Oct 14 2008
Snake Handling Christians
One Sunday while my husband and I were in Church a lady stood up and began to talk about the “crazy snake handling McCormick’s over in Heard County”. I got so angry and upset I had to step outside until I cooled off. I know it is wrong to get angry in Church but the people she was talking about are sort of related to me. They are my step-fathers first cousins. They are all very good, kind, Christian people who will give you their last nickel if you need it. They do practice the snake handling religion but that is their choice to make.
One of the cousin’s, Junior McCormick is the Pastor of a snake handling Church a few counties over. His parents were of the same religion also so he grew up around the practice.
Snake handling is a religious ritual in a small number of Pentecostal churches in the U.S., usually characterized as rural and Holiness. Practitioners believe it dates to antiquity and quote the Book of Mark and the Book of Luke to support the practice:
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. Mark 16:17-18
Junior explains that, for him, handling snakes is simply following the gospel to the letter. “Other folks don’t do this because their churches don’t believe, or it’s just something they’re scared of,” he said. “They come to that scripture but want to jump over that part because it’s a deadly thing
Serpent handling is always controversial and in many areas illegal, yet it shows no signs of disappearing from its traditional home in Appalachia, the mountainous regions of the Southeastern United States stretching from Georgia to Pennsylvania.
(Practitioners, or self-described sign-followers, prefer the term serpent-handling to snake-handling noting that they incorporate poisonous reptile’s not common snakes into religious worship.)
The practice began in the early 1900s. Its popularity has waxed and waned through the years. According to Ralph Hood, a professor of social psychology and the psychology of religion at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, serpent handling is currently at fairly low ebb of popularity. Such fluctuations are characteristic of a faith that persists throughout Appalachia.
