Snake Handling

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Snake Handling

Throughout most of the twentieth century, snake-handling Appalachian Christians, who refer to their practice as "serpent handling," have been and continue to be part of the region's most sensationalized and least understood religious tradition. Serpent handling epitomizes the religions of Appalachia as the first and often only tradition that comes to mind in the popular national consciousness. Serpent handlers are a small independent Holiness group distinctive to the mountains, small valleys, and plateaus of Appalachia. The most informed estimates average two thousand participants scattered throughout the region, excluding out-migration.

David L. Kimbrough's Taking Up Serpents: Snake Handlers of Eastern Kentucky (1995) affirms that serpent handlers are not peculiar unto themselves but are clearly a part of Appalachia's much larger and older independent, nondenominational Holiness tradition, from which they are distinguished in worship practices and beliefs only by the inclusion of serpent handling, fire handling, and drinking poison. Clear distinctions prevail between different theological traditions of serpent handlers, from Oneness or Jesus Only groups to Trinitarian groups, a common division in the larger Holiness-Pentecostal movements within and outside of Appalachia. As part of Appalachia's larger Holiness tradition, Kimbrough affirms serpent handlers' strong, plain-folk, camp-meeting heritage in the region, stating that their "practices and beliefs represented an intensification and elaboration of traditional norms" (p. 77).

More thorough and persuasive than any other scholar to date, Kimbrough evaluates long-circulating accounts and only recently discovered information that decisively identify the practice's most probable origins long thought to be associated with George W. Hensley. At a revival in 1910 near Cleveland, Tennessee, Hensley took literally Mark 16:18, "They shall take up serpents," as a command Holiness people should keep. Taking Up Serpents also provides a solid social history of serpent handling. It follows the path of the Saylor family of eastern Kentucky, one of Appalachia's premier serpent-handling families, from their Presbyterian heritage, which they brought with them when they first settled in Kentucky at the beginning of the nineteenth century, through their shift to Primitive Baptist Calvinism, and finally to Holiness traditions at the end of the nineteenth century. The Saylor family embraced serpent handling by way of Hensley's work in eastern Kentucky in the early 1930s.

The Saylor family social history demonstrates the strong historical and theological commonalities that unite the varieties of Appalachia's religious traditions rather than their apparent yet misleading differences that are more distinguishing than divisive. Kimbrough also provides a persuasive contextual framework that rejects the cliché of fatalism for a sacramental interpretation of serpent handling that expresses a hope-infused, situational realism.

The crush of media fascination in the 1990s, from best-selling novels and I-was-there accounts to feature stories on Oprah and Dateline NBC, became white-hot following publication of Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia (1995) by Dennis Covington, a New York Times reporter on Appalachia. Covington's repetitive flair for the dramatic more often than not is at the expense of careful accuracy about the real-life people he names and portrays; nonetheless he provides a human face to Appalachia's serpent-handling Christians. As of this writing, popular media continue to highlight serpent handlers as though they stand separate and apart from an all but invisible multitude of interrelated groups that together make Appalachia the nation's largest and—second only to New England—oldest regional religious tradition.