagan administration officials and Republican senators came to Arkansas for fund-raising events for Bethune. Rev. Jerry Falwell, the right-wing leader, came to Arkansas to call for Pryor’s defeat. Pryor eschewed the same strategy, feeling that Democrats from out of the state would hurt rather than help him. Bethune’s ads said Pryor had voted against the popular former movie star, Ronnie Reagan, on 77 percent of the issues in the Senate. The Saturday before the election Reagan, who was approaching a landslide win of his own, made a speech at the packed Excelsior Hotel ballroom. 

“Don’t send me back to Washington alone,” Reagan said with the smiling Bethune beside him. Reagan carried Arkansas with 60 percent of the vote. Pryor got 57 percent.

In 1994, Pryor ran for re-election and no Democrat or Republican opposed him—a rarity in any state. Betty White, a homeless woman, ran as a write-in and got 832 votes. (Pryor’s son Mark also had no opposition, except for a Green Party candidate, in his second race for the same seat in 2008.)

Pryor spent much of his second term fighting for a taxpayer’s bill of rights, to curb abuses by the Internal Revenue Service. Reagan signed Pryor’s bill into law in 1988.

Pryor’s last crusade was against the pharmaceutical industry. In 1990, he introduced the Pharmaceutical Access and Prudent Purchasing Act, which sought to end the spiral of drug prices; it would have allowed Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate with drug makers on prices that would be charged to Medicare and Medicaid patients. The industry fought back. 

Pryor had a massive heart attack on April 15, 1991. The illness hobbled him for the rest of his career. Majority Leader George Mitchell and Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas took up the cause of drug pricing but they never were able to pass a bill. President Joe Biden finally took up Pryor’s cause in 2023.

Another passionate reform effort was to end the electoral college so that the winner of the popular vote would always be the next president. The most important job in the whole democracy was president, but it also was the only political job in the country, from members of the county quorum court to the top, that might go to the loser. In 1992, sensing that the third-party candidacy of Ross Perot could tilt the election of George H. W. Bush over Bill Clinton regardless of the size of Clinton’s election victory, Pryor again introduced a Senate resolution for a constitutional amendment to end the electoral college and assure that election winners always took office. The Senate never sent the amendment to the states for ratification. Only one election loser had ever failed to become president—Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878 —but two subsequent losers, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald J. Trump in 2016, became president. Trump lost the actual balloting to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes.

Like Bumpers, Pryor found the relationships in Congress profoundly different after radio provocateur Rush Limbaugh and Republican House leader Newt Gingrich turned American politics into a war of saintly Republicans vs. evil Democrats. Friendly Republicans departed and were replaced by politicians who called Democrats socialists and radicals who were out to destroy the country. Pryor did not run again in 1996; Bumpers made the same choice in 1998. The Capitol, they said, was no longer an enjoyable place to be.

Pryor’s retirement did not end his engagement with politics and government. In 2000, he was director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He taught courses at the University of Arkansas and gave his unexpended campaign funds to form the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Oral and Visual History at the university. He was the inaugural dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at Little Rock, serving for two years. After the murder of Bill Gwatney in 2008, he was chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party for a spell. In 2009, Gov. Mike Beebe appointed him to a 10-year term on the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees, where he did not enhance his popularity by protesting the lavish spending on athletics and stadium additions. A massive stroke in 2016 curtailed his activities for good.

Survivors include his widow, Barbara; his sons and their wives, David Jr. (Judith), Mark (Joi) and Scott (Diane); his grandchildren, Hampton, Adams, Porter and Devin; and his great-grandson, Raven. 

The post In Memoriam appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

My Papaw is no longer living, may God rest his soul. But if he were, I am certain he would be ashamed of what has become of the Grand Old Party. Papaw was a hardworking business man with stories for days of growing up on a Louisiana farm with dozens of cousins. He always spoke to me and my cousin about hard work, individual responsibility, and the value of a dollar.

My papaw fostered within me a sense of accomplishment and pride in any work I was doing. When I grew up and became a voter, these values, to me, reflected the heart of the GOP.

So what changed?

If you pressed me for an answer to that question, I’d have to say it was Donald Trump.

At some point in the last eight years I started to realize that my family members were deviating from the conservatism that raised us. With each new story of a disgusting joke, sexual assault allegation, or racist soundbite I would watch for a shift — Would they take their Trump flag down? Might they stop sharing Trump’s outlandish messages on social media? Could they be trusted to talk about social issues without parroting his deceitful talking points?

For some – too many – of them, the answers were no, no, and no. And that is the heartbreaking place we find ourselves in 2024.

Donald Trump has amassed a following of millions who believe everything he tells them, will do anything he asks, and even cause harm and distress to their own families for the sake of his mission.

There is no word for that besides “cult,” and that’s exactly what it is.

Donald Trump is going to be the Presidential nominee for the Republican Party. His influence will only grow, and the impact on our families will continue to be traumatic. Here in Arkansas, it’s especially difficult to confront the loss.

Trump’s face is on billboards across the state and the gospel of his elusive plan to make America great is preached in many of our churches. “Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen?” is a litmus test when political conversations arise. Answer a definitive, “no,” and you might lose another friend, or miss your chance to make a new one.

I know I am not alone in the complex grief of losing a loved one to the cult of Trump. There are thousands of us in states like Arkansas. We aren’t trying to change anyone’s mind— we just want our people back.

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A man returned home to Ashley County after his service to our country. 

His hands, once calloused from farm work, were now marked by a different kind of labor.

He carried the weight of a soldier. It left small reminders, indelible marks.

In the mornings he would stand with the fields stretched out before him, admiring the amber waves in the early light. The air was crisp and welcoming.

The man was amidst the familiar landscape but felt a stranger. This lines on his face were apparent, ones from service to country, not to land like his mother had wanted. 

The man hummed in his mind: This land is my land, this land is your land.

From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters.

In the house, the man’s walls held memories of simpler time. The day to day solitude was both a comfort and a burden.

The man spent his days tending to the fields and listening to the wind. Nature had a way of offering solace.

He found a companion in a new but old dog, one that reminded him of a beloved friend from long ago.

This land was made for you and me.

In the evenings, the man sat on the porch, looking at the stars that were somehow closer in the Arkansas sky. The constellations were old friends. He knew that, like him, they had witnessed the passage of time.

The man didn’t have the words to describe the things he had seen, the weight he had carried and will carry.

The good people of his hometown didn’t press. They understood the language of silence.

The days turned to weeks; the man found rhythm and place. 

It wasn’t the same as it had been, and he knew he wasn’t the same either.

The fields, the house, the dog, the stars. There’s a gentle healing with the cadence of country life. 

Little by little, the man would find his way back to himself.

I roamed and rambled, and I’ve followed my footsteps

To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts

All around me, a voice was sounding

This land was made for you and me.

The post Homecoming appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

Conversations about how to make our state and country better have become a constant tit-for-tat exercise in futility — or worse, loved ones lose contact altogether.

Through all of this grief, I can’t help but think “Arkansas, we are better than this.”

We do not have to accept the division and vitriol we’re fed these days. Arkansans are capable of coming together like no one else I know. 

That fact has been on glorious display lately as we’ve watched conservative farmers and liberal lawyers lock arms around an issue dear to every single one of us: transparency in government.

Arkansans have had a uniquely substantial right to know how our government is using its time and resources — that is to say, our tax dollars — since the first Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1967. Then-Governor Winthrop Rockefeller considered it one of the greatest achievements of his administration. The law faced legal challenges, but the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of a broad interpretation that favored transparency. That ruling has guided our state’s focus on transparency for years.

“It is vital in a democratic society that public business be performed in an open and public manner. We have no hesitation in asserting our conviction that the Freedom of Information Act was passed wholly in the public interest and is to be liberally interpreted to the end that its praiseworthy purposes may be achieved.” Associate Justice George Rose Smith

But you don’t need a history lesson to understand the main idea here: Do we want the government to be able to keep secrets from its people, or do we believe that the government should be open and accountable to the people who created it?

Arkansans have made our answer clear, and we did it by coming together in ways we haven’t seen in years.

It’s hard to know where we go from here, and we know that the fight against government secrecy isn’t over. But for once, the fight won’t be among neighbors and family members. The fight for government transparency will be between us, the people of Arkansas, and a select few of the powerful.

When the people of Arkansas stand together, we’ve already won.

The post Together, We’ve Already Won appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

So, why am I deconstructing? Despite the claims of wanting to be liked, rebelling against God’s authority, and letting my feelings deceive me, the answer is simple. I am deconstructing to arrive at a place of authentic faith. I am a Christian, I prayed the prayer and I still firmly believe in all of the key doctrines and confessions. It is arrogant to say otherwise. I’m deconstructing to save my faith from all of the garbage it has accumulated for the last twenty-five years. 

In my Introduction to Philosophy college course, I learned about a German theologian by the name of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher was confronted by higher criticism coming out of German theological schools and new ideas that put prior understandings of Christian truth in doubt. After thinking through these critiques, his new approach sought to make Christian faith more personal and up to the interpretation of the reader. To Schleiermacher, this approach encouraged a more authentic faith, even though he conceded it wasn’t a perfect one. Schleiermacher was not alone in his desire to keep the core of Christian faith while dispensing with what was not true.

Fundamentalist Evangelicalism put a lot of trappings on my faith that cannot be justified or proven. Most of the trappings revolve around assumptions based on dogmatic doctrines like: inerrancy, the idea that the original manuscripts of the Bible are curated by God and do not contain errors; textual infallibility, which is the claim that the writing of the text is completely authoritative; and scriptural sufficiency, the idea that the Bible is all you need and contains the answers to all life’s questions. Religion that is authentic, adaptable, and correctable cannot exist in concert with these doctrines. That’s why if the Bible says it, I don’t necessarily believe it, and it doesn’t settle the question. I want a faith that is intellectually honest and spiritually humble. Evangelicalism does not provide this because it embraces fundamentalism and dogma.

There’s much to unlearn from Evangelicalism. I’ve spent years trying to detach my mind from what fundamentalism preaches: dogma, reactionary theology, and prejudices. Often when interacting with others on social media I will catch myself saying something in a tone that is too certain. I realize that I’m not trying to get to the truth; I’m trying to be right. Doubt is an unpleasant but necessary bedfellow for one who takes on this faith overhaul. I’ve found myself angry at being lied to, depressed at the pain I’ve caused, and confused about how to move forward. There is always fear and shame lurking in the back of my mind whispering, “What if you’re wrong? God will be angry with you…” I don’t believe this is true, but the impulse is always submerged in my religiously abused subconscious.

Deconstruction is not triumphalism. We’re not throwing parties and hosting orgies. We don’t boast about how we’ve slain the dragon of fundamentalism in its lair – because you never do that, or at least I haven’t managed to do it. As someone who’s been homebound for most of the pandemic, I struggle with how I’m living out this new understanding of faith. I feel like an actor at times, maybe because I am one. I live with a deep frustration at how many years I wasted in Evangelicalism, lying to myself and not taking a stand against its abuses sooner. My Evangelical pastors and professors lied to me about other people to make themselves look holier and better. Do you realize what this does to trust? And they did it all in the name of Jesus. So much of my deconstruction journey has been angry, and that, too, has been strange and difficult coming from a place that told me, “do not let the sun go down on your anger.” 

My M.Div. was obtained from Liberty Divinity School (yes, that Liberty) at the end of 2013. While there are aspects about the education I appreciate, like the exposure to translations of Patristic texts and learning about the Southern Baptist Resurgence, there’s a lot to dislike. I’ve since learned about liberal theology, liberation theology, neo-orthodox theology, Greek Orthodox theology, and other forms of Christian faith. I’ve learned how Judaism is misunderstood and slandered in our Christian circles, and it has been humbling and wrecking to discover how our own sacred text paints our Jewish neighbors in ahistorical, biased lights. Christianity has a history of embellishing facts to make itself look better than other religions and divert attention away from its own shortcomings. 

Christianity is the source of white supremacy and white European privilege. Christianity was the justification for the enslavement of an entire race of people and the genocide of another. Christianity has been the primary driver of terror and abuse toward those who are LGBTQ+. None of this is sexy; none of it is comfortable; none of this makes me feel good. When coupled with challenging my definition of spirituality and what is “good and honorable,” I’ve discovered that deconstruction has brought me hurt and unease. Spiritual devotions no longer have the same meaning; adjusting to corporate liturgy, social justice, and freedom of conscience/thought turns over all the tables. Evangelicalism wasn’t like this – it was certain, sure, organized, and easily backed up with “chapter and verse.” But it was a lie. The hurt and unease are worth it for truth.

At the first Episcopalian bible study I attended someone spoke about an interpretation of a passage that caused all of my bad instincts to rise. I sat in indignation, waiting for the priest to intervene and correct them like every Evangelical bible study I’d attended. 

But the priest didn’t, and neither did anyone else in the room. Instead, I was floored by how they began to discuss the merits and implications of what had been said, how that particular interpretation helped the listeners better understand their faith, even if they disagreed with it. When I left, I challenged myself to be more willing to listen than to teach. As a result, I’ve grown so much from being exposed to the ideas of others, whether I agree with them or not. Fundamentalism often tries to resurface during these moments of exposure to the new, but I always find it more rewarding to tell it to shut up and let myself learn. 

There are things I miss about Evangelicalism. I can’t look at the Bible the same way  anymore; it’s become just another book, even if it has an honored place. Music allows me to emotionally connect with God, but so much of the music I used to listen to has either a terrible message or is ruined by the messengers who abused others to make it, yet I still miss the music. I miss the focused drive of Evangelicalism that is all too often lacking in mainline denominational settings. 

But here’s what I don’t miss: I don’t miss false certainty and false confidence, and I wouldn’t trade them for what I have now: an authentic, human faith journey. 

Before each Holy Eucharist, our priest says, “Wherever you are in your journey of faith, you are welcome at this table.” There are days I don’t know where I am – but not all who wander are lost. We’re all on this sojourner journey together, even if our paths often diverge.

Deconstruction isn’t “sexy,” but it beats all of the fool’s gold currently being sold in Evangelicalism. It leads, when done thoroughly and humbly, to a faith that is real. I might be right, but I might be wrong – and I’m okay with that. There are far worse things in this world than being wrong. If I’m going to err, I’d rather err on the side of love and grace for all my fellow humans than on the side of judgment and disdain. 

I believe the Gospel saves us from ourselves and leads us into a better life. The seeds of the gospel are flourishing in most religions and in every culture. Loving God by loving others as you love yourself has the power to change the entire world if we embrace the fullness of what that truly means. Resurrection – the belief that life comes despite death – is foundational to understanding how God works through everyone to make all things new.

I don’t need to assent to creeds or commit to an exclusive religion or faith tradition. There are those who don’t consider themselves to be religious and yet they’re more like God in practice than many fundamentalist Evangelicals. These folks have embraced the ethos of loving others as they love themselves; they show this by seeking to free people from the systemic oppression that drapes our world. I am one with persons of color, LGBTQ+ people, and those who find themselves destitute and impoverished. I am with those in prison for crimes they did not commit, for those suffering physical or mental illness, and for the elderly left forgotten in deplorable conditions. I find common cause with the differently abled, the single mothers and childless career women, and all those shattered by the evil in our world. We are not free until we are all free. 

These causes called by the Gospel sound exciting and romantic, especially for the cis het Christian white guys with savior complexes who believe leading others to deconstruction is now their life’s work. However, there have been many painful moments for me. I was going into ministry. That is lost to me now. For the last six years I’ve tried to re-establish my motivation, but it isn’t there. I didn’t realize how much my “calling” to teach was bound up in my Evangelical faith. It was the steam engine of my life, the guiding star, and it’s gone. At nearly forty, its absence causes me to wonder what will ultimately become of my life. I no longer know. And, strangely, I’m at peace with that, even if it’s painful. 

Christians believe God sees the heart. I hope that when or if God sees mine it will prove to be whole and at peace with who I am and how I’ve helped and loved others. I hope that I’ve tried to make the world a better place for everyone – the goal, I believe, of the kingdom of God.

The post Deconstructing Certainty appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

What an awkward phrase that is: “the youth group at my parents’ church.” 

For the longest time, even after I no longer attended their North Texas non-denominational evangelical congregation (another epic phrase), I thought of it as my church. Even after I was aware of the trauma, aware of the terrible theologies and philosophies, aware of abuses that had happened within its walls, I still instinctively claimed it. It was the winter of 2021 before I finally broke the habit and remembered to use “my parents’ church.” 

Because it wasn’t my church. It was never really mine. In high school, after my older brothers had left for college and I was functionally an only child, the majority of my fights with my parents was whether or not I had to attend youth group. I loved the other students in the group and I have fond memories of them (Strangely, many of them have undergone similar journeys to the one I’m about to describe. Curious how that happens, isn’t it?). 

But the theologies and youth leadership that tends to go hand-in-hand with North Texas evangelical churches – sickly sweet, smiling as they throw their verbal barbs, uncaring if they speared my closeted friends – was not for me, in my curiosity and open-heartedness. 

And yet. Here I was, still calling it “my church.” 

My particular brand of religious trauma is arguably tamer than most. I’m a straight white dude, so exactly the demographic North Texas non-denominational evangelical churches tend to appreciate most. But trauma doesn’t have an Olympics; traumatic experiences are unique to the individual. If you freeze when you think of church, if the thought of what you learned in church makes you tear up or get nauseous or have any kind of visceral reaction, congrats, here’s your trauma. 

(The jokes are a coping mechanism. I’m working on it.)

Accepting that I’d been traumatized was only the first step. Like many in my shoes, I flirted with atheism, desperate to find a system that didn’t rely on anything beyond what I could rationally understand. It worked for a while, and I don’t discount that my years denying any kind of higher power other than the mysteries of science were essential in my journey. 

But in my most vulnerable moments, the thought of a universe with nothing else never quite sat right with me. I saw Hubble pictures and felt the mysterium tremendum, the terrible mystery of creation that has no answer. I read so many different books looking for answers – Kierkegaard, Rachel Held Evans, hell, the Bible, unfettered by toxic theologies – and felt something realer, something truer, than what I could explain. I looked out over the northern Pacific Ocean, and felt small in a way that words and logic could not describe.  

God was there for me, in some capacity, and so I couldn’t help but continue to call that North Texas congregation “my church” because that was my first experience of the certainty of God’s existence. Despite having found another church, that North Texas place still had a grip on me.  

What does it mean to move on from fundamentalism? For me, it was acceptance of uncertainty. My parents’ church taught faith as an unwavering devotion to a man-made document that answered any questions you might have about life. My foray into atheism was similarly rooted in a belief that science and logic could answer just about any question. 

I was seeking certainty again. 

But life isn’t like that, is it? A book written by men thousands of years ago doesn’t have all the answers for our complex life together in 2023. We have to constantly hash out the new worlds we live in, preferably over a meal. 

I returned to a semblance of faith in God because those books I read and the experiences I had taught me, at last, to be comfortable with uncertainty. To seek it out and live in that mystery. There’s other ways to do that, sure, but it feels like I chose this. At last, this is my faith. Not my parents’. Not those grinning, too-put-together youth pastors. This is mine. 

At last, this is my faith. Not my parents’. Not those grinning, too-put-together youth pastors. This is mine. 

Faith after fundamentalism makes the mystery make sense to me, as much as it can. It helps me accept and live within uncertainty, the knowledge that some questions will never be answered, and to revel in that. It doesn’t solve the mystery, but then, I don’t think it has to anymore. 

So now I go to church, sometimes. 

There’s a great little Episcopalian church off of Cantrell in West Little Rock. The people are so kind, and so accepting, and so willing to listen to questions. The priest is one of the smartest, most empathetic women I’ve ever met. They have a potluck every Sunday. It’s my church. 

There’s a nice Presbyterian church a block over from my house. The reverend is a man whose booming voice and delightful stories stand next to an absolute care for his flock, a burning desire to serve them in whatever way he can. It’s my church. 

There’s a Methodist church back in Athens, Georgia, that I miss dearly. It’s a scrappy group of people who stand in front of refugees and immigrants. It’s professors and students and veterans who go out after services and feed the unhoused, as Jesus commanded. It’s my church. 

All of these places have made me feel comfortable and happy inside their walls. All these places have invited me to their table with my uncertainty, genuine smiles on their faces, and told me: “Stay, with your questions. We don’t have a lot of answers, but we love you.” 

I think of faith now as, among other things, a community of uncertain people who continue on anyway. Who shrug, alongside me, and say, “We’re doing our best. God helps with that. Want some lunch?” 

The post A Faith of My Own appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

The Shiny Happy People docuseries has taken Arkansas by storm, with details of abuse, oppression, and cult tactics having happened right in our backyard.

The series focuses on the Duggar family’s 19 Kids and Counting show on TLC. It details the family’s involvement with the Institute for Basic Life Principles (IBLP), a fundamentalist ideology that spread through Southern Baptist churches. IBLP was founded by Bill Gothard in the early 1960s, and participants were encouraged to homeschool their children and administer strict authoritarian discipline.

Watching this show has sparked conversations among my college friends about the way we found ourselves in fundamentalist circles in our teens and early twenties. Many of my friends were born and raised IBLP-adjacent, with the same principles of male headship and authority, female submission, and harsh discipline that includes corporal punishment. Figureheads like Dr. James Dobson, Billy Graham, and Jerry Falwell were revered for their willingness to “stand for [their version of] biblical truth.” Often the homes that follow the teachings of these men are indistinguishable from those following Gothard in Shiny Happy People, but for (sometimes) the lack of long skirts and Wisdom Booklets.

As for my friends and I, after leaving our Southern Baptist university, having hard conversations with family and mentors, and sometimes starting families of our own, many have realized that we want a faith that is different from what fundamentalism gave us.

Finding faith after fundamentalism is not easy. Those who were raised from birth in authoritarian religiosity often have complex trauma to untangle, abusive family members to confront or avoid, and many life lessons to unlearn for the sake of their own children.

I, personally, was not raised in a fundamentalist home, but my childhood was traumatic. I was raised by a mom who worked 60+ hour weeks to keep me from knowing her own childhood reality of poverty and dependence on a deeply flawed man of the house. In my search for safety, certainty, and belonging, I found fundamentalism in my teenage years. I remember sitting in the pew alone, but near the families of my friends. We would hear sermons geared toward raising godly sons and daughters, and it was apparent to me that I was an outcast among my friends who were lucky enough to be given a faith script from birth. (At least that’s how I felt at the time.)

Fundamentalism gave me all the answers I needed to the questions my childhood trauma left me with. Fundamentalism always had an answer, and when the answers didn’t make sense or the questions were out of the agreed-upon social boundaries, they could be conveniently shut down, dismissed, or used to question the salvation of the person asking.

The result of this was a feeling of safety that I had never experienced. In order to keep that feeling of safety, I had to squash my questions, pain, and genuine curiosity, and return to the predetermined conclusions I had been given. I learned quickly that my new safe place was only safe if I learned those social boundaries and complied with them quickly. 

When questions came up, I would repeat some version of the refrain (that I now know came from the Heritage Singers), “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” I would assume my unwillingness to take my pastors at their word was a symptom of my own sinfulness, that there was something I had not yet repented of. My upbringing had not occurred under the headship of a Godly male leader, so it was incumbent upon me to train myself in the ways of the Lord now that I was saved. I had to make up for what my upbringing lacked.

Today, even typing these sentences leaves me with a knot in my stomach.

A lot has changed since my framework of belief revolved around fundamentalism. It took time, healing, and lots of grace. I had to come to a place where I want to rebuild my faith without the parts that hurt me and my loved ones. The “how?” of that rebuilding is what I’m trying to figure out now.

Like many of my peers, I’m sorting through the faith I was given and decided what should be kept and what I need to leave behind. To be sure, I’m keeping a lot of good things I was given in the context of faith.

• I’m keeping friends becoming family.
• I’m keeping casserole deliveries to families who are grieving, just had a baby, or are under a lot of stress.
• I’m keeping intergenerational community, and the feeling of privilege when I gain wisdom from someone who was in my season of life four decades ago.
• I’m keeping gathering, breaking bread, and talking about things that matter most in life.
• I’m keeping prayer, because when I am truly at the end of myself, I need connection to God— not certainty of what will happen or a reason for everything, just connection.
• I’m keeping my training in New Testament Greek.
• I’m keeping the seeking of social justice, because before it became an “enemy of the Gospel” to fundamentalists, it was a core value of my faith.
• I’m keeping Sabbath—or at least I’m trying to.

As I type this, I am hearing the voices of male pastors telling me “you can’t pick and choose which parts of the Bible to believe and follow.”

I have many answers to that admonition, many of them biblical retorts. But I left squabbling about the bible in the past a long time ago. It’s not worth it—I have nothing to prove to them anymore. I am free.

Faith after fundamentalism is not easy, but it is worth it. Many of us left high-control religiosity with nothing to anchor us any longer. We were unlearning fundamentalism while grieving former relationships and family, and it was the hardest thing we have ever done.

We don’t have to be Shiny Happy People. We can be authentic, kind humans, living out a faith we are proud of.

There is life after fundamentalism. There is faith after fundamentalism, if you want it.

And life after fundamentalism is abundant and sweet. 

The post Faith After Fundamentalism appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

Head down Razorback Road on a late spring weekend in Fayetteville and you’ll see Canopy city — red and white fabric roofs, boxes of beer, a throw rug or two and maybe an old La-Z-Boy recliner. Under the canopies we find unlikely bedfellows, canopy fellows if you will. The pre-family reunion known as the hog pen. 

Canopy city is where we grab a donut from someone you know well even if you don’t know their name. Or a slice of Domino’s Pizza, a random chicken wing. Under the canopies we take shelter from the rain, from the scorching June sun or the unseasonably cold April wind — whatever the weather sees fit to be that day cause it’s always fickle like that. 

We’re here because we’re queued up to get into the hog pen, the Razorback baseball section that’s essentially a big lawn out behind left field. Sometimes folks line their chairs and pop up canopies days, maybe weeks, in advance of a series. We chat and crack jokes and get rowdy. Swap stories, talk sports. Shoot the shit like good Arkansans do. 

About 90 minutes before first pitch, the pen gates open like the parting of the Red Sea. Only in this moment the tribe of pen family, brothers from another mother, transform into enemies as soon as the gates open. When the Red Sea parts, it’s every man, woman, and child for themselves. All friendship and kinship is suspended for a few minutes of total chaos: Grown men of a well-seasoned age haul ass down the lawn, beer bellies bouncing while wagons of Yeti coolers and Fireball whiskey trail behind. Women sprint like division 1 athletes, steamrolling over anyone or thing in their pathway. Children zoom past the old folk straight to the fence and slide face first into their family’s preferred spot, sacrificing their tiny bodies for a shot at premier baseball viewing. It’s a few glorious, unforgettable minutes of sports fandom. It’s utter insanity. 

Just as quickly as the first 50 people pour into the pen, we’re set up and back to being one another’s chosen family. The Fireball comes right out, the unofficial libation of the hog pen. It’s the most widely used and respected of liquors out here. No, not for its taste, but because it travels well, warms you up when it’s cold, gives gumption, and consoles broken baseball hearts. 

Assigned seating isn’t a thing, as you’ve already gathered. It’s first come, first served but we do have an acknowledgement of everyone’s preferences. There are the berm folks, the ones who set up on the little ledge of a hill ten or so yards back from the fence. Team Berm likes the unobstructed view of the game no matter how dense the front of the pen gets. Our crew sets up at the fence, known as the rail. The rail is coveted; truly the only right and holy view if you care about seeing balls and strikes. It’s the best place to sit if you’re gonna ask me, but nobody did ask me and that’s fine.

The allure of the hog pen is different for each person; it offers an experience that those who sit in chair backs or fancy boxes wouldn’t understand. Bring your kids and shoo them off to play catch. Grill out and have picnics. Make friends with frat bros and county sheriffs and people who drive 7 hours one way in their campers to watch some baseball. Heckle the hell out of the visiting team. Drink your own beer. Pass out homemade cookies. Act a fool. The pen is where life moves a little slower and a little easier. 

We met a guy named Sherman under contentious terms during one of the rail seating conquest moments. On this particular day, we didn’t make the rail and sat behind Sherman on the second row. Feathers got ruffled over chair placement and some biting words were exchanged.

But eventually things settled and Sherman became a beloved baseball brother. He and his wife live out in the boonies, somewhere past Lamar, about a hundred or so miles from Fayetteville. He’s retired and has a tattoo of a body-building Razorback on his right calf. Often he has twin granddaughters in tow who sit in swinging camp chairs made for 8 year-old bodies.

Sherman is of a certain generation and demographic you see a lot of in the pen — country boys in their sunset years watching ball, harkening back to a time when they too could run and throw and hit like those young men out there, in the prime of their youth, playing America’s game. 

There’s Jimmy, pen patriarch, who is always on the rail no matter what. It’s a respect-your-elders type of thing with Jimmy; we all just know he deserves to be in the front. He’s kind and generous, always ready in his straw hat to toss tootsie pops to kids. Jimmy is the easy-going, Tommy-Bahama-wearing, “no bad days” grandpa of the pen who makes everyone feel at home. 

Ten yards behind Jimmy and Co. are the berm regulars —Lancey. Forest. Cam. Brenden, et al. Cam’s been sick but is fighting hard. He shows up to Canopy city with his buttons that say “Cam Kicks Cancer!” and homemade I♡Hogs keychains and bracelets he sells to help pay down medical bills.

The first time I saw Cam was three years ago at a super regional at Baum Stadium. The team was soaring that year and greedy ticket holders were scalping hog pen spots for hundreds of dollars. The hog pen, you should know, is the great equalizer. The Shakespearan theater pit of baseball, where anyone can and should be able to afford a ticket to watch a game. Cam had an empty, torn up Eureka Pizza box he had scribbled “QUIT OVERCHARGING FOR HOG PEN TICKETS” on that he proudly held up all weekend from the berm. 

West of Cam and down at the rail sits Amanda, our official yell leader. Nearby are the trio of nurses, Belinda, Ashley and Z. Kendall with the unmistakable cyclops-looking sunglasses is also at hand. And so is Lance, who always makes his way down the rail during every 7th inning stretch, just so he can shout “allrightyousonsofbitches!” while snapping group selfies with front-rowers every few feet. It’s a beloved tradition and an honor to be in a Lance selfie that is posted the subsequent day on his Facebook page for all the world to see. There’s also Greg, gentle-giant Army vet, and his badass but easygoing wife Jill. Greg’s part of the yellow-hat crew, the ones who sport canary Arkansas ball caps with red As, easily identifiable in a sea of red and white headware faithfuls.

I’d be remiss, of course, if I didn’t mention Rick. The Rick of Razorback fandom royalty. If you know the hogs, you know Rick, who is the ultimate hog lover and a favorite fan often seen on televised Razorback games. Rick dons a visor with fake furry red hair attached, which he calls the Razorback wig, and he’s on a quest to attend 100 Razorback games this year. I think maybe he already did it. He doesn’t just love baseball, he loves supporting every kind of hog team and often bounces from one game to the next if different sports overlap in a season. He wears fake tusks in his mouth, Razorback sneakers and socks that have his wife’s face on them. He rides a beefy motorcycle. Knows everyone’s name. He brings perspective, a good time for all, and a doormat he throws on the hog pen ground to keep his shoes clean when it rains. 

Our home base is in left-center, over by the university’s camera guy who films the outfield action. It’s excellent home run territory and prime real estate to snag a ball or three during batting practice. One season, my partner Ben took a go-ahead home run to the jaw standing in the pen out in left-center. It left a bruise but it was a game-winning hit, so worth it.

We sit by Marc and Cali of Siloam Springs, both of whom work for a Christian card company. Marc runs ultramarathons for fun, and Cali (wo)mans his aid stations. Sometimes their blended family of grown kids cycle through the games with them. Marc wears a tired red bucket hat adorned with Razorback enamel pins and buttons. He’s a Midwestern guy who’s made his home with the hogs. Marc and Cali are happy, down to earth people we love. If things are going well, they both start to dance. Dancing Marc is a special treat; the world wishes it could be so lucky to see him break out his ole’ midwestern white dude moves, overflowing with joy as his body glides along to the stadium sounds of Rhianna or Red Dirt country. 

This season didn’t end how we wanted it to. The hogs were absolutely slaughtered by TCU during our home-hosted regional. The weather was crappy and games were delayed. We didn’t make it to supers or to Omaha.

But it’s okay. We won our conference and we spent hours with our hog family enduring some exceptionally frigid and windy games in one of America’s best collegiate ballparks.

Baum Walker Stadium really is special, and the hog pen is a big part of that. It’s flanked by people who exemplify decades of statewide Razorback fandom — folks who have longed for a national championship and have woo’d pig sooie for longer than I’ve been on this earth. They know the stories and the voices and the ghosts of this game. 

I remember a time before the hog pen existed when baseball wasn’t such a thing in the Natural State. I never thought there’d be enough room for Arkansas to love baseball the way I do, that it would never be able to quit its first love of football. That we’d never find a devotion beyond it.

But by some mysterious, even magical force, baseball has blossomed here. I’ve seen it catch like a fever, spreading its allure with elementary aged kids and pave the way for the explosion of travel ball clubs and city rec leagues. I can see the reverence for what Dave Van Horn has built here these last twenty years or so in Fayetteville through commitment, passion, and perseverance.

We celebrate our pro hogs. We pack out Baum Stadium. We clear a lawn in left field so people can cram in with their coolers and families and friends. A championship looms large, yes it is so close that we can taste it. But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here for the hogs and our chosen family. It’s the trash talk, the delivery pizza, the peanut shells and dusty tracks along the rail that draw us in and keep us coming back. We tolerate the downpours and the spider bites, the tipsy frat guys and the left-sided sunburns because of the joy we feel when we’re together in this place. 

We are the hog pen, and we’re here because we’re home. 

The post Finding home in the hog pen appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

My journey with lung disease began in the Spring of 2022 as I noticed subtle changes in my heart rate, energy level, and appetite.  I also developed a wicked cough that became much worse at the end of the year.

As a self-employed Illustrator and Graphic Designer, I am accustomed to working extremely hard and hustling non-stop.  It’s typical for me to end my year exhausted and burned out.  This was different.

My doctor visits didn’t reveal any obvious culprits.  Some bloodwork indicated that I had low iron.  I was prescribed iron supplements and spent the next two months trying to function in an incredibly compromised state.  

By the end of 2022, it was obvious that I was getting much worse.

In January of 2023, I began a series of lab work that went on for weeks.  I had dozens of vials of blood taken as well as numerous chest X-rays and C/T scans.  The x-rays and scans revealed my lungs were enlarged as well as my lymph nodes.  My physician had various specialists involved and they all came to the same conclusion-they had no idea what was going on.

By February I was clearly fading fast.  My body wasn’t accepting food and even the most basic human activities required prep work and recovery.  Showering demanded I store up my energy, sit in the shower and do my best to avoid fainting. 

I’ve always been a very independent person.  Realizing I could barely rise from the toilet without help was a profound and shocking blow.  

As I saw my doctors multiple times per week they witnessed my unspooling in real time and became increasingly concerned.  On numerous occasions, they debated hospitalizing me simply to stabilize me and keep me alive.  Without a diagnosis, I wasn’t given any sort of treatment since whatever they prescribed could potentially make my condition worse.  

I’ve jokingly told people that I may not have been at death’s door, but I was certainly walking down the hallway.

The sensation of losing yourself bit by bit every day is equal parts terrifying and liberating.  Rather than feeling raw terror, as you might assume, I felt an unexpected sense of calm.  

This isn’t to suggest I wasn’t scared or unnerved but somewhere within myself, those feelings were combatted by a sense of peace and determination.  During this period, I was adrift from time and any shared reality with the world.

My daily existence was stripped down to its most primal essence.  I was focused on my wife, and my kids, doing what I could to survive and accepting my lack of control over the matter.  

Most of this time I was alone, bedridden, and isolated, with my life existing almost exclusively in my mind.  I lacked the energy to read, or verbally communicate easily.  This time was mainly spent taking inventory of my life and utilizing tools I’d developed in therapy to remain positive and grateful.

I prepared final goodbyes with family and friends, considered my obituary, and did what I could to make dealing with my unfinished business as easy as possible for my wife and kids.

At this time, I was placed on full-time oxygen which stopped my fading and provided a small amount of stabilization.  My Pulmonologist ordered a surgical biopsy to finally determine what was occurring in my lungs.  I was also ordered to have an endoscopy to diagnose my worsening cough and a colonoscopy to rule out cancer.

On Tuesday, February 28 I entered Washington Regional Medical Center to have my endoscopy and colonoscopy.  Due to my dependence on oxygen, these procedures had to be done in a hospital with anesthesia.  Despite waking up with ten minutes left in my colonoscopy (Yes!  You read that correctly!) the procedures went well.  

I entered WRMC on Thursday, March 2, and had a surgical biopsy of my lungs that was done with the DaVinci surgical robot.  Thanks to this technology my surgery was less invasive than I’d feared.  The recovery was still extremely painful and due to issues with my drain port required my staying in the hospital for 4 days.

The following weeks involved a painful recovery from surgery with a comical low point of my waking up to my drain port wound leaking like the world’s most disturbing garden statue.

Once my diagnosis was found I was immediately placed on an extremely high dose of steroids.  

Within a week I felt the effects of the steroids.  Although still severely limited I no longer felt like I was fading, but that I was coming back to life.

The lung disease I’m fighting is relatively mysterious and there aren’t obvious answers for me.  I have no idea what caused the disease, or what my long-term prognosis is.  Living with ambiguity is part of my life now.

I’m learning every week what I can and can’t do.  Although I see progress, it’s small, incremental changes and my desire to get back to normal must be controlled.   My limited state is what’s normal, for now at the very least.

Thanks to my wife I have very good health insurance.  However, even with this insurance, we face a mountain of bills and economic uncertainty.

If my treatment doesn’t go well, I may have to go to specialized clinics that deal with this specific disease.  Although I expect a year or more of recovery to see what my “new normal” is I have no idea when I’ll be able to work again or how we’re going to deal with the financial challenges ahead of us.

What I do know is that with my phenomenal wife by my side and the support of my wonderful family and community, I’ll find a way.

Being able to receive the incredible amount of love I’ve been given during this experience has changed me forever.  Outside of survival my focus going forward is sharing that love as much as I can because no one survives alone.

Chad Maupin has been an Illustrator and Graphic Designer since the Clinton Administration. To learn more about his work visit www.big-bot.com. You can also find him on social media: @bigbotdesign.

To donate toward Chad’s medical costs, visit his Go Fund Me page.

The post No One Survives Alone appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

In his heartbreakingly simple song “Speed Trap Town,” contemporary southern sage and roots rock troubadour Jason Isbell sings of the small-town high school football effect: “It’s a boy’s last dream and man’s first loss.” To be young and perpetually hopeful only to eventually come face to face with defeat — this is the coming of age sports story we embrace here in Arkansas.

But what is a Friday autumn night without the bright lights of a football field beckoning us to remember those last dreams and first losses?

Early this spring, Chris Goering asked this very question on a social media post:

I started on the defensive line for three years at little Medicine Lodge, Kansas, and we improved each year, from 3-6 to 7-2 to an undefeated regular season my senior year, 9-0, before running into the private school bullies from Wichita: Wichita Collegiate. (Although they played in the same class as us, they could recruit from the huge city of Wichita and had at least 5 seniors on that team play major Division One football.) We played only with the players living in our small town and public school district. Though it was 27 years ago, this story still stings and it currently reverberates on the high school football field and education landscape of Arkansas.

Medicine Lodge is 100 miles from Anywhere, USA, that most Americans could point to on map. It’s a small agriculture-centered town that has largely stayed in the game all these years because there happened to be a large gypsum deposit nearby, which enables the town’s industry to make and ship wallboard all over the region from there. I love my hometown, and I feel just as connected to it when I return to visit my parents. The people of that town still have my back all these years later. Like most towns in Arkansas, it is a small town a long ways away from any bigger towns.

While I’d love to recount more stories from high school football, what I owe my hometown is to make sure that your kids will continue to be able to form productive identities in small town sports and extracurricular activities, to feel an entire community’s support at their backs in basketball gyms, at the softball diamond, and on the football field. Your kids deserve a chance to host a state playoff game where they cannot see past the people standing around the field and filling both sets of bleachers.

As a former high school (and college) football player turned teacher I believe that Governor Sanders’ new education plan poses a deep threat to all rural schools across the state. I want to preserve important opportunities for our kids and protect the small towns of America.

What the Governor is up to is pretty simple. She deeply wants to open school choice up to the state by adding vouchers for private schools now and create a free-for-all of charter schools later. The problem, as most of you who live in rural areas know, your towns don’t have access to private schools or charter schools, and losing even a few members of your schools to this competition could have disastrous effects.

Charters and private schools don’t outperform public schools, and they don’t often offer comprehensive extracurriculars or sports like football (typically), pathways for young people to be as connected to and as proud as I am of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, all these years later. These schools are not an improvement; they are a means of destroying your towns by taking the schools out at the knees, just as Wichita Collegiate did to us those years ago. They open up public school tax dollars that you and I pay to be wasted, as incidents around the country prove over and over.

With the LEARNS act, Governor Sanders is a 5-star athlete playing quarterback for Wichita Collegiate in 1995. She has all the power and all the advantages in the world on the football field, and she’s coming to your town to not only dash your dreams of holding your communities together but to beat you 42-7. The problem is that with the LEARNS act, not only will the things you love about your town be different, the foundation that the public school provides will be significantly compromised or reduced to rubble.

-Chris Goering, #73

The post a boys last dream and a man’s first loss: saving high school football appeared first on Arkansas Strong.