Snake-Handling Survives Skepticism, Death -- Practitioners Put Their Faith To Lethal Test

KINGSTON, Ga. - On a cool, tranquil spring evening in Georgia hill country, the congregation trickles into the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. As older parishioners chat, young couples juggle diaper bags, baby carriers and coloring books, and boys dash around the pews.

Cutting through the mingling churchgoers, three men stride quickly, bearing small wooden boxes they place near the pulpit. A faint buzzing can be heard.

The service begins.

With a warning.

"We have serpents up here," says the Rev. Carl Porter, pastor of the little country church an hour's drive from Atlanta. "There's death in it. There's death in them boxes.

"If the Lord moves on you, obey the Lord. But if you leave 'em right in the boxes, you don't have to worry about it."

A din swells: electric guitar, drums, tambourines and vigorous singing, louder and louder. A hard-rock jam session mixed with the Grand Ole Opry.

Catchy, repetitive lyrics: "Got 'im, got 'im, got 'im on my mind!" "You don't know like I know what he's done for me!" "Well I tried God, I tried God, and I found him to be all right!"

Toe-tapping, hand-clapping, foot-stomping. Hopping and dancing.

Near the pulpit, Porter and three others now carry four-foot-long rattlesnakes, thick and languid, or sleek copperheads, winding and writhing.

They throw the snakes over their shoulders, raise them over their heads, drop them down their shirt fronts, let them coil themselves around their arms.

A wandering boy is taken by the hand and led back to his seat, while near the snake-handling semicircle, a lithe, bearded young man whirls around and around. One woman's hands begin shaking up and down, while another opens her arms wide and falls backward to the floor.

Strange words pour from another woman's mouth. Wailing, gasping congregants hold each other up. One woman beseeches another, tapping firmly on her forehead: "You've got to give in to Jesus! You've got to receive him!"

"Praise Jesus! Praise the Lord!"

The fever rises, and Porter pulls a copperhead up to his face. As its tongue flicks at him, he stares into the tiny dark eyes.

What does he see? Not potential death or even the pain he suffered last year when a bite left one of his fingers blackened and withered.

No, he explains later, he sees the victory of faith over the devil's evil.

From the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 16: "And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them."

The snake-handlers accept those words literally and believe that a holy spirit enters them during the "signs."

"You have your skeptics on everything," says Pastor Charles McGlocklin of New Hope, Ala., who has been handling snakes for more than 20 years. "I don't put people down for not believing. I'm just a poor country boy, and it's hard for me to explain to a well-educated man like you. But I know that it's real."

As many as 3,000 strong, America's snake-handling practitioners meet in plain little out-of-the-way churches, defying mainstream church tradition, skepticism and ridicule, legal crackdowns and death itself to prove their faith.

It is religion done raw and raucous.

"A lot of people are going to church to have a place to go on Sunday and say they went to church. They're trying to make salvation like going to a fast-food restaurant," says McGlocklin. "You've got to get down on your knees and separate yourself from the world, and really have an experience with God."

The numbers of faithful are believed to be in a slow decline. But there remains a dedicated core of followers, many from several generations of snake-handlers, some with relatives who died of bites. Even suffering the painful bites and venom rarely discourages believers.

Origins in Tennessee hills

A few years before World War I, a man named George Went Hensley went up White Oak Mountain near Ooltewah, Tenn., unable to get the verses from Mark out of his mind. There, he said later, he prayed for a sign and soon saw a rattlesnake, which he lifted up and carried down the mountain.

Slowly, he led converts to his teaching that taking up serpents was one of the signs of faith mandated by Jesus to his apostles.

Appalachian migrants carried the practice with them. Today, says Steven Kane, a University of Rhode Island anthropologist, there are regular snake-handling services in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, among others.

The churches are usually called Pentecostal Holiness, but are independent. They are fundamentalist, but they do vary: Some say women can wear makeup, some object. Others disagree on what it means when a handler is bitten.

Various biblical verses spur some to handle fire and tread barefoot on snakes, besides handling them and drinking poison.

There is no knowing when the next service will be a snake-handler's last. For Kale Saylor, 77, of Kentucky, the final service was March 12. A rattlesnake bite claimed his life three days later.

He was at least the 74th victim of a snake-handling service in this century. Even Hensley, the first snake-handler, died of snakebite in 1955.

Feels an "anointing"

Free-lance journalist Dennis Covington, a Birmingham, Ala., native and a convert to snake-handling, thinks often of the "anointing" he feels as he holds a snake, that feeling that followers say comes from the divine.

"It was a complete absence of fear, a sense that I was being obedient. When I actually picked it up, everything started to fade; the congregation, the church, started to fade out.

"That's when I understood there is power, there's a spiritual ecstasy in the believer giving up a sense of self."

Several states outlawed snake-handling in the 1940s, and some practitioners were jailed. But the snake-handlers saw themselves as martyrs, much like the early Christians, and many simply became more determined.

It is still outlawed in some states, but prosecutions are rare.

There are less-risky aspects to the services. Once the snakes are returned to their boxes at the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, the pace slows. There are readings from six biblical verses that refer to serpents, then singing of country gospel, a sermon and "testifying" by congregants about their faith.

Porter says one couple no longer attends because of job-related pressure to stay away. Terry Garrett, 32, goes to the pulpit to tell of derogatory comments from fellow college-educated employees at an automobile company.

"We're not all worked up, we're not in a trance, we're not three-quarters ignorant," says Garrett, who says he has handled dozens of poisonous snakes, eaten rat poison and drunk battery acid and strychnine during services. "It's perfect love."

Academicians respect them

"I have great respect for these people," said Scott Schwartz, among a handful of academicians who have studied snake-handling for decades. "They're just regular, nice people who happen to handle serpents and handle fire. Basically, I'm in awe over these people's ability to do these things."

Researchers have interviewed participants and recorded services. They have taken electroencephalograms during a snake-handling and analyzed blood samples taken before, during and after a service to document physiological changes during the "anointing."

"The medical evidence we've presented basically says something goes on. We don't have enough evidence to say what," said Schwartz, an archivist at the Smithsonian Institution.