Case Study 1: Snake Handling — The Most Sensationalized, Least Representative Practice

The Photograph You Have Already Seen

You have almost certainly seen the photograph. Or one like it. A man in a small, wood-paneled room, sweat on his face, eyes closed or rolled heavenward, holding a timber rattlesnake above his head with both hands while other worshippers around him sway, hands raised, mouths open in prayer or song. The image is arresting. It is meant to be. It has appeared in magazines, newspapers, documentaries, and coffee-table photography books for the better part of a century. It has come to represent, in the popular imagination, what religion looks like in Appalachia.

It does not.

That photograph, however genuine its content, represents the religious practice of an infinitesimal fraction of Appalachian worshippers. But it has shaped outsiders' perceptions of mountain religion more than any other single image, and understanding why — understanding what the fixation on snake handling reveals about the relationship between Appalachia and the rest of America — is as important as understanding the practice itself.

This case study examines snake handling on its own terms: its origins, its theology, its practitioners, and its actual place in the ecology of Appalachian religion. It also examines the outsized attention the practice has received, and what that attention tells us about how America looks at Appalachia.

Origins: George Went Hensley and the Grasshopper Community

The origins of snake handling as a regular feature of worship are associated with George Went Hensley, a Holiness preacher in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. The traditional account holds that around 1910, Hensley was preaching on White Oak Mountain in Grasshopper, Tennessee (near present-day Cleveland) when he interpreted Mark 16:17-18 as a direct commandment to believers — not a metaphor, not a description of what might happen, but an instruction about what must happen if faith was genuine.

"They shall take up serpents."

According to the account, Hensley handled a rattlesnake during the service and was not bitten. The congregation was electrified. Word spread through the mountain communities, and within a few years, snake handling had been incorporated into the worship of a small number of Holiness-Pentecostal congregations in Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and the Carolinas.

The historical details are murkier than this clean origin story suggests. Some scholars have questioned whether Hensley was truly the first, noting reports of serpent handling in religious contexts that predate his ministry. The Church of God in Cleveland, Tennessee — the Pentecostal denomination headquartered near Hensley's home territory — incorporated snake handling into some of its services in the early twentieth century before eventually distancing itself from the practice as it sought mainstream respectability. A.J. Tomlinson, the Church of God's early leader, reportedly handled snakes in services but later moved the denomination away from requiring or even encouraging the practice.

What is clear is that by the 1920s and 1930s, a small network of independent Holiness-Pentecostal congregations across central and southern Appalachia had made snake handling a regular feature of worship — not an occasional event but a sustained practice, grounded in a specific theological interpretation and carried out with full knowledge of the physical risks involved.

George Went Hensley himself died of snakebite in 1955, during a service in Florida. He was seventy-five years old.

The Theology: Why They Do It

To understand snake handling, you must take its theology seriously. Practitioners are not thrill-seekers. They are not mentally ill. They are not performing for cameras. They are doing what they believe God has commanded them to do, and they are doing it in the face of a risk they understand perfectly well.

The theological foundation rests on several interlocking convictions:

Literal biblical authority. Snake handlers read Mark 16:17-18 as a straightforward commandment, not a metaphor. The same passage that says believers will "speak with new tongues" (which Pentecostals practice as speaking in tongues) and "lay hands on the sick" (which Pentecostals practice as faith healing) also says they will "take up serpents." To accept the first two commands while rejecting the third is, in this reading, to pick and choose from scripture — to obey God when it is convenient and disobey when it is dangerous.

Faith as risk. The handling of venomous snakes is understood as a demonstration of faith — not in the sense that faith guarantees protection from harm (handlers know they can be bitten, and many have been, some fatally), but in the sense that obedience to God requires accepting the possibility of harm. To refuse to handle serpents out of fear is to allow fear to override faith. The danger is not denied; it is the point. Faith that costs nothing proves nothing.

The anointing. Practitioners typically describe the act of handling a snake as occurring under a specific spiritual condition they call "the anointing" — a felt sense of God's presence and direction that tells the believer it is time to take up the serpent. Handling outside the anointing — out of pride, showmanship, or the desire to prove something — is considered dangerous and spiritually improper. The anointing is understood as God's specific, moment-by-moment direction, and it cannot be conjured or controlled. A believer might feel the anointing in one service and not in another. The serpent sits in its box until someone feels called to take it up.

Death as God's will. When a handler is bitten and dies — and this has happened, repeatedly, across the history of the practice — the death is understood not as a failure of faith but as God's sovereign will. Many snake-handling congregations also refuse medical treatment for snakebite, interpreting the same scripture passage (Mark 16:18: "if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them") as prohibiting the use of medicine. Seeking medical help is, in this framework, a failure of faith — a refusal to trust God's outcome, whatever it may be.

This theology is internally consistent, rooted in a specific interpretive tradition, and held with a sincerity that should not be doubted even by those who find the practice incomprehensible. To dismiss snake handlers as ignorant or crazy is to refuse to engage with a theological position on its own terms — and it is, not incidentally, the same kind of condescension that has been directed at Appalachian people and their beliefs for well over a century.

The Scale: How Many People Actually Do This?

This is where the conversation must get honest.

At the practice's peak in the mid-twentieth century, snake-handling congregations could be found across much of central and southern Appalachia — in eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, southern West Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and parts of Georgia and Alabama. But even at this peak, the total number of congregations was small — perhaps a few hundred at most — and the total number of regular practitioners was a tiny fraction of the region's churchgoing population.

Today, reliable estimates place the number of active snake-handling congregations at somewhere between forty and one hundred, with most clustered in a few areas of eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, and southern West Virginia. The total number of regular participants — people who attend snake-handling services with any regularity, whether or not they personally handle snakes — is estimated at a few thousand.

A few thousand out of twenty-five million.

The Appalachian region contains tens of thousands of Baptist churches, thousands of Methodist churches, thousands of Pentecostal and Holiness churches, hundreds of Presbyterian, Catholic, and Episcopal churches, and a growing number of nondenominational evangelical megachurches. The snake-handling congregations represent a fraction of a fraction of a percent of this landscape. They are, statistically, invisible.

And yet.

The Outsider Gaze: Why the Fascination?

The amount of media attention devoted to Appalachian snake handling is staggeringly disproportionate to the practice's actual prevalence. A partial list of major media coverage would include multiple feature-length documentaries, several reality television shows, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, multiple photography exhibitions, and at least a dozen books. The practice has been covered by National Geographic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, Vice, and virtually every other major media outlet. Several documentaries have won or been nominated for significant awards.

Compare this coverage to the attention devoted to, say, the tradition of Decoration Day cemetery cleanings, which involves vastly more Appalachian people and tells vastly more about the actual practice of mountain religion. Or the shape-note singing conventions that have been meeting continuously for over a century. Or the women's missionary societies that have fed, clothed, and cared for Appalachian communities for generations. These practices are, from a journalistic perspective, unremarkable. They are not exotic. They do not make for dramatic photographs.

The fixation on snake handling tells us more about the observers than the observed. Several dynamics are at work:

The exotic gaze. Snake handling confirms the outsider's expectation that Appalachia is a strange, dangerous, pre-modern place where people do things that civilized people do not do. It satisfies a desire for the primitive that has deep roots in how America relates to its mountain region. The same impulse that sent nineteenth-century "local color" writers into the mountains to catalogue the quaint customs of the "contemporary ancestors" (a condescending concept explored in Chapter 14) sends twenty-first-century documentary filmmakers to snake-handling churches to catalogue the dangerous customs of people who apparently live outside the bounds of modern rationality.

The spectacle imperative. Media coverage gravitates toward the dramatic, the visual, the immediately compelling. A woman holding a rattlesnake above her head is a better photograph than a woman organizing a church supper. The economics of media attention reward the sensational and punish the ordinary, creating a systematic distortion in which the least representative practices receive the most coverage.

The confirmation of prejudice. For audiences who already hold negative stereotypes about Appalachian people — that they are ignorant, superstitious, backwards, dangerous — snake handling serves as confirmation. It validates the belief that mountain people are fundamentally different from (and inferior to) the educated, rational, modern observers watching from outside. The coverage rarely contextualizes the practice within the broader landscape of Appalachian religion. It rarely notes how few people actually do it. The implicit message is: this is what those people are like.

The refusal to see the ordinary. The flip side of the fascination with snake handling is the disinterest in ordinary Appalachian religion. The Missionary Baptist church that runs a food pantry serving two hundred families a week is not exotic. The Primitive Baptist congregation that has been singing the same hymns for two hundred years is not dramatic. The minister who works at the hardware store Monday through Saturday and preaches on Sunday is not a good subject for a Vice documentary. And so the actual religious life of the mountains — the life that sustains millions of people — remains invisible, while the practice of a few thousand becomes the defining image.

The People Behind the Practice

None of this should erase the actual practitioners from the conversation. They are real people with genuine convictions, and they deserve to be understood rather than merely gawked at or dismissed.

Dennis Covington's Salvation on Sand Mountain (1995), one of the most thoughtful accounts of snake-handling communities, describes the practitioners he encountered as deeply sincere, tightly bonded, and acutely aware of the risks they take. They are not ignorant of the danger. Many have been bitten. Some carry the scars — swollen hands, missing fingers, lingering pain from tissue damage. They have watched friends and family members die. They continue because they believe they are obeying God, and they consider obedience more important than safety.

The communities are small, intimate, and often kin-based. Many snake-handling congregations are essentially extended families who worship together, and the decision to handle serpents is embedded in a web of family tradition, communal expectation, and personal conviction that is far more complex than a simple reading of a Bible verse. Young people grow up watching their parents and grandparents handle snakes. The practice is learned, socialized, and transmitted through the same channels that transmit any other family tradition.

It is also, increasingly, dying out. The snake-handling congregations are aging. Young people are leaving for larger, more conventional churches — or for no church at all. The isolation that once insulated these communities from outside influence has eroded. The legal pressures (snake handling is illegal in most Appalachian states, though enforcement is sporadic) have not eliminated the practice, but they have discouraged its growth. Within a generation or two, snake handling as a regular feature of Appalachian worship may effectively cease to exist.

The legal history of snake handling adds another layer to the story. Following several high-profile deaths, most Appalachian states passed laws prohibiting the handling of venomous snakes in religious services. Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama all have statutes or judicial rulings restricting or banning the practice.

Enforcement has been inconsistent. Prosecutors are often reluctant to bring charges against religious practitioners, both because of constitutional concerns (the First Amendment's protection of religious exercise) and because of practical considerations (juries in mountain communities may be sympathetic to defendants). When charges have been brought, they have typically followed a death, and convictions have been rare.

The legal question is genuinely difficult. The right to practice one's religion freely is a foundational American value. But the state also has an interest in preventing foreseeable, preventable deaths — particularly when children may be present at services where venomous snakes are handled. The tension between religious liberty and public safety has never been fully resolved in the snake-handling context, and the declining number of practitioners has reduced the urgency of the question without eliminating it.

What the Case Study Teaches

The story of snake handling in Appalachia teaches several things at once.

It teaches that a sincere, internally consistent religious practice can exist outside the bounds of what mainstream culture considers reasonable — and that the mainstream's reaction to such a practice reveals as much about the mainstream as about the practitioners.

It teaches that media attention is not proportional to significance — that the most covered phenomenon in a region may be among the least representative, and that the distortion this creates can be more damaging than ignorance.

It teaches that the relationship between Appalachia and the rest of America is structured by an exotic gaze that seeks out the strange and ignores the ordinary, creating a funhouse-mirror image that serves the needs of the observer rather than reflecting the reality of the observed.

And it teaches, finally, that taking a practice seriously — understanding its theology, its social context, its actual scale — is fundamentally different from either celebrating it or condemning it. Understanding is not endorsement. But understanding is necessary if we are to see Appalachian religion for what it actually is, rather than what outsiders want it to be.

Discussion Questions

  1. The chapter argues that the media fixation on snake handling tells us more about the observers than the observed. Do you agree? Can you identify other examples — in Appalachia or elsewhere — where media coverage of a small, atypical practice has distorted public understanding of a larger culture?

  2. Snake handling is based on a literal interpretation of Mark 16:17-18. Most Christians interpret this passage differently — as metaphorical, as applicable only to the apostolic age, or as descriptive rather than prescriptive. How do we evaluate competing interpretations of scripture without dismissing the practitioners of any interpretation as ignorant? Is it possible to take a practice seriously without endorsing it?

  3. The snake-handling tradition is declining and may not survive another generation. Does this represent a loss? If so, what exactly is being lost — a sincere expression of faith, a cultural tradition, a historical curiosity? Is there a meaningful difference between allowing a tradition to die naturally and actively suppressing it?

  4. Dennis Covington, a journalist who covered snake-handling communities, found himself drawn into the practice and eventually handled a snake himself before pulling back. What does his experience suggest about the power of community to shape individual behavior? What are the ethical responsibilities of journalists and researchers who enter communities with unfamiliar practices?

  5. If you were producing a documentary about Appalachian religion, how would you ensure that snake handling was presented in appropriate proportion to the broader religious landscape? What other practices or institutions would you include, and why?