Serpent handlers of the Clover Gap Mine community, Lejunior, Kentucky, 1946

Win Bassett: These Signs Shall Follow Them

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Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

The Signs Followers of southern Appalachia prefer not to be called “snake-handlers,” but “serpent-handlers,” due to the King James Version of the Bible’s use of the term.

"Snake Charmer (1976)", by renowned Kentucky folk artist Edgar Tolson.
“Snake Charmer (1976)”, by renowned Kentucky folk artist Edgar Tolson.

“Chambliss lettered the words ‘Mark 16:17-18’ in black paint, and that was just about all he felt led to preach on too,” Wiley Cash writes about Carson Chambliss, a preacher at the fictional River Road Church of Christ in Signs Following outside Asheville, N.C. Cash continues his narration on Chambliss in the beginning of his New York Times bestselling novel A Land More Kind Than Home:

“I’d seen people I’d known just about my whole life pick up snakes and drink poison, hold fire up to their faces just to see if it would burn them. Holy people too. God-fearing folks that hadn’t ever acted like that a day in their lives. But Chambliss convinced them it was safe to challenge the will of God. He made them think it was all right to take that dare if they believed.”

Cash tells me that he learned about serpent-handling worship services in an undergraduate class on Appalachian history at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, and he used the introduction to this faith tradition to develop Chambliss’s character. “I didn’t see it as something exotic or strange,” Cash says. “I just saw it as something that was realistic to the place, its people, and their traditions.”

Full article continues at Guernica / a magazine of art & politics

More articles on non-mainstream religious practices:

Blackburn went to the serpent box and got the two copperheads out(Opens in a new browser tab)

Superabundance of Religious Fervor Lands Holy Roller in Police Court(Opens in a new browser tab)

The Blood Verse(Opens in a new browser tab)

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