Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 4, 1995 TAG: 9505040040
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN SEWELL ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: KINGSTON, GA. LENGTH: Long
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 metro 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, tamborines 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 4-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 shirtfronts, 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 the Rev. 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 Book 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's 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 practioners 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 who have had relatives die of snakebite.
Even suffering the painful bites and venom rarely discourages believers. One, Dewey Chafin of West Virginia, says he's been bitten 118 times while handling thousands of snakes since 1960.
Despite the pain, and even the death of his sister to a rattlesnake bite in 1962, he has never received medical treatment for a bite.
"I always figure God will take care of me," Chafin said. "If he wants you to die, you'll die. If he wants you to live, you'll live.
"It's always the same. It's a victory over the devil ... The serpent is a symbol of the devil. When you have power over it, that's God having power over evil."
And there are newcomers, like two recent converts at the Kingston church.
``My friends think it's like devil worship; it's like we're worshipping the snakes or something,'' said Michelle Tancrede, 15. ``It's hard to explain. But you can feel it.''
``I don't have a lot of friends left anymore,'' added Branden Neitz, 24, who said he's left behind his life of drugs, booze and heavy metal music. ``Some of 'em think I'm pretty strange.''
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 that 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 other states.
A snake-handling service death was recorded as far away as Long Beach, Calif., four decades ago, Kane said.
The churches are usually called Pentecostal Holiness, but are independent. They are fundamentalist, but 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 77-year-old Kale Saylor 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.
Dewey Bruce Hale, 40, died in the south Georgia town of Enigma on Jan. 15, nine hours after being bitten in church by a rattlesnake he had taken there.
Berrien County Sheriff Jerry Brogdon was chagrined to learn that Hale refused medical treatment. He died at his home, surrounded by fellow faithful who prayed with him but didn't call authorities until after his death.
``One of the hardest things is they had probably 100 people sitting there watching a person die,'' Brogdon said.
He added: ``I don't agree with that but this is their belief, and I respect that. He died doing what he believed in.''
Free-lance journalist Dennis Covington, a Birmingham, Ala., native, attended his first snake-handling service while covering the 1991 trial of Glenn Summerford, a minister convicted of attempting to kill his wife by forcing her hand into the box of rattlesnakes he kept for services.
A middle-aged man with an appetite for danger, interest in his own Appalachian roots and a desire for more vibrant spirituality than he found in urban churches, Covington was drawn inexorably into the snake-handling world.
He attended eight churches in six states, and became a snake-handler himself. As recounted in his new book, ``Salvation on Sand Mountain,'' Covington even considered becoming a minister.
Covington, who insists he would ``never be so stupid or desperate enough to pick up a rattler just to make a good book,'' thinks often of the ``anointing'' that followers say is a divine feeling.
``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.''
Covington, sitting up on the sofa of his comfortable suburban home, added: ``I was anointed by the Holy Spirit. A psychologist or a medical doctor might have a different explanation. I don't much care about what they say.''
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. Authorities are sensitive to charges that they are infringing on religious freedom, and some are leery for other reasons: A North Carolina sheriff was hospitalized two weeks after being bitten by a snake during an arrest in 1985.
The Constitution of Virginia guarantees religious freedoms, but the State Code contains a provision making it unlawful " ... to display, exhibit, handle or use any poisonous snake or reptile in such a manner as to endanger the life or health of any person."
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.
When the service ends after more than two hours, congregants thank visitors for coming and invite them back with a gentle warmth.
``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.
Josef Federman of the Associated Press also contributed information to this story.
by CNB