Chapter 29: Faith in the Hollers — Religion in Appalachian Life

"The preacher was a farmer like the rest of us. He plowed the same dirt Monday through Saturday and stood up Sunday to tell us what God had laid on his heart. Nobody paid him for it. He did it because he was called, and we listened because we knew he understood what it meant to lose a crop." — Oral history interview, Floyd County, Kentucky, 1978, Appalachian Oral History Project

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Describe the major Protestant traditions in Appalachia — Baptist (Regular, Missionary, Primitive), Methodist, Presbyterian, Holiness, and Pentecostal — and explain how each shaped mountain communities differently
2. Analyze the church as community infrastructure extending far beyond worship — including mutual aid, social networks, dispute resolution, and identity formation
3. Contextualize snake handling as the most sensationalized and least representative practice in Appalachian religion
4. Evaluate religion's complex, often contradictory role in both supporting and opposing social change — from labor organizing to civil rights to contemporary politics

The Sound That Carries

Before you see the church, you hear the singing.

In the hollers of eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia, in the coves of western North Carolina and the ridges of southwestern Virginia, the sound of congregational hymns drifting through open windows on a summer Sunday morning has been one of the defining sounds of mountain life for more than two centuries. Not polished choir music — not the four-part harmonies of a well-funded urban congregation — but something rawer, older, more urgent. Voices rising together in a minor key, sometimes lined out phrase by phrase by a song leader, sometimes breaking free into the keening, ornamental style that scholars call shape-note singing — a system of musical notation, using differently shaped noteheads to represent different pitches, that allowed congregations without formal musical training to learn and sing complex hymns. Shape-note singing spread through Appalachia in the early nineteenth century and never entirely left.

The sound matters because it tells you something that no demographic survey or theological treatise can fully communicate: religion in Appalachia has never been primarily about doctrine. It has been about community. About belonging. About having a place where your voice — your literal, physical voice — joins with the voices of your neighbors in something that transcends the hardships of Monday through Saturday. The theology is important, and we will examine it closely. But the lived experience of Appalachian religion begins with the fact that church was, for most mountain people across most of the region's history, the central institution of community life. More central than the school. More central than the government. In the company town era, often more central than the company itself — because the company could close the mine, but it could not close the church that met in someone's living room.

This chapter traces the religious history of Appalachia from the earliest frontier congregations through the contemporary evangelical landscape, paying attention to what mountain religion actually looked like from the inside rather than what it looked like to the parade of outside observers — journalists, sociologists, documentary filmmakers — who have been coming to the mountains for a century to gawk at the most exotic manifestations of mountain faith while ignoring the quiet, steady, world-sustaining religion that happened every Sunday in ten thousand ordinary churches across the region.

The Frontier Foundations: Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians

The Baptists: Three Traditions, Not One

To say that Appalachia is "Baptist country" is true but misleading, because it implies a uniformity that has never existed. The Baptist tradition in the mountains splintered into at least three major streams, each with its own theology, its own worship style, its own relationship to the community — and understanding the differences between them tells you more about Appalachian religious life than any single generalization.

The Regular Baptists were the earliest Baptist presence in many mountain communities, arriving with the first waves of Scots-Irish and English settlers in the late eighteenth century. Regular Baptists held to a moderate Calvinist theology — they believed in predestination but not in the extreme form that made evangelism pointless. Their worship was dignified but not stiff, their congregations self-governing, their preachers typically unpaid and drawn from the community. The Regular Baptist church was, in many hollers, the first permanent institution of any kind — preceding the school, the store, and certainly the government. It served as meeting house, courtroom, social hall, and moral authority rolled into one.

The Missionary Baptists represented the evangelical impulse within the Baptist tradition. Emerging in the early nineteenth century and growing rapidly after the great revival movements of the 1800s, Missionary Baptists believed in active evangelism — that Christians had a duty to spread the gospel, support missions, fund Sunday schools, and organize for the conversion of the unconverted. They were more outward-looking than the Regular Baptists, more willing to cooperate with broader denominational structures, and more likely to build the larger, more visible churches that outside observers noticed. By the late nineteenth century, Missionary Baptist congregations were the most numerous Protestant churches across much of central and southern Appalachia.

The Primitive Baptists went in the opposite direction. Sometimes called "Hardshell Baptists" or "Old School Baptists," the Primitive Baptists rejected the entire missionary enterprise as unbiblical innovation. They opposed Sunday schools, missionary societies, theological seminaries, musical instruments in worship, and any organized effort to convert nonbelievers. Their theology was strictly Calvinist: God had already chosen who would be saved, and human effort could neither help nor hinder that divine decision. Their worship was spare and powerful — unaccompanied hymns lined out by a leader, long extemporaneous prayers, sermons delivered in the distinctive chanted preaching style that is one of the most recognizable (and least understood) features of traditional mountain religion.

Chanted preaching — sometimes called "the tone" or "holy whine" — is a sermonic delivery in which the preacher begins speaking normally but gradually shifts into a rhythmic, almost musical cadence, with each phrase rising to a melodic peak and then falling, the congregation responding with murmured affirmations. The style has deep roots, possibly in the preaching traditions of West Africa (brought to the mountains by Black Appalachian worshippers) and the Celtic oral traditions of Scots-Irish settlers. It is an art form requiring enormous skill, and those who dismiss it as primitive or unsophisticated have simply never listened carefully enough to recognize what it actually is: a sophisticated integration of speech, music, and communal participation that can sustain a congregation's attention and emotional engagement for an hour or more.

The Primitive Baptist refusal to pay ministers was not merely thrifty — it was theological. They believed that a paid minister was a corrupted minister, beholden to whoever signed the check. Their preachers worked the land, ran stores, taught school, or mined coal alongside their congregants. They preached because they felt called, not because they were hired. This created a relationship between minister and congregation that was fundamentally different from the professionalized clergy model of mainline Protestantism. The Primitive Baptist preacher did not descend from a seminary to instruct his flock. He rose from within the community to speak for it.

The Methodist Circuit Riders

If the Baptists planted themselves in the hollers and stayed, the Methodists came riding through.

The circuit rider — an itinerant Methodist preacher who traveled a regular route through scattered frontier communities, preaching in homes, barns, courthouses, and open fields — was one of the most important religious figures in early Appalachian history. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Methodist circuit riders like Francis Asbury covered astonishing distances on horseback, bringing organized Protestant worship to communities too small and too isolated to support a resident minister.

Francis Asbury, the first Methodist bishop in America, crossed the Appalachian Mountains more than sixty times during his decades of ministry. His journal, one of the great primary documents of frontier religion, records a life of extraordinary physical hardship — fording swollen rivers, sleeping in cabins with dirt floors, preaching to congregations of a dozen people who had walked miles through the rain to hear him. Asbury was not Appalachian by birth, but he understood mountain people in a way that many later observers did not, and his tireless traveling established Methodist congregations across the region that persist to this day.

The Methodist system was ideally suited to the dispersed settlement patterns of the mountains. Where Baptists required a congregation large enough to call and sustain a preacher, the Methodist circuit system could serve tiny, scattered communities by rotating a single minister through a circuit of preaching stations. The circuit rider might visit a particular community only once a month, but that monthly visit became a social event as much as a religious one — a reason for families from adjacent hollers to gather, exchange news, conduct business, and strengthen the social bonds that made survival in an isolated landscape possible.

Methodism also brought something that the strict Calvinism of the Primitive Baptists did not: a theology of human agency. The Methodist Arminian tradition taught that salvation was available to all who chose to accept it — that individuals had genuine free will in matters of the soul. This theological optimism resonated with frontier people who were, in every other dimension of their lives, exercising agency — clearing land, building homes, creating communities from wilderness. The idea that you could also choose your own salvation fit the psychological landscape of the frontier as naturally as the circuit rider's horse fit its mountain trails.

The Presbyterians: Education and Institution-Building

The Presbyterians came to the mountains with the Scots-Irish migration of the eighteenth century, and they brought something that distinguished them from both the Baptists and the Methodists: an institutional tradition rooted in education.

Presbyterian polity required an educated clergy. Where Baptist preachers could be (and often were) men with no formal education beyond the Bible itself, Presbyterian ministers had to be trained — in theology, in biblical languages, in the intellectual traditions of Reformed Christianity. This requirement meant that where Presbyterians settled, schools followed. Some of the earliest academies and colleges in the Appalachian region were Presbyterian foundations: Maryville College in Tennessee (1819), Centre College in Kentucky (1819), and dozens of smaller academies that provided the only formal education available in mountain communities for decades.

The Presbyterian commitment to education would later manifest in the settlement school movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — institutions like the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky (1902), where educated women from outside the region came to provide schooling, medical care, and cultural programming to mountain communities. The settlement schools were complicated institutions — genuinely helpful in providing educational access but also carriers of a condescending attitude toward mountain culture that sometimes did as much harm as good. We will encounter them again in later discussions of Appalachian education and reform.

But in the early period, the Presbyterian contribution was straightforward and significant: they built schools. In a region where formal education was scarce and literacy was a hard-won achievement, the Presbyterians invested in the life of the mind in ways that shaped the mountains for generations.

The Fire Falls: The Holiness Movement and the Rise of Pentecostalism

The Holiness Rupture

In the decades after the Civil War, something shifted in Appalachian Protestantism. The established churches — Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian — had grown respectable. Their buildings were bigger. Their ministers were better educated. Their services were more orderly. And for a significant number of mountain people, this respectability felt like betrayal.

The Holiness movement emerged in the late nineteenth century as a rebellion against what its adherents saw as the spiritual deadness of mainstream Protestantism. Drawing on the Methodist doctrine of sanctification — the belief that a Christian could achieve, through a second definitive spiritual experience after conversion, a state of complete freedom from willful sin — the Holiness movement insisted on a more intense, more experiential, more emotionally immediate form of worship than the increasingly sedate mainline churches were offering.

Holiness preachers called for visible evidence of the Spirit's work: shouting, weeping, falling prostrate, speaking in unknown languages, physical manifestations of divine presence that could not be faked or formalized. They rejected the growing materialism of American culture and the churches that accommodated it. Their worship services were long, loud, and unpredictable. Their theology was strict: no alcohol, no tobacco, no dancing, no worldly entertainment, modest dress, total separation from "the world."

The Holiness movement did not originate in Appalachia — it had roots in urban revivals and Wesleyan theology — but it found in the mountains a population that was ready for it. Mountain people who had watched their churches become more formal, their ministers more distant, their worship more controlled found in the Holiness movement a return to what they understood as authentic Christianity: raw, direct, unmediated by institutional respectability.

Pentecostalism Arrives

The Holiness movement was the seedbed. Pentecostalism was the explosion.

The Pentecostal movement, which traces its American origins to the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles (1906), emphasized the baptism of the Holy Spirit as a distinct experience accompanied by specific supernatural gifts — most notably glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. Where the Holiness movement had called for a second blessing of sanctification, Pentecostalism added a third: the baptism of the Spirit, evidenced by speaking in languages unknown to the speaker but understood as divine communication.

Pentecostalism spread through Appalachia like fire through dry brush. The Church of God, headquartered in Cleveland, Tennessee — right at the edge of the Appalachian mountains — became one of the fastest-growing religious organizations in the region. Founded in 1886 by Richard Spurling and reorganized under Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson in the early 1900s, the Church of God combined Holiness strictness with Pentecostal expressiveness and a deeply democratic ecclesiology. Its preachers were ordinary men and women — yes, women preached in early Pentecostalism in ways that would later be curtailed — who claimed direct divine authorization for their ministry.

The appeal of Pentecostalism in Appalachia was not difficult to understand. It offered what the mainline churches increasingly did not: emotional intensity, communal ecstasy, a sense of direct divine presence, and the radical egalitarianism of a movement in which the Spirit could fall on anyone — poor or rich, educated or illiterate, Black or white, male or female. In the coal camps and mill towns of early twentieth-century Appalachia, where working people had little control over their economic lives and less over their political circumstances, the Pentecostal church offered a space where ordinary people could exercise spiritual authority, experience transcendence, and belong to a community that valued them not for their economic productivity but for their spiritual gifts.

The growth was explosive. Between 1900 and 1940, Pentecostal and Holiness congregations multiplied across the Appalachian region, often meeting in storefronts, private homes, brush arbors, and converted commercial buildings. Many of these congregations were independent — affiliated with no denomination, answerable to no hierarchy, governed only by the preacher and the congregation. This independence was both strength and vulnerability: it allowed for extraordinary flexibility and responsiveness to local needs, but it also meant that there was no institutional check on charismatic leaders who might abuse their authority.

The Farmer-Preacher: Ministry Without a Paycheck

One of the most distinctive — and most misunderstood — features of Appalachian religious life is the tradition of the farmer-preacher (sometimes called the bivocational minister): a man who worked the land, the mine, or the mill alongside his congregants during the week and stood up on Sunday to preach. He was not paid for preaching, or was paid so little that the payment was essentially symbolic — a few dollars in the collection plate, some canned goods, a share of someone's garden.

The farmer-preacher tradition was not a sign of poverty or backwardness, though outside observers often interpreted it that way. It was a deliberate theological and cultural choice, rooted in several convictions that ran deep in mountain religion.

First, the conviction that ministry was a calling, not a career. A man preached because God told him to preach, not because he had chosen ministry as a profession. Professionalizing the call — going to seminary, seeking a salaried position, treating ministry as a job — was seen by many mountain congregations as fundamentally corrupting. It turned the preacher into an employee and the congregation into an employer, distorting the spiritual relationship between them.

Second, the conviction that a preacher who shared his congregation's daily life understood their struggles in a way that an outsider could not. The farmer-preacher knew what it meant to lose a tobacco crop to hail. The miner-preacher knew what it meant to crawl on your belly through a two-foot coal seam, knowing that the mountain above you had already killed men you grew up with. When such a man stood up on Sunday and spoke about faith in the face of suffering, his words carried an authority that no seminary degree could confer.

Primary Source Excerpt — Loyal Jones, Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands (1999): "The old-time preacher was not a professional. He was a farmer or miner or timber cutter who felt called to preach. His authority came not from ordination or education but from the community's recognition that God had set him apart... He spoke their language, shared their hardships, and knew their sorrows because they were his own."

Third, the refusal to pay a minister was a form of economic democracy. A paid preacher was inevitably dependent on whoever controlled the money — in the company town era, this meant the coal company. Companies frequently built churches in their towns and subsidized ministers who could be counted on to preach obedience, patience, and the virtue of accepting one's station. The farmer-preacher, by contrast, owed nothing to the company. He could say what his conscience demanded because his livelihood did not depend on anyone's approval of his sermons.

This independence would become critically important during the labor wars. While company-sponsored ministers preached submission, independent farmer-preachers and Holiness ministers sometimes became the most outspoken supporters of unionization — not despite their religious convictions but because of them.

Footwashing, Communion, and the Rituals of Belonging

Among the most distinctive — and most moving — rituals in traditional Appalachian worship is the practice of footwashing, observed by Old Regular Baptists, Primitive Baptists, and some other traditional congregations as a religious ordinance based on John 13:14-15, in which Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and instructed them to do likewise.

In the footwashing service, members kneel before one another, remove shoes and socks, and wash each other's feet in basins of water, drying them with towels. The act is deliberately humbling. The lawyer washes the feet of the coal miner. The deacon washes the feet of the newest member. Age, status, and social position are suspended in an act of mutual service that is simultaneously physical and spiritual.

For observers unfamiliar with the practice, footwashing can appear strange — another exotic ritual for the outside cameras. But for those who participate, it is profoundly intimate. You are touching another person's bare feet. You are kneeling before someone you may have argued with last week. You are enacting, in the most concrete physical terms possible, the Christian ethic of humble service. The tears that flow during footwashing services — and they flow freely, among men and women alike — are not performative. They are the release of emotional barriers in a moment of genuine human connection.

Footwashing was often combined with the communion service (called "the Lord's Supper" in most Baptist traditions), creating a day-long or even weekend-long observance that was among the most emotionally intense experiences in mountain religious life. The combination of communion, footwashing, and the extended singing and preaching that accompanied them produced a communal experience of extraordinary depth — an experience that bound the congregation together in ways that no ordinary Sunday service could match.

The Old Regular Baptists — a tradition particularly strong in eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia — maintained these rituals with meticulous fidelity across generations. An Old Regular Baptist communion and footwashing service in 2020 would have been recognizable to a participant from 1820: the same hymns (lined out, unaccompanied), the same scriptural readings, the same physical acts of washing, the same tears. This continuity was not accidental. It was deliberate — a theological commitment to preserving the faith "as it was delivered to the saints," unchanged by the innovations of modernity.

Women in Appalachian Religion: Power Within Constraints

The role of women in Appalachian religion was complex, contradictory, and more powerful than the formal theology of most mountain churches would suggest.

On the formal level, the major Baptist traditions restricted women's roles sharply. Women could not preach, could not serve as deacons (in most congregations), and could not hold positions of formal authority in church governance. The theological justification was drawn from Paul's letters (1 Corinthians 14:34-35, 1 Timothy 2:12), and it was enforced with the same seriousness that mountain churches applied to all questions of biblical interpretation.

But the formal restrictions told only part of the story. In practice, women were the backbone of Appalachian religious life. They organized the church suppers, maintained the benevolence funds, ran the Sunday schools, coordinated the cemetery cleanings, managed the social networks that held communities together, and did the invisible labor of care — cooking for the sick, sitting with the dying, clothing the children of bereaved families — that was the church's most important community function. The institution could not have survived without them, and everyone knew it, even when the formal theology did not acknowledge it.

The Holiness and early Pentecostal movements offered women something the Baptist and Methodist traditions often did not: the opportunity to preach. Early Pentecostalism's emphasis on the gifts of the Spirit — gifts that were distributed by God without regard to gender — created space for women preachers, prophets, and worship leaders. Women like Aimee Semple McPherson (who, though not Appalachian, influenced Pentecostal practice in the mountains) demonstrated that women could command large audiences and build significant religious organizations. In the smaller Holiness and Pentecostal congregations of the mountains, women who felt called to preach sometimes found communities willing to hear them — communities that valued the anointing of the Spirit over the restrictions of traditional gender roles.

This opening was never complete, and it narrowed over the course of the twentieth century as Pentecostal denominations institutionalized and adopted more conservative gender norms. But in the early period — the years of explosive growth before institutional consolidation — Pentecostalism in Appalachia offered women a degree of spiritual authority that was unavailable in the older traditions.

The tension between women's formal subordination and their actual indispensability is one of the central paradoxes of Appalachian religion. It mirrors a broader tension in mountain society, where women's contributions to family and community survival were essential but officially subordinate — where the labor of women sustained the structures that the authority of men governed.

The Church as Community Infrastructure

More Than Worship

Ask an elderly Appalachian woman what the church meant to her family and she will not begin with theology. She will tell you about the time the church took up a collection when her father was injured in the mine. She will tell you about the women who brought food every day for two weeks when her mother was sick. She will tell you about the decoration day when the whole community cleaned the cemetery and the older people told stories about the dead, keeping memory alive across generations. She will tell you about the church supper where she met her husband and the revival meeting where her son found his way back from drinking.

The church in Appalachian communities functioned as community infrastructure — a network of mutual support, social organization, and collective identity that extended far beyond the Sunday morning service. In communities with minimal government services, no organized charity, no social workers, and no safety net, the church was the safety net.

Mutual aid operated through both formal and informal channels. Many congregations maintained a "benevolence fund" for members in need — families struck by illness, injury, death, or economic disaster. But more important than the formal fund was the informal network of obligation and reciprocity that the church sustained. When your barn burned, the men of the church showed up to rebuild it. When your husband died in the mine, the women of the church appeared with food, sat with you through the terrible first nights, and made sure your children were fed and clothed for as long as it took. This was not charity in the condescending sense. It was mutual obligation among people who knew they might need the same help tomorrow.

Decoration Day — the annual spring gathering at the community cemetery to clean graves, place flowers, and remember the dead — was one of the most important communal rituals in mountain religion, and it illustrates how deeply the church was embedded in the fabric of community life. Decoration Day was religious (it typically included a sermon and hymns), social (families who had moved away returned for the occasion, reconnecting scattered kin networks), historical (the stories told at gravesites transmitted community memory across generations), and practical (the cemetery was actually cleaned and maintained). No single secular institution combined all these functions. The church did it without thinking about it, because that was simply what the church was for.

Dispute Resolution and Moral Authority

In the absence of easily accessible courts and law enforcement, Appalachian churches served as institutions of church discipline — informal tribunals that adjudicated disputes, enforced community moral standards, and imposed consequences for behavior that the congregation considered unacceptable. A member accused of dishonesty, adultery, drunkenness, or other offenses could be brought before the church meeting, given the opportunity to confess and repent, and — if unrepentant — "churched" (expelled from membership).

Being churched was no minor sanction. In a community where the church was the primary social institution, expulsion meant exclusion from the network of mutual aid, social connection, and communal identity that made mountain life sustainable. It was, in a real sense, a form of social death — and the threat of it exercised a regulatory power over community behavior that formal law enforcement, often distant and distrusted, could not match.

Church minute books — the handwritten records of church meetings, preserved in attics and historical archives across the region — are among the most valuable primary sources for understanding the social history of Appalachian communities. They record not only theological deliberations but disputes over property, complaints about domestic abuse, accusations of business dishonesty, and the full range of human conflict as it played out within the framework of congregational governance.

Identity and Belonging

Perhaps most fundamentally, the church provided identity. In a society that offered mountain people few sources of positive self-definition — where the outside world increasingly characterized them as backward, ignorant, and pathological — the church told a different story. You were a child of God. You were part of a covenant community. You had worth and dignity not because of your economic position or your education or your accent but because you were known and loved by the Creator of the universe. This was not an abstraction. In a church where everyone knew your name, where you had sung beside the same people since childhood, where the preacher had held your hand at your mother's deathbed and would hold your hand at your own — belonging was concrete, physical, woven into the texture of everyday life.

The church also provided one of the few arenas in which mountain people could exercise leadership. In a political and economic system that systematically excluded them from power — where the coal company owned the town, the absentee corporation owned the mineral rights, and distant politicians made decisions that determined their fate — ordinary men and women could be deacons, Sunday school teachers, choir leaders, committee chairs. They could speak in meetings, make decisions, exercise authority. The church was, for many Appalachian communities, the most democratic institution available — and the skills people developed there (public speaking, organizational management, consensus building, conflict resolution) would later serve them in other arenas, including labor organizing and political activism.

Religion and the Labor Wars

Churches That Supported the Union

The relationship between Appalachian religion and the labor movement is one of the most important — and most contradictory — stories in the region's history. Religion was used to justify both resistance to the coal companies and submission to them, sometimes in the same community, sometimes by preachers of the same denomination.

The churches that supported organized labor did so on explicitly theological grounds. The prophetic tradition within Christianity — the tradition of Amos, Isaiah, and Jesus's own confrontations with economic exploitation — provided a powerful framework for understanding the coal operators' oppression of their workers. When miners were paid in scrip, cheated at the scales, evicted from company housing for union activity, and shot by mine guards for organizing — all of which happened, repeatedly, across the coalfields — preachers who took the prophetic tradition seriously had no difficulty identifying this as sin.

During the Harlan County conflicts of the 1930s, local ministers were among the most important supporters of the United Mine Workers of America. They opened their churches for union meetings when no other building was available. They invoked biblical language of liberation and justice from the pulpit. They visited jailed organizers and testified on behalf of strikers. Some paid dearly for it: their churches were dynamited, their families threatened, their livelihoods destroyed.

The connection between Pentecostal/Holiness Christianity and labor radicalism is particularly striking and underappreciated. The Holiness emphasis on economic simplicity, the rejection of worldly wealth, and the egalitarian theology that valued spiritual gifts over social position all aligned naturally with the union cause. Holiness preachers, who owed nothing to the coal companies and whose theology explicitly condemned the pursuit of wealth at others' expense, were among the most fearless voices in the coalfield labor movement.

Churches That Preached Submission

But the story has another side.

Many Appalachian churches preached a theology that, intentionally or not, served the interests of the coal operators. This theology took several forms.

Fatalism — the belief that suffering in this world was God's will and that the proper Christian response was patient endurance rather than political action — was a powerful force in mountain religion. "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away" could be a statement of profound faith in the face of genuine tragedy. But it could also function as a theological justification for accepting intolerable conditions — a way of interpreting poverty, exploitation, and premature death not as injustices to be fought but as divine tests to be endured.

The coal companies understood this perfectly. They subsidized churches and ministers who preached patience, obedience, and the sinfulness of "stirring up trouble." Company-paid preachers were a recognized feature of the company town system, and their sermons — emphasizing the next world over this one, the sinfulness of covetousness, the virtue of contentment with one's station — served the company's interests as reliably as the mine guards and the company store.

Primary Source Excerpt — Florence Reece, songwriter and union activist, Harlan County, Kentucky (1931): "The company had their preachers who told the miners to be good and obey and not to complain, that they'd get their reward in heaven. But I knowed there was preachers on our side too — preachers who said it wasn't God's will for children to go hungry while the coal operators lived in big houses."

The tension between these two theological positions — fatalism and activism, acceptance and resistance — was never fully resolved in Appalachian religion, and it persists in altered forms today. It reflects a genuine theological disagreement about the nature of Christian obligation: is the faithful response to injustice to endure it patiently, trusting in God's ultimate justice, or to fight it actively, understanding the struggle for justice as itself a form of faithfulness?

Religion and Social Change Beyond Labor

Highlander and Its Clergy Allies

The Highlander Folk School, founded in Grundy County, Tennessee in 1932 by Myles Horton and Don West, is one of the most important institutions in the history of American social movements — and from its beginning, it had deep connections to Appalachian religion. Don West was an ordained Congregational minister. Many of Highlander's earliest students and allies were mountain preachers who saw in Highlander's mission of education for social change a natural extension of their own ministry.

Highlander trained labor organizers in the 1930s and 1940s, civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s (Rosa Parks attended a Highlander workshop shortly before the Montgomery Bus Boycott), and community organizers in the decades since. Throughout this history, clergy — both from within Appalachia and from outside — were among its strongest allies. The connection was not coincidental. Highlander's pedagogy, rooted in the conviction that ordinary people had the knowledge and capability to solve their own problems, resonated with the democratic ecclesiology of mountain churches where the authority of the congregation was paramount.

Civil Rights Organizing Through Churches

In the Appalachian context, civil rights organizing often looked different than it did in the Deep South, but churches played a similarly central role. In the coalfield communities where Black and white miners had worked side by side — uneasily, imperfectly, but in closer proximity than in most of the segregated South — interracial worship, while not common, was not unknown. The coal camps had sometimes fostered a rough interracial solidarity grounded in shared economic struggle, and the churches that emerged from that experience carried some of that solidarity into the civil rights era.

Black Appalachian churches — Baptist, Methodist, African Methodist Episcopal, and Pentecostal — were the organizational backbone of civil rights work in the mountains, just as they were elsewhere in the South. They provided meeting spaces, communication networks, moral authority, and the practical infrastructure of organizing. The skills that Black church members had developed in running their congregations — budgeting, planning, public speaking, building consensus — transferred directly to the work of organizing for civil rights.

But Appalachian religion also produced some of the most determined resistance to racial equality. White churches that had long preached the divine ordering of society — God had put people where He wanted them, and challenging that order was challenging God — applied the same logic to racial segregation that they had applied to economic hierarchy. The church that told miners to accept their station also told white congregants that integration was a violation of God's plan.

Snake Handling: Sensation and Reality

The Most Sensationalized Practice

We must talk about snake handling. Not because it is representative of Appalachian religion — it is emphatically not — but because it is the first thing that many outsiders think of when they think of Appalachian faith, and that distortion itself tells a story that needs to be addressed.

Snake handling as a religious practice is based on a literal interpretation of Mark 16:17-18: "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; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover." Practitioners, typically associated with small independent Holiness-Pentecostal congregations, handle venomous snakes — usually copperheads and timber rattlesnakes — during worship services as a demonstration of faith and obedience to scripture.

The practice was popularized by George Went Hensley in the early twentieth century in eastern Tennessee, though its exact origins are debated. At its peak, snake-handling congregations could be found across several Appalachian states, but even at that peak, they represented an infinitesimal fraction of Appalachian worshippers. Today, the number of practicing snake-handling congregations is estimated at fewer than one hundred, with total regular participants numbering in the low thousands — out of an Appalachian population of roughly twenty-five million.

Let us put that in perspective. If you randomly selected a thousand Appalachian churchgoers, the probability that even one of them had ever handled a snake in a worship service would be vanishingly small. Snake handling is to Appalachian religion what Amish buggy-driving is to American Protestantism — a genuine practice of a tiny community, elevated to outsized prominence because it satisfies outsiders' desire for the exotic.

The disproportionate attention is itself the story. Journalists, filmmakers, and photographers have been drawn to snake-handling churches for decades, producing a body of coverage that is vastly out of proportion to the practice's actual significance. A documentary about a snake-handling church gets funded; a documentary about the women's circle at the Missionary Baptist church in Letcher County, which has been quietly providing meals to sick families for sixty years, does not. The sensational crowds out the ordinary, and the distortion becomes self-reinforcing: outsiders come to Appalachia looking for snakes and find them, because they were looking for them, and then conclude that snake handling is what Appalachian religion is about.

Case Study 1 examines snake handling in greater depth — its theology, its practitioners, its actual place in the landscape of mountain religion. The point here is simply this: if your understanding of Appalachian religion begins and ends with snake handling, you understand nothing about Appalachian religion.

Hymns and the Theology of Suffering

The hymns of Appalachian churches are, collectively, one of the most profound bodies of theological expression in American religious history. They deserve attention not as cultural artifacts but as theology — as statements about the nature of God, the meaning of suffering, the hope of salvation, and the experience of living in a world that is beautiful and brutal in equal measure.

The hymn tradition in the mountains draws from multiple sources. The oldest layer consists of the lined-out hymns of the Regular and Primitive Baptist traditions — hymns from the eighteenth-century English and American repertoire (Isaac Watts, John Newton, Charles Wesley) that were sung without instruments, with the song leader reading or chanting each line before the congregation sang it. This practice, called lining out, originated in an era when hymnals were scarce and many worshippers were illiterate. It survived in Appalachia long after it had disappeared from most other American Protestant traditions, and it produced a distinctive sound: slow, ornamental, deeply moving, with each singer adding their own embellishments to the melody in a style that ethnomusicologists have compared to the heterophonic singing traditions of West Africa and the Scottish Highlands.

"Amazing Grace," the most famous hymn in the English-speaking world, was written by John Newton in 1772 but achieved its iconic status through the singing traditions of Appalachia and the rural South. The melody most Americans associate with the hymn — the one that brings tears to the eyes of people who have never set foot in a church — is not Newton's original tune but a folk melody, probably of Scots-Irish origin, that was matched to Newton's words in the southern singing tradition and transmitted through shape-note hymnals.

Primary Source — Hymn text, "Poor Wayfaring Stranger" (traditional, date unknown):

I am a poor wayfaring stranger Traveling through this world below. There is no sickness, toil, nor danger In that bright land to which I go. I'm going there to see my father. I'm going there no more to roam. I'm only going over Jordan. I'm only going over home.

The theology embedded in the mountain hymn tradition is a theology of suffering. Not suffering celebrated or romanticized, but suffering acknowledged and transcended. These are songs written by and for people who knew hardship intimately — who buried children, lost homes, worked themselves into early graves, watched the land they loved destroyed by forces they could not control. The hymns do not deny the reality of suffering. They do not pretend that the world is good when it manifestly is not. They assert, instead, that suffering is not the final word — that there is "a bright land" beyond this one, that the losses of this world will be restored, that the dead will be seen again.

Whether one shares the theological convictions behind these hymns or not, it is impossible to deny their power as expressions of human resilience in the face of hardship. They gave language to grief. They provided frameworks for endurance. They were, for generations of mountain people, the primary means of making sense of lives marked by loss.

Contemporary Appalachian Religion

The Changing Landscape

The religious landscape of Appalachia today looks dramatically different from what it was a century ago, though the changes have been uneven and the continuities are stronger than they might first appear.

The most visible change is the rise of megachurches and nondenominational evangelical congregations — large, media-savvy, often politically engaged churches that bear little resemblance to the small Primitive Baptist meetings or independent Holiness churches of the earlier tradition. These congregations, typically led by charismatic pastors with sophisticated communications operations, draw members from across county lines and denominational boundaries. They offer contemporary worship music (praise bands rather than shape-note hymns), programs for every age group, and a theological message that emphasizes personal prosperity and individual transformation.

The megachurch model represents, in some ways, a fundamental break with the Appalachian religious tradition. The farmer-preacher who worked the land beside his congregation has been replaced by a professional pastor with a media budget. The unaccompanied hymn has been replaced by amplified praise music. The intimate, face-to-face community of the holler church has been replaced by a congregation of hundreds or thousands who may not know each other's names. What has been gained in polish and professionalism has been lost in intimacy and embeddedness.

Yet the megachurches have also absorbed some of the functions that traditional churches once served. They run food banks, operate addiction recovery programs, provide counseling services, and organize community events. In many Appalachian communities where government services have been cut to the bone, the megachurch has stepped into the gap — not always wisely or equitably, but often effectively. The church-as-community-infrastructure tradition persists, even in an institutional form that would be unrecognizable to a Primitive Baptist from 1920.

The Decline of Traditional Denominations

Simultaneously, the traditional denominations that dominated Appalachian religious life for two centuries are in decline. Primitive Baptist congregations are aging and shrinking, their uncompromising theology and austere worship style attracting fewer young members. Regular Baptist and Missionary Baptist churches in small communities are closing as populations decline and younger generations move away. Methodist congregations are splitting over issues of sexual ethics and denominational governance. The Presbyterian institutional presence that once anchored mountain communities through schools and hospitals has thinned as national denominations have consolidated resources in more populated areas.

The decline is partly demographic — communities that are losing population lose churches along with everything else — and partly cultural. The media-saturated, mobile, individualistic culture of twenty-first-century America does not easily sustain the kind of rooted, place-based, communally embedded religious life that defined mountain Christianity. When your children have moved to Lexington or Charlotte or Columbus, the church that bound the community together loses the next generation.

The Political Dimension

Perhaps the most consequential transformation in contemporary Appalachian religion is its increasingly explicit alignment with conservative partisan politics. This alignment is not unique to Appalachia — it characterizes white evangelical Protestantism across the United States — but it has particular force in a region where religion has always been central to community identity.

The politicization of Appalachian religion accelerated in the 1980s with the rise of the Moral Majority and the broader "culture wars" engagement of white evangelicalism. Issues like abortion, homosexuality, school prayer, and the perceived secularization of American culture became markers of religious identity, and Appalachian churches — where cultural conservatism had deep roots independent of partisan politics — were drawn into a national political alignment that mapped religious conviction onto Republican Party loyalty.

The consequences have been significant. Churches that once served as spaces of community solidarity across political lines have become, in some cases, extensions of a partisan political identity. Ministers who once spoke to the shared economic struggles of their communities now speak to culture-war grievances that divide those communities along lines of age, education, and exposure to the broader world. The farmer-preacher who stood with the union because it was the right thing to do has been replaced, in some quarters, by pastors who stand with political movements that oppose the very economic policies (labor protections, social spending, healthcare access) that their congregants most need.

This is not the whole story. Many Appalachian ministers and congregations resist the politicization of their faith. Many continue to practice the quiet, community-sustaining religion that has always been the core of mountain Christianity — feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, burying the dead, singing the old hymns. The political dimension of contemporary Appalachian religion is real and consequential, but it is not the only dimension, and to focus exclusively on it would be to repeat the distortion that this chapter has been arguing against: allowing the sensational to crowd out the ordinary.

Comfort and Constraint: The Dual Legacy

Religion in Appalachia has been both comfort and constraint. It has been the institution that sustained people through hardships that would have been unbearable without it and the institution that sometimes kept them from fighting to change those hardships. It has provided language for grief and language for submission, motivation for justice and motivation for acceptance, community that strengthened and community that enforced conformity.

The hymns that expressed the theology of suffering also, critics have argued, reconciled people to suffering that was not inevitable — that was the product of specific economic and political choices made by identifiable human beings. The church discipline that maintained community standards also enforced a moral rigidity that was particularly punishing for women, for those whose sexuality did not conform, and for anyone whose questions about faith could not be contained within the bounds of acceptable doubt.

The mutual aid networks that sustained families through crisis also created obligations that could be suffocating. The tight-knit community that knew your name also knew your business and had opinions about it. The preacher who shared your daily life also had the authority to shame you before the congregation.

None of this diminishes the genuine comfort, meaning, and community that Appalachian religion provided. It complicates it. And the complication is essential, because the temptation — for outsiders and insiders alike — is to flatten Appalachian religion into a single story: either the sentimental story of simple mountain faith or the dismissive story of ignorant superstition. Neither story is true. The truth is that religion in Appalachia has been one of the most powerful forces in the region's history — powerful enough to sustain people through extraordinary hardship, powerful enough to motivate both resistance and submission, powerful enough to shape the mountains as surely as the geology and the coal.

Community History Portfolio: Checkpoint

Chapter 29 Checkpoint — Cultural Portrait (Religion):

For your selected county, investigate the religious landscape — past and present:

1. Historical denominations: What were the earliest churches established in your county? When? By which denomination(s)?
2. Church as infrastructure: Can you find evidence (in historical records, oral histories, or newspaper archives) of churches serving non-religious community functions — mutual aid, dispute resolution, social gathering, education?
3. Religion and industry: During the period of industrial development (coal, timber, textile, or other), what was the relationship between churches and the dominant industry? Were there company-sponsored churches? Were there churches that supported labor organizing?
4. Contemporary landscape: What denominations or religious organizations are currently active in your county? Have there been significant changes in the religious landscape over the past fifty years?
5. Primary source: Locate at least one primary source related to religion in your county — a church minute book entry, a hymnal, a photograph, a sermon excerpt, an oral history — and write a 200-word analysis of what it reveals about the role of religion in community life.

This checkpoint should be approximately 800-1,200 words and will be incorporated into the cultural portrait section of your final portfolio.

Chapter Summary

Religion in Appalachia has been many things simultaneously: the most stable community institution in a region of constant upheaval, a source of extraordinary comfort and occasional constraint, a vehicle for social change and a bulwark against it, a repository of musical and theological traditions of genuine depth, and an easy target for outside observers looking for the exotic rather than the ordinary. The Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Holiness, and Pentecostal traditions each shaped mountain communities in distinct ways, but they shared a common function: providing structure, meaning, belonging, and mutual support in a landscape where all of those things were perpetually under threat. The farmer-preacher, the shape-note singer, the women who brought food when the mine collapsed, the minister who opened his church for a union meeting, the congregation that sang together through generations of loss — these are the ordinary, extraordinary realities of faith in the hollers. They deserve to be understood on their own terms.