Venom and Faith

For the past few weeks, I haven't been able to get snake handling churches out of my head. The movement grew through the 1930s and 40s, passed down through families like an inheritance, in small congregations tucked into the hills of Appalachia, largely out of sight and unbothered by the outside world. It is still practiced today. I should also mention the worship music has the energy of rock and roll, which obviously makes the whole thing even more fascinating to me.

It all centers on one passage: Mark 16:18 - “They shall take up serpents; and if they shall drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay their hands upon the sick, and they shall recover.” Practitioners see this as a literal commandment, not a metaphor. And they have been quietly obeying it for over a hundred years.

What amazes me most about these churches is the faith. Faith so total, so absolute, that you will repeatedly reach into a box of rattlesnakes on a Sunday morning because you believe God wants you to. That is a different category of belief than most people will ever experience, and I find it genuinely breathtaking.

They follow their selected Bible verse with complete conviction. I suppose the one I follow is the Gospel of Luke 17:21, where Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is within… but that's a conversation for another day.

My own relationship with danger is a little embarrassing to confess. I am someone who reads ingredient labels like they are legal documents. I have stood in a grocery store aisle for far too long debating whether the ingredients in a bag of crackers were worth the risk. I treat processed food like a biohazard. And yet here are these people drinking literal strychnine as part of their Sunday service. I am out here treating modern food like it might kill me, and these folks are sipping poison, roughhousing snakes, and praising the Lord.

What I keep coming back to is the sheer power of what these congregations have… a belief so deep and unshakeable that it changes the way they move through the world, the way they face death, the way they spend a Sunday morning. Whatever you believe about God, you cannot watch a person reach bare handed into a box of rattlesnakes in an act of pure faith and not feel something. That kind of belief is its own kind of miracle.

These congregations deserve to be known. Their faith, whatever one makes of it, is something worth being aware of.