Fred and I, therefore, continued to attend various serpent-handling churches together and separately, sometimes accompanied by a newspaper associate, photographer Mike DuBose. From the first what was proposed was not a highly theoretical study, as might be the case in a theological, anthropological, or sociological treatise. We were interested rather in presenting a descriptive, analytical, partly oral-historical insight into the belief and the believers of the taking up of serpents as an act of Christian obedience. What we wished to provide was a perspective for understanding the people as well as the practice.
That perspective, however, is not easily attained.
Since most of us tend to seek simple, concrete explanations for phenomena, it is easy to view one aspect of serpent handling rather than the whole and, consequently, either to romanticize or brutalize the people and the practice. One can feel after attending a service that it is completely irrational, wild—people running around, falling down, quivering, uttering strange sounds; drinking deadly poisons; taking venomous serpents (giant and tiny ones, coiled, extended, limp, knotted together, rattlers, cottonmouths, copperheads, cobras) and staring at them nose to nose, wrapping them around their necks, wearing them on their heads, pitching them, carrying armloads of them, shaking them, petting them; displaying arms tattooed with snakes, hands atrophied by bites, fingers missing, clothing embroidered and etched with snakes—or feel the same sense of the bizarre after going into homes and seeing live deadly snakes in closets and adjoining rooms, pictures framed on the wall of people with handfuls of rattlers, photo albums of disfigured bodies from venom poisoning, or a huge frozen rattlesnake taken out of a freezer by a relative of a person whom the serpent killed during a funeral service for yet another snakebit victim. All of this can seem as abnormal as an episode from “The Twilight Zone.”
— Serpent-Handling Believers, Thomas Burton
