Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Christian Serpent-Handling Tradition

Them That Believe The Power and Meaning of the Christian Serpent-Handling Tradition. by Ralph Hood (Author), W. Paul Williamson (Author); September .
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Finally, Tomlinson, while there is no record he ever handled snakes, was the leading proponent of the practice in the church. If there is an area where the sources line up with historical consensus, it is in terms of the number of snake handlers.

Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Christian Serpent-Handling Tradition

The practice never captured the imagination—or the bodies—of the majority of Christians swept up in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The population of serpent handlers has probably never amounted to more than a few thousand, and in the early days handlers likely numbered in the low hundreds. But this small number of serpent handlers generated a disproportionate amount of interest among leaders in the Church of God, one of the largest and most significant churches in the holiness-pentecostal revival.

During this period, no less than seven State Overseers of the Church of God handled snakes during revival meetings. At the same time, the development of wire news services ensured that handling would escape the constraints of the church that nurtured it to become a regional practice and a national curiosity. In short, much of the current scholarship on the holiness-pentecostal tradition in the South provides not only an insufficient assessment of the practice in the early history holiness-pentecostalism, but it also fails to consider how handling related to larger cultural trends in the United States, including popular imaginings of Appalachia as a site of regional otherness and normative conceptions of the limits of religious practice.

The remainder of this essay seeks to outline how the contested explanations and justifications for handling poisonous snakes in religious meetings led to the creation of snake or serpent handling as a distinct form of worship both in the minds of pentecostals and in the minds of the wider American public. In the early twentieth century, many southern holiness-pentecostals understood baptism by the Holy Spirit in terms of a question Charles Fox Parham — posed to his Topeka-based Bethel Bible School students.

Although nuances regarding the validity of certain experiences separated Seymour and Parham, the two men cultivated what would become a widely-held belief in pentecostalism: Spirit baptism is followed by clear and unmistakable signs that attest to its reality. In Los Angeles in , the blind, soft-spoken Seymour initiated the raucous, emotionally charged Azusa Street Revival. It met three times a day, seven days a week, and lasted for three and one-half years.

I did not have the experience, so I was almost always among the altar seekers. He claimed that he levitated, shook, and fell to the floor. Following this experience, Tomlinson made signs and miracles a key feature of his rapidly growing movement. Just as Appalachia was on the periphery of the South, they too lived on the fringe of the dominant society. The manifestation of signs not only created distinctions between pentecostals and non-pentecostals, but also between competing pentecostal groups.

A look at the snake-handling churches of Appalachia

Yet, within this wide consensus, individual signs could be interpreted narrowly or broadly, therefore creating boundaries between groups and reinforcing hierarchies within various groups. For instance, as religious studies scholar Ann Taves has noted, Parham and Seymour disagreed over which tongues counted as true signs of Holy Spirit baptism. Tomlinson was especially concerned with signs, and dedicated a large amount of his prolific writing to the subject.

He saw signs as an essential component of Christian history and made them a cornerstone of his growing church. God gave Noah the sign of the bow in the sky. He gave Abraham the sign of circumcision. The signs God gave to Moses to convince the people of the power of God…. Signs separated them from the market and industrial forces reshaping Appalachia and highlighted their divergence from the long-established religious bodies in the region.

Confusion is not a sign of godliness…. Then if you have the sign of confusion up, take it down…. The world is reading your sign. How and why did serpent handling cease being one of the acceptable Markan signs? How did it become a dangerous practice not befitting respectable pentecostals? To answer these questions, one must trace the ways in which members of the church developed mechanisms for evaluating embodied signs, regulating their practice, and determining their relative value within their respective social structures.

This evaluative process emerged from engagement with popular media sources especially newspaper reporting and secular authorities. Members of the Church of God and other churches worked to build a community of believers simultaneously set apart from the dangerous and corrupting influences of mainstream culture and distinct from the extreme fractiousness of those who insisted that Jesus commanded the handling of poisonous snakes. Historian Randall Stephens has noted that holiness newspapers provided a crucial medium for spreading the pentecostal revival throughout the South.

Even as these publications provided an important mechanism for forging a collective, imagined identity for the growing pentecostal churches of the South, they also recorded debates over how this emerging community would and could imagine its limits. Within these debates, popular journals helped establish which signs would freely circulate as embodied expressions of Spirit baptism.

Not surprisingly, as word of serpent handling spread in the holiness-pentecostal press, the controversial practice also became a contested sign of Holy Spirit baptism. These sources recorded the early history and diffusion of serpent handling in Appalachia while also illuminating the complex processes of symbolic differentiation that eventually influenced popular, non-pentecostal understandings of this controversial sign.

Although many publications associated with southern pentecostalism commented on serpent handling, few lavished it with more attention—and praise—than The Church of God Evangel , the official publication of the Church of God Cleveland. Edited and published by Tomlinson, Evangel appeared in and grew apace with the church.

Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Christian Serpent-Handling Tradition

By Evangel was a weekly, newspaper-format publication and at the end of the decade it claimed more than 15, subscribers. On September 12, , an anonymous note appeared in Evangel: George Hensley is conducting a revival at the tabernacle in Cleveland, Tenn. It began the last Saturday in Aug. The power has been falling and souls crying out to God. Twice during the meeting Serpents have been handled by the Saints. Scholars have long speculated that snake handling—as both a religious ritual and a folk practice—predated Hensley by perhaps a decade, but apparently religious leaders did not feel a need to record earlier incidents of snake handling at coal camps or in brush arbor meetings.

By the s, however, as more and more pentecostals throughout the South debated Holy Spirit baptism, secular and religious media alike appropriated this new practice into the holy roller phenomenon. If in the accounts of serpent handling reporters failed to connect the practice to holy rollers, by reports in Texas and Georgia newspapers did make the connection.

One story described children handling snakes. Before he began handling snakes, Hensley was an illiterate moonshiner with no permanent residence who supplemented his ill-gotten income by working variously as a miner, a lumberjack, and as a factory worker. Like many other early Church of God members, Hensley had roots in rural mountain communities in West Virginia and Tennessee. They worked in coal mines, as day laborers, semi-skilled factory laborers, or rural subsistence farmers. Initially, in the early s, the Church of God preached almost exclusively to these communities in Appalachia.


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Indeed, as some scholars have noted, there seems to be a complex relationship between industrialization, greater mobility, social change, and the explosion of the holy roller revival in the South. First, Hensley had preached on all of the signs listed in Mark Next he prophesied that some rabble-rouser would bring a snake for the saints to handle.

Some were bitten, but with no damage to them. So on Sunday night Sept. Instead, Tomlinson continued to write about the practice and used it in his outreach to the local media. Not to be outdone, Tomlinson emphasized that the church had manifested basic signs such as glossolalia and divine healing. Then he upped the symbolic ante. In several instances, as has been noted in the paper, fire has been handled by several parties. In several instances fire has been handled with bare hands without [the saints] being burned. The following year, Tomlinson elevated serpent handling up the semeiotic hierarchy above the more commonly practiced signs.

Quite a number have been able under the power of God to take up serpents and thus demonstrate the power of God to a gainsaying world. From to , Tomlinson authored no less than eighteen lead Evangel articles touting the sign of serpent handling. Large snakes were brought in… and were successfully handled. This was to show the healing power of the Lord. Even though these reports in Evangel suggest that only a tiny minority of the Church of God ever handled snakes in their meetings, the frequency of their publication sometimes two or three accounts of handling appeared in a single issue indicates an interest on the parts of both Tomlinson and his readers.

The rhetorical consistency of the reports suggests that their authors and many of the thousands of subscribers to Evangel believed that the sign of handling not only attested to the basic validity of their Spirit baptism experiences, but that it was also an important aspect of their spiritual symbolic order. Tomlinson often made this claim. I suppose he [the critic] is not able to do such things as we are doing, such as taking up serpents, handling fire, casting out devils, and healing the sick, all by the power of God.

This failure suggested a real spiritual deficiency, while the presence of serpent handling in the Church of God symbolized its holiness. As the s drew to a close, Tomlinson and many others believed that members of the Church of God could successfully manifest the most dangerous signs in the symbolic hierarchy of Holy Spirit baptism.

This emphasis on dangerous signs coincided with a period of rapid expansion of church membership. From to the Church of God more than tripled in size to nearly 20, members and the circulation of Evangel surged to 16, by The combined weight of church growth and frequent press coverage of serpent handling points to a general willingness on the part of Tomlinson and other Church of God leaders to adopt controversial signs in order to gain symbolic leverage over their religious and secular adversaries.

Within this imagined community, serpent handlers were not a distinct or separate group of worshippers. Those who took up snakes were identified as saints, brothers, and sisters. Each title testified to their acceptance within the wider Church of God polity. The saints of the Church of God distinguished themselves from members of other denominations who failed to manifest the progressive expressions of Holy Spirit baptism represented by all of the Markan signs, including serpent handling. Before turning to non-Church of God responses to the practice, it is worth reiterating that the practice of serpent handling did not originate with Tomlinson and its continuation was not contingent on his approval.

The practice predated its appropriation by the Church of God, emerging more or less simultaneously in Kansas, the Ozarks, the Sand Mountain region of Alabama, and in Tennessee around the cities of Chattanooga and Cleveland. Many of these incidents—recorded in local newspapers, Evangel , and enshrined in popular memory—happened in proximity to the early activities of the Church of God but were not directed by it. In the early s, Tomlinson lost control of the ecclesiastical structure of the Church of God. This repudiation of the practice led to the creation of a hard boundary in the Church of God between the saints and a new class of spiritual outlaws who persisted in the eccentric practice of snake handling.

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Many stories published during this period discussed the serpent as a tempter that sowed discord among pentecostals. Yet, during the first decade of the pentecostal revival, reports flowed into non-Church of God newspapers and magazines recounting the miraculous manifestations of the Holy Spirit as they related to the handling of poisonous snakes.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the network of publications associated with the Assemblies of God. From the s to the early s, the vast majority of these reports were especially interested in Mark Its presses churned out volumes of tracts, books, and pamphlets, along with The Latter Rain Evangel. Within this context, the Stone Church helped influence a generation of early pentecostals with reports of missionaries threatened by snakes and poison.

For example, one representative report from linked Mark, serpents, and foreign missions: Beyond references to missionary work in exotic lands, some Assemblies of God publications also contained accounts of worshippers at revival meetings in the United States who were accidentally struck by snakes. In the Assemblies of God, serpent bites were more often than not directly associated with the healing power of the Holy Spirit indicated in Mark Burnett who had recently received the gift of the Holy Spirit.

The healing virtue of the Lord Jesus went through my body like an electric current and I was instantly healed….

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As her fellow churchgoers anointed her with oil and prayed for healing, Hannah prayed her own prayer: I was bitten on Monday and never put my shoe on that foot for five days, yet never failed to play the organ and help in every service. Luttrull of Bruner, Missouri, reported being bitten by a copperhead while speaking in tongues. She refused medical treatment and allowed a brother and sister to anoint her with oil and pray over her. On no less than four occasions between and , E.

Bell, the First General Chairmen of the Assemblies of God, felt it necessary to respond directly to questions about the practice of serpent handing in his regular columns. It is instructive to note that this question arose repeatedly during the period when the Church of God advocated for the sign throughout the South. Explicit condemnation of serpent handlers as evil agents of Satan became more common in the s as the Church of God revised its position on handling serpents—a revision that allowed other groups to condemn not only the practice, but also its practitioners.

Their concerns echoed the consensus emerging in the publications associated with of the Assemblies of God. Long before Tomlinson was forced to relinquish control over the Church of God in , two early dissenters raised concerns about the practice. First, in shortly before Hensley held his Cleveland revival, J.

Ellis, an important minister of the church, offered a stern warning to handlers: Only the mercy of God has kept some of them [saints who take up serpent] out of the grave. God has given them several object lessons that ought to teach them there is a limit to it.

Of these groups, the first to offer a straightforward rejection appears to have been the Pentecostal Holiness Church, which condemned snake handling in Unlike the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the Pentecostal Mission warned against handling but, because of connections to the Church of God, initially stopped short of condemning serpent handlers. These displays of supernatural power attract crowds to the services, and some are favorably impressed with these things, while to others they are stumbling-blocks. While competition with the Church of God had prompted the Pentecostal Holiness Church to condemn serpent handling, institutional connections between the Pentecostal Mission and the Church of God forced Barth to refine and clarify her position two months later.

Although Barth had to admit that she had not personally witnessed handling, some in the Assemblies of God did have direct contact with the practice. This is likely because of the overlapping territory of the Assemblies with the Church of God. Initially organized in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in as an umbrella organization combining more than one hundred pentecostal congregations throughout the South and Midwest, the Assemblies of God became one of the largest and most dynamic of the early pentecostal denominations.

As the memberships and geographic boundaries of the Assemblies of God and the Church of God exploded in the late s, the two groups often found themselves in contact with one another and competing for converts. While proselytizing in rural Arkansas, Walthall reported on a small congregation in Marysville:. From thence we went to Marysville, Ark.

A man of the Church of God plea was in the community and had taken advantage of the conditions to install his second cleansing, snake handling theories. We allowed him liberty in the meetings until we saw he was determined to use every opportunity, in testimony and otherwise, to get his tenants before the people. When we saw that he would not work in harmony with the spirit of the meeting […][w]e had to forbid him, who then went from us crying persecution. We never rallied over the confusion and hence the meetings were a failure, except that the Saints were helped and established.

First, on a popular level, serpent handling was nearly synonymous with the Church of God; Walthall, and likely many others in the Assemblies of God, understood the two to be inseparable. Walthall deemed this novel interpretation dangerous and believed it contributed to confusion within the church. This hesitancy to condemn the handlers diminished as the Church of God ceased to use serpent handling as cudgel to bludgeon its opponents.

Under the leadership of Flavius Josephus F. As historian Mickey Crews has noted, Lee considered merging with the Assemblies of God and as a result downplayed the practice. If Ellis and Lemons had earlier paid lip service to the legitimacy of the sign, Heath, in contrast, now openly condemned snake handling.

In the end, all three critics sought to change the entire symbolic framework for understanding the sign by shifting it from the religious to the secular realm. In this way, they read pride, showmanship, and illegality written on the bodies of snake handlers. The new focus on pride and showmanship brought the Church of God in line with other major denominations such as the Assemblies of God.

Shall we consider them superior in spirituality? Nay, but rather they are drawn away of Satan being enticed to presume on gospel favors. By the few remaining positive references were replaced by harsh condemnation. Further, the suggestion that the spirit of snake handling is showmanship displaces the Holy Spirit from the practice.

The shift from serpent to snake within the Church of God not only marked a transition toward denominational cooperation, but also coincided with intensified secular media coverage of the practice. Church leaders came to regard the once-perceived evangelistic benefits of the practice as liabilities. As the Church of God withdrew support for the practice, municipalities and states passed laws banning it.

Appalachian states began banning the handling of snakes in public venues in the s. The faithful are quick to add that there is no guarantee in the scriptures that they will not be bitten. Indeed, Hood and Williamson list 89 documented cases of death from snake bites and nine fatalities from drinking poison.


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In addition, many snake handlers suffer nonfatal bites, some many times. Nevertheless, the snake-handling tradition continues. Believers understand serpent handling to be a literal confrontation with and an overcoming of death. If the serpent does not kill, death has been denied; if the serpent does kill, death has been overcome. The most famous early snake handler was George Went Hensley, who began handling rattlesnakes in the early s. By , Hensley had introduced various church leaders to the practice of snake handling, inspiring unknown numbers of Christians in the Appalachian region.

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