Watching an episode of City Confidential on A&E I came to wonder, just how many people still handle snakes during religious worship? (I’m talking about hardcore fundamentalist Christians)
Are they still around, and how wide-spread are they? Are they unique to certain pockets in the U.S. South, or are there some in Europe? (I know they originated somewhere in Tennessee).
How many have been killed, and what about the children during the ceremony?
(Oh, and if you provide links, PLEASE make sure there aren’t any pictures. I’m severely ophidiophobic-which is why I’m not about to google the term myself!)
It’s a pretty fringe-y belief, even by the standards of YEC fundamentalists who are convinced that Spongebob is the Antichrist, or whatever.
Foundation for the practice, FWIW, is in the Long Ending of the Gospel According to Mark:
I.e., handling venomous snakes without injury is a mark of the True Believer, along with a few other things like speaking in tongues, immunity to poison, and the gift of laying on hands for healing. Therefore, to prove themselves True Believers, they keep rattlers around to pick up and wave around.
Nope, there’s an age limit, but some churches do allow individuals under the age of 18 to handle the snakes, and occassionally the kids get bitten. Why anyone would think this kind of a thing is a good idea is beyond me.
I’ve heard this before, but I’ve never figured out why they bother to dilute it. If they really have faith, wouldn’t Drano work just as well? How come no one ever tries that? I’m not just being flipant! Obviously, any group that uses anything stronger won’t last very long, but there still has to be some “thinking” behind only using a certain strength of poison. You would think someone would be tempted to try something stronger as a test, as a child, or whenever they happen to be out of strychnine.
I think a significant factor here is that groups that practiced Drano-drinking probably died out rapidly.
Likewise, they handle rattlesnakes which, while venomous, are not the most deadly snakes around. If they were really serious, why not use two-step vipers or coral snakes? I mean, many people bit on an extremity by a rattler survive, they are far from sudden death. (Though certainly there IS a risk of death involved)
It’s not like there aren’t alternative snakes available - both water mocasins and cottonmouths are found in the areas where these practices exist, yet the snake of choice is a rattler.
Given that every third living thing is Oz happens to be poisonous, perhaps they’ve just been misidentified, & they are ordinary churchgoers, merely picking the adders out of their scrambled eggs every Sunday before breakfast.
Right. I acknowledged as much. What I’m curious about is what keeps all of them from dying out. When they run out of strychnine one Sunday and someone says “Hey, there’s some Drano under the sink!” or when the rattler dies and someone says “You know, there’s a cottonmouth living under my shed I keep meaning to do something about!” what happens to keep them all alive?
Either someone else objects (in which case what do they say?) or something they’ve been taught keeps most snake-handlers from ever making such a suggestion. But what? Someone’s got to raise the issue eventually in every congregation (Kids question everything!) so there must be a tradition among them to explain these things. What is it?
(I’m also skeptical about the supposedly Darwinian origin of the rattler and strychnine tradition. Were there once thousands of snake-handling sects, most of which died out after a week?)
A few years back, I read of a minister in one of these churches, who was convited of murdering his wife. It seems he needed to be rid of her, so he held her arm in a cage full of rattlesnakes (he kept the congregation’s snakes in his garage). She was bitten repeatedly, and died. He told the police that his wife had told him that “she wanted to test her faith”,
The policeman investigating the death noted that she had wanted to leave the guy, and her body showed evidence of a struggle.
Isn’t this blasphemous?The Bible states that one should not put God to the test.
Right, but they’re not testing God because they know God will save them if they have enough faith; they’re testing their own level of faith. :dubious: Or something like that.
The case I mentioned in the OP was very similiar-he wanted to get rid of his wife, but couldn’t divorce her, so he shoved her hand into one of their rattlesnake containers. Only she lived, he went to jail, and no one in the congregation would talk to her again.