By Bill Leonard
Around 2 p.m. on May 26, West Virginia serpent handler/preacher Mark Randall “Mack” Wolford was bitten by a rattler at a service in the Panther State Forest. Resisting medical treatment, he returned home, surrounded with prayer. As his condition worsened he was taken to the Bluefield Regional Medical Center around 10:30 p.m. and was later pronounced dead.
As a teen, Wolford saw his father die the same way. Last November, Reverend Wolford was featured in an extended story in the Washington Post Magazine. Of serpent handling, he observed: “Anybody can do it that believes it….. Jesus said, ‘These signs shall follow them that believes.’ This is a sign to show people that God has the power.”
Wolford echoed the King James text of Mark 16:17-18: “These signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing. It shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” Verse 20 adds: “And they went forth, and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following.”
Serpent handling often seems the ultimate biblical literalism, practices born around 1909/10 within the early Pentecostal, Church of God tradition when Holiness preacher George Hensley first took up serpents in east Tennessee churches.
Three of the five “signs” from Mark 16 — casting out devils, speaking in tongues, laying hands on the sick — have long characterized Pentecostalism. In adding the other two — handling snakes and drinking poison — these believers insist they are “confirming the word,” validating scripture for the entire church. No matter that these verses fall into Mark’s “long ending,” a section not found in early extant manuscripts, probably added in the second century. Handlers assert that if God had not wanted it in the biblical text it would have appeared there. Case closed.
I attended my first serpent handling in 1990, an outdoor revival and reunion led by Reverend Arnold Saylor. The next year I invited Saylor to lecture in my class at the Baptist seminary in Louisville. In 1997 a similar invitation brought Georgia serpent handler Carl Porter to Wake Forest University.
Their presentations were amazing classroom encounters. When challenged that “gifts of the Spirit” listed in Galatians never mention serpent handling, Porter responded: “But it does in Matthew 16, and Jesus is the one talking!” Case closed.
Those who study serpent handlers are indebted to researchers like Mary Lee Daugherty, Ralph Hood Jr. and Tom Burton who have written about them across the years, moving beyond caricatures to take their spirituality seriously.
In a 1998 article in International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, Hood, psychology professor at University of Tennessee/Chattanooga, wrote: “They are a deviant religious sect with importance both for the scientific study of religion and for the theological implications of their beliefs and practices.”
In Serpent-handling Believers, Burton, longtime professor at East Tennessee State, suggested that they are seeking “an epiphany … an intuitive grasp of reality,” grounded in a unique religious experience.
Daugherty, founder of the Appalachian Ministries Educational Resource Center, concluded that serpent handling had “sacramental” implications for participants, a “sacrament” that is alive and can kill you as worship literally becomes a matter of life and death.
Serpent handlers understand that reality, sadly, as Reverend Wolford’s death illustrates. Perhaps 75-100 have died since 1909; many have been bitten.
Whatever else, serpent handlers represent spirituality on the margins, spirituality that refuses to be domesticated, often with drastic results. Such marginalized spirituality is not new in Christianity.
Montanus, a second-century charismatic, believed the Holy Spirit inspired his “end time” prophecies and his challenge to church authorities. The early historian Eusebius wrote: “And he became beside himself, and being suddenly in a sort of frenzy and ecstasy, he raved, and began to babble and utter strange things, prophesying in a manner contrary to the constant custom of the Church handed down by tradition from the beginning.” Although orthodox, the Montanists were condemned by the church. Case closed.
St. Simeon Stylites died in 459 after 37 prayerful years on a pillar (stylite) in the Syrian desert. Evagrius, the 6th century historian, wrote: “He wore on his body a heavy iron chain. In praying, he bent his body so that his forehead almost touched his feet.” Male pilgrims received his counsel; women were forbidden to come near.
Two years before his death in 1226, St. Francis of Assisi experienced the stigmata, a vision, St. Bonaventure wrote, that “left Francis aglow with seraphic love in his soul … [and] left marks on his body like those of the Crucified [Christ]. Francis’ was the first of over 300 documented stigmatas, some life-threatening.
Before condemning serpent handlers too quickly, we might remember certain types of secular “spirituality” such as hang-gliding, mountain-climbing and surfing, whose devotees often use ecstatic language to describe their life-endangering experiences.
Marginalized spirituality is both internal and external, religious experience that seems eccentric at best, certifiable at worst — vision quests engendering strange deeds. Indeed, dangerous forms of spirituality often exist in the primal stage of many movements.
Immersion baptism bears inherent, now symbolic, life-threatening danger. The language of the Lord’s Supper, long since softened by Temperance juice and the memorialized presence of Christ, speaks graphically of life, death, body and blood.
Did today’s civilized sacraments originate on such spiritual margins? Case closed?