Of all the potential pathways into the world of snake-handling religion, Dennis Covington’s surely stands among the unlikeliest.
Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia
Da Capo Press
288 pages
$10.75
In 1992, Covington worked as a freelance reporter for The New York Times, covering his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. On a routine call to discuss story ideas, his editor suggested checking out a local trial involving a holiness pastor from Scottsboro, a small mountain town about 100 miles northeast. Authorities had accused this man of contriving to kill his wife with rattlesnakes—the same rattlesnakes that made regular appearances at his church.
Covington hesitated, fearing he’d further an image of Southerners as ignorant yokels. Still, he took the assignment, writing up the trial and getting to know the central characters. Before long, journalistic duty begat personal curiosity, the fruits of which Covington details in his 1995 memoir Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia.
The book recounts Covington’s journey into a backwoods charismatic subculture with scattered outposts across Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia. In visits to converted service stations, revival tents, and other destinations off the beaten path, he witnesses the faithful handling deadly serpents and gulping down a pesticide compound called strychnine.
Covington starts off as a sympathetic observer. He marvels at the sheer physical courage on display. He resonates with shows of ecstatic worship and spiritual fervor, welcoming the contrast with his pleasant Southern Baptist congregation in Birmingham. He senses God’s enlivening presence in these communities, which take inspiration from Jesus’ bold claims about his disciples in Mark 16:18: “They will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all.”
Over time, Covington’s interest in snake-handling spirituality intensifies. He feels a mysterious pull toward these gatherings, becoming something more than a friendly interloper. Parts of his personal history—a childhood fascination with snakes, hints of Appalachian ancestry, an insatiable thirst for danger—strike him as signposts. It comes as little surprise when, finally, Covington takes up snakes himself.
Is the wild branch grafted onto the family tree? Not exactly. Covington is an outsider wrestling with questions of belonging. But the experienced snake handlers aren’t confused about who they are and where they come from. Most can trace their traditions back through parents and grandparents. Covington movingly describes the binding force of their shared cultural heritage, rooted in an ongoing friction between old Appalachian customs and modern American mores.
To borrow the current sociological vernacular, snake handlers inhabit a “thick” community. They’re an exceptionally tight-knit bunch. Local congregations meet frequently, and regular “homecoming” events function as extended family reunions. Marrying within the community is the norm.
Thickness also shows up in the exceptionally high demands snake-handling faith makes of its followers. They have the scars—and hospital records and funeral certificates—to prove it. Recalling his own experience of dodging death as a war correspondent in 1980s El Salvador, Covington aptly observes that when snake handlers recall biting incidents—often with mordant matter-of-factness or liberal helpings of gallows humor—they aren’t dusting off quirky family folklore. They’re telling war stories, with all the foxhole solidarity that implies.
A great deal of today’s cultural commentary sings the praises of thick communities and considers strategies for reviving them. We’re acutely aware of the perils of thinness: lack of purpose, loss of meaning, loneliness, addiction, attachment to screens. For Christians, this all makes sense: Scripture speaks of covenants, not casual commitments. Jesus speaks of carrying your cross and hating your closest family for his sake.
Still, Covington’s memoir made me ponder certain factors that complicate our rush to extol thick communities. For one thing, there are limits to a simple binary of thick versus thin.
As Covington portrays it, snake-handling culture is thick in some respects and strangely thin in others. A lack of ecclesial structure or denominational oversight allows elements of theological weirdness to creep in, some of it bearing on matters less exotic than the snakes themselves. I was surprised to learn of“Jesus Name” or “Jesus Only” churches that reject Nicene orthodoxy, mocking the Trinity as a heresy of “three-God people.”
Proponents of thick communities can also skim over the plight of misfits and outcasts. In his closing chapters, Covington introduces a Kentucky man named Elvis Presley Saylor, a consistent but unwelcome presence at snake-handling events. Fellow worshipers treat him as Satan incarnate, hurling epithets like “the wicked one” within earshot.
Saylor claims he aroused their ire by taking a second wife after the first left him for a snake-handling preacher. His situation sounds complicated, perhaps more so than he lets on. It also sounds like something better addressed by wise pastoral counsel than imprecations and anathemas. Why does he keep enduring this abuse instead of trying a different church? As Covington comments, snake handling represents the “only religious establishment” he knows. Staying is painful, but leaving is unthinkable.
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Saylor’s dilemma feels especially tragic when set against Covington’s own falling out with the handlers, which was awkward but hardly acrimonious. It unfolds after a preacher delivers some uncharacteristically belligerent remarks about a “woman’s place,” aimed indirectly but unmistakably at Covington’s wife (a deacon in their Birmingham church) and a female photographer assigned to his reporting project.
Oddly enough, Covington had received his first invitation to preach just before the same meeting, without knowing the provocation in store. When his turn arrives, the congregation lets him land a good counterpunch. But everyone seems to calmly apprehend that his snake-handling journey has run its course.
“Endings,” Covington reflects without bitterness, “are the most important part of stories. They grow inevitably from the stories themselves.” That may be good journalistic advice, though I question how well it translates into the realm of church community and membership. Christ-ian fellowship means something more than a succession of chapters that open and close at our own discerning.
Still, at a time when prominent thinkers celebrate thick community as a check on individualism run amok, we shouldn’t forget those at risk of suffocating underneath. If “not all those who wander are lost,” then not all those who stand still are found.
Matt Reynolds is former senior books editor for Christianity Today.
