Where Have All The Snake Handlers Gone?

The Depression came late and stayed long in rural America.  A curious ritual became popular during this time in certain Holiness and Pentecostal churches:  snake handling.

George Hensley, a former Tennessee moonshiner, became the father of this movement.  While walking through the woods in 1910, he encountered a poisonous snake.  Picking it up, he marvelled that he was not harmed just as the Bible promised(Mark 16:18).  Hensley would go on to introduce this practice in Appalachian churches and its popularity grew rapidly as a test of a person’s faith.

Snake handling is not without danger.  “There are over 100 documented deaths from serpent bites,” says Ralph Hood, professor of social psychology at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga.  ”In every tradition, people are bitten and maimed by them. They risk their lives all the time by handling them. If you go to any serpent-handling church, you’ll see people with atrophied hands, and missing fingers. All the serpent-handling families have suffered such things.”

How do adherents view a person being bitten by a snake?  A variety of explanations are offered from the presence of hidden sin in the person’s life to a lack of faith or anointing of the Spirit.   

Hensley’s death from a snakebite in 1955 combined with many states passing laws against the practice witnessed the decline of snake handling.  Today, only a few dozen churches still engage in this ritual.

Modern Pentecostals explain Christ’s words on taking up snakes without harm by pointing to the Apostle Paul’s experience of being bitten by a viper but not harmed (Acts 28:1-5).  In other words, the sense is the accidental taking up of serpents, not the intentional.

Desperate times create special fervor in religious circles.  Should such times ever return again, the practice of snake handling will hopefully retain its near-extinct status.

Brief history and video of snake handling here!

From Houston Chronicle