serpentecostal gemma de choisy it’s the morning of … wind ruffling fallen oak and maple leaves....

Serpentecostal Gemma de Choisy

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It’s the morning of Nov. 7, 2013, and Andrew Hamblin, a 22-year-old pastor with ordinary,

boyish looks and extraordinary ambition, is behind the wheel of his family’s black Windstar

minivan driving toward his church. It’s 52 degrees, warm for autumn but made to feel colder by a

northwesterly wind ruffling fallen oak and maple leaves. Along the road ahead, Cove Lake’s

rippling surface reflects the Cumberland Mountains. Heading west on Jacksboro, Hamblin makes

a left onto a smaller, tighter road as four game wardens from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources

Agency follow him.

Hamblin has led the Tabernacle Church of God in LaFollette, Tenn., since late 2011. The

building is squat and brick. Concrete crosses are inlaid in its walls. Across the street, an emphatic

WELCOME! is scrawled in red, loopy script on the side of a blue mailbox, which is gently

rusting at its hinges. Beside the mailbox, a sign nailed to a juvenile maple reads POSTED: NO

TRESPASSING. At the base of a dirt driveway, a slim marquee lists Hamblin’s name under

PASTOR, above service times: Friday at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 1 p.m. The church sits at the

top of the driveway, adjacent to a gravel parking lot, at 345 Longmire Lane.

At 10:31 a.m. Hamblin posts to Facebook from his Android. “Anyone and everyone that

will please begin to pray now. 4 game wardens have me at my church now. I don’t know what the

out come [sic] will be but Liz” — his wife — “will keep everyone posted. Mark 16:18 is still

real.”

Hamblin’s is one of an estimated 125 active serpent-handling churches. He and his

congregants handle venomous snakes in the name of Jesus — a century-old practice inspired by

the verse Hamblin mentioned in his post and outlawed in every state but one. You’d think a

church where supplicants risk their lives and break the law would keep itself small and secret.

Hamblin’s is anything but. After a write-up about the church in The Wall Street Journal, Hamblin

and his mentor, a fellow serpent-handling pastor named Jamie Coots, became the stars of a new

National Geographic Channel reality-television show called Snake Salvation.

Standing beside the church door, Hamblin kicks at some desiccated cacti in a stone


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planter. Redheaded, round-nosed, and dressed in gray slacks and a tucked-in, purple button-down,

he stands just over 6 feet tall. Stuffing his hands into his pockets, he sighs and watches the

wardens load their SUVs with aquariums full of writhing copperheads, cottonmouths, and timber

rattlesnakes. In total, the TWRA agents confiscate 53 venomous snakes that morning, and cite

Hamblin to court for the illegal possession of Class 1 Wildlife — an offense that carries a fine of

$2,500, and a potential sentence of up to 11 months and 29 days in jail, per animal: $132,500,

five decades, and three years in total. When the wardens knocked on the Hamblins’ door earlier

that morning, they said, simply, “You know why we’re here.” And Andrew Hamblin did. “I

wasn’t gonna lie,” he later tells me.

Historically, “Appalachia” — which is not just a range of mountains, but a culture — has

curated a backwoods and backward image thanks, in part, to its association with poverty, coal

mining, and illegal moonshine production. Moonshine is hardly the problem of the day:

LaFollette, Tenn., is just one of an increasing many towns notching both the Bible Belt and the

newly buckled Meth Belt. The bond within a church like Hamblin’s is forged on a crucible of

danger and trust. If someone is bitten, the congregation prays; if someone dies, the church looks

after the family that person leaves behind. Among converts, that sense of community is

strengthened by their choice to take up serpents and by everything they forsake: premarital sex,

alcohol, and, of course, drugs.

“There were a lot of people who had struggled with addiction, had been on the wrong

side of the law, had been involved in drug dealing and crime, and really wanted to reform their

lives,” Snake Salvation executive producer Matthew Testa told Time before the show premiered

last fall.

In December, Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson let his controversial, if unsurprising,

thoughts about same-sex marriage and race slip to GQ. Suddenly, he was either redneck bigotry

personified, or a guardian of traditional values. (In a post on Facebook, Andrew Hamblin called

him the latter.) Like Robertson, Hamblin is a product of reality TV’s special brand of


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prestidigitation: Stars start out as people and end up caricatures, defined by whatever fans and

foes do or do not want them to be. To some, Hamblin is a hillbilly with a deadly hobby, but to

others, he’s a man of faith in a godless time.

Which is why, 15 days later, when Hamblin stands outside the Campbell County

Courthouse, he stands as a soldier in the Lord’s army. He’s fighting America’s most dubious

battle: the War on Christianity. And he’s brandishing the First Amendment like a flaming sword.

“I won’t ever stop taking up serpents,” he says. “I’ve got God’s law on my side.”

*

A man spoke to God on a mountain, then carried down new rules. The man was George Went

Hensley. The mountain was White Oak, in south-central Virginia. The year was (probably) 1910,

the tinnitus end of the Pentecostal boom, a decades-long fundamentalist trend in American

religious fashion. The movement catered to the working-class poor — migrant workers, and the

children of former slaves, especially — and anyone else seeking an extreme expression of faith to

counter their extremely devastating daily lot. The movement insisted upon literal readings of the

Bible; intense, spontaneous, and demonstrable sacred experiences called “gifts of the Holy Spirit”

were paramount. Early Pentecostal congregations screamed in agony and danced for joy. They

spoke in tongues and, in the absence of divinely rendered miracles, they performed their own —

faith healings and exorcisms — and scared the shit out of a whole lot of milquetoast middle-class

white folks in the process. In the years leading up to serpent handling’s near-nationwide banning,

horror stories of wives lost to Pentecostal frenzy and children suffering bites fueled public

outrage and legislation.

Like early Pentecostal worshippers, contemporary serpent handlers defer exclusively to

the King James Version of the Bible. The sect Hensley started draws inspiration from Mark

16:17–18: “(17) And these signs shall follow them that believe; in my name shall they cast out

devils; they shall speak with new tongues; (18) 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.” And


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Mark 16:15–16 says: “(15) And He said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the

gospel to every creature. (16) He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that

believeth shall not be damned.” Serpent handling, in other words, is an evangelical tool —

evidence, however suspect, that God both is and is great.

Even though Pentecostal churches “spoke in (new) tongues,” “laid hands on the sick,”

and “cast out devils,” they tended to skip the Book of Mark’s lethal suggestions. Maybe George

Went Hensley was extra gung ho because he’d only just been saved. He’d been a boozehound, a

layabout, a notorious Lothario; by some accounts, he was out to prove his conversion’s sincerity.

Then again, he might have always been an all-or-nothing type. If some of the signs in Mark

16:17–18 were worth following, Hensley figured all of them should be, snake handling and

drinking “deadly things” included. (Most snake-handling churches have a jar of strychnine or

liquid lye resting on the altar.) So Hensley found a rattlesnake on top of White Oak Mountain. He

prayed to God for protection so he could handle the snake unharmed, and did. Then, snake in

hand, he bounded back down, found an audience of receptive ears, and got to preaching.

Hensley died of a snakebite in 1955. For serpent handlers, that fact is totally beside the

point. The scholarly consensus is that most verses after the eighth chapter in the Book of Mark

were way-late additions, not remotely present at the text’s inception. The point, as Ralph Hood

Jr., who literally wrote the book on serpent handling, Them That Believe, puts it, “is that a

powerful charismatic personality can unveil a text for a receptive audience — a text in which a

potential role has heretofore been ignored.”

Hood, a professor of religious psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga,

has spent 25 years conducting research in serpent-handling churches and church members’

homes. In the process, he’s become a friend to many snake handlers and something of an

ambassador on their behalf. Lately, that ambassadorial role includes religious-rights advocacy.

“To date and at present, serpent handling is the only New Testament-based Christian

practice that is actively legislated against in the United States,” Hood tells me. Some of that


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legislation has been draconian, to say the least. Anyone caught preaching a literal interpretation of

Mark 16:17–18 in the state of Georgia, for example, was eligible for capital punishment until

1968. Federal laws would have overridden a death sentence in such a case, but still — that’s how

long the law stayed on the books. In 1947, after five people died in two years from snakebites in

serpent-handling churches, Tennessee passed a law (which is still in effect) forbidding “a person

to display, exhibit, handle, or use a poisonous or dangerous snake or reptile in such a manner as

to endanger the life or health of any person.” The only state that hasn’t made serpent handling

illegal is West Virginia.

Despite laws prohibiting the practice, and the obvious, grievous bodily harm practitioners

face, adherents remain devout, defiant, and capable of converting new members who grew up

outside the sect — like Andrew Hamblin.

*

On a Friday night in late October, the parking lot outside Hamblin’s church is a mayhem of out-

of-state cars. Dark blue palmetto trees grow under a gibbous moon on South Carolina license

plates; on Kentucky’s, a thoroughbred bolts. One family of five traveled to LaFollette from

Georgia for the weekend — all big fans of Snake Salvation.

Hamblin greets me outside with a handshake, smiling wide. “Welcome, welcome, glad to

have yinz here,” he says, swapping y’all for the same nasal yinz (“you ones”); his is a

bottlenecked, Appalachian accent that’s hard to ignore. In a way, it’s fodder for anyone critical of

Hamblin who wants to discredit his defense of his faith.

“I’d just love to get a Ph.D. in theology, you know?” he tells me. “That’d be the coolest.”

But between the snakes and his five children (Liz and Andrew have a set of twins, and their first

child was born when they were 16), his hands are perpetually full. Hamblin never graduated from

high school, and he doesn’t have a GED, which is not to say he isn’t scholarly. I grew up in a

born-again household — church three times a week, no alcohol in the house, Bible camp, the

whole package — and I have never heard anyone quote scripture as lengthily or as accurately as


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Andrew Hamblin can. After we talked, I checked my tape recorder against my own King James

Bible. At one point, he monologues a chapter of the Book of Job — the entire chapter. And he

doesn’t miss a verse.

Since Snake Salvation premiered on Sept. 10, 2013, Hamblin says, services attended by

fewer than 75 people are rare. One hundred, even 120 worshippers jockeying for standing room is

more common. Compared with the numbers he preached to just months before — 10 people,

maybe 20 during revivals — the difference is profound. “People who see the show find me on

Facebook ‘n’ want to know where the church is, can they come to the service — all that,”

Hamblin says, “and I tell ‘em, ‘Yes. Of course. All are welcome.’”

Hamblin shares links and pictures and updates his Facebook status three or four times a

day. Most call people to worship (“Service starts at 7:30 tonight. Come EXPECTING a

blessing!”) or keep friends and fans keyed into his plans. “I’ve had Facebook messages and friend

requests — lord! I’ve had so many I can’t even keep up with them all.” It’s a new platform, but

an old technique; Hamblin uses Facebook the same way Billy Graham used TV. He had to make

a fan page to keep his updates going around. A sermon podcast is in the works. He’s been talking

to a local jail about starting a prison outreach ministry. (“We’ll have to leave the snakes at home

for that,” he concedes.) His grandest goal: to one day lead an international megachurch.

When Hamblin’s cell phone goes off, I recognize the ringtone — the reality show’s

theme song, “My Salvation” by the band Hendricks. Before excusing himself to take the call, he

makes a request: “I’ll ask you to sit a ways back from the front, just like in Jolo.”

Catholics have Vatican City. Elvis Presley fans have Graceland. For serpent handlers, the

Church of the Lord Jesus with Signs Following in Jolo, W. Va., is synonymous with the practice,

mostly because it can be practiced there legally. Far from keeping fringe religions’ typical low

profile, Jolo’s former pastor, Mark Randall “Mack” Wolford, was famous for opening his

church’s doors to writers, photographers, or anyone curious about snake handling. In fact, it was

there, in Wolford’s church, in late 2011, where I first met Andrew Hamblin. I was 22 and had just


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graduated from college, Hamblin was 20 and had just become the pastor of his own church in

LaFollette, and Mack Wolford was still alive.

“Nobody’s been bit since I’ve been pastor here, and that’s the way I want to keep it,”

Hamblin says, pressing redial on his phone. “Kids are kept away from the serpents,” he continues,

eyeing me like he’s assessing my potential derring-do, “and neither do visitors.” I solemnly swear

I’ll keep away from the snakes. Hamblin nods, presses his phone to his ear, and steps inside to

take his call.

The sanctuary walls in Hamblin’s church are lined with scripture-quoting placards in

various states of humidity warp. A drum set, keyboard, and guitar are set up behind the altar, each

hooked to standing amps wedged into the corners at the church’s northernmost wall. On the wall

is a mural of people clinging to rocks, buttressed against sponge-painted waves in an angry sea.

Like Coots’ church in Middlesboro, the snake-handling church in Jolo is old-school;

women there wear their hair long enough to sit on (1 Corinthians 11:15: “But if a woman have

long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering”) and don’t show much skin

that isn’t on their face or hands. By comparison, Hamblin’s congregation looks wildly

progressive. In a pew perpendicular to the pulpit, Elizabeth Hamblin is wearing a floor-length

skirt and a long-sleeve shirt, as are a few sweet-faced teenage girls sitting with her. Everyone else

is dressed like they got off work 10 minutes ago (some of them have) or plan on going out when

church is done. Flannel or camouflage prints and work-stained blue jeans seem to be the men’s

standard uniform. Several women wear jeans and denim jackets pocked with rhinestones, and one

girl is wearing a truly fabulous pair of fringed, white leather cowboy boots. Not even the hoop

through my septum marks me out: The tips of Tabitha Bennet’s short black hair are dyed a hot,

violent pink; the jewels in her nose ring and the stud through her upper lip match.

Bennet lives in LaFollette, where she works as a hairstylist. She started coming to the

church in September with her ex-husband, Shawn, who isn’t a recovering drug addict, but fully

recovered, she says. Shawn saw “Andrew’s show” and was baptized shortly after during a church


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revival: “Since he got saved, it’s like he’s a whole new man. He has truly been healed.” Before

that, he was addicted to an unfathomable list of prescription stuff, Tabitha tells me proudly,

pointing Shawn out — a clean-cut guy in a pressed collared shirt, standing with a crowd of men

talking to Hamblin.

Just before the service starts, a couple from Maryville, Tenn., sits down on my right. The

woman tells me they found out about the church from the show. “We don’t take up serpents

ourselves,” she says, “but we respect what he” — meaning Andrew Hamblin — “believes.”

I ask them why they attend if they don’t hold with the practice. Her husband answers:

“It’s his passion. Pastor Hamblin has true spirit, a true love of God. We belong to another church,

the both of us, but we come here once before on Friday nights for that.”

*

Hamblin was raised by his grandmother and grandfather, a minister of a Freewill Baptist Church.

He grew up feeling more like a brother than a son to his mother: “My mother was a meth addict.

Meth, pills, booze — she looked like somethin’, like a monster from a zombie movie.” He says

painfully little about his father. Hamblin learned the guitar by playing gospel music at his

grandparents’ church, and he learned to play it pretty damn well: When he was just 13, he started

playing bluegrass professionally. By 14, he’d played banjo for several bands in Knoxville and

Nashville. At 15, he performed at Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tenn.,

while Elizabeth Marie, the pretty blonde girl he’d marry three years later, rode the rides and

watched him play from the theater’s stands. When he moved his fingers, he could “make it rain,”

a pawn shop clerk said not long ago, when Hamblin tested a banjo he eventually bought for $50

cash.

“I was good,” Hamblin says of his own talents. And yet, he chose to leave the musician’s

life behind him before he was old enough to vote. “I knew that I could be one of those men that

has a tour bus, that has a mansion home in Nashville, yet I felt a calling in my life to the church.”

When he was 17, Hamblin saw the pastor of a church in nearby Middlesboro, Ky.,


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featured on CNN. At that point, Pastor Jamie Coots wasn’t a celebrity, or even the head of a

prominent church. In fact, his church was tiny; about 15 people attended on average. CNN

featured Coots because of his small church’s peculiar, if old practice. Like his father and

grandfather before him, as his son after him will be, Coots is a snake-handling preacher.

“Growing up at our church, we spoke in tongues,” Hamblin told an interviewer at The

Christian Post last September, “even at a Free Will Baptist church — we spoke in tongues, we

shouted, danced, believed in baptism of the Holy Ghost, just like a Church of God or Pentecostal

church would.” So when he saw people handling snakes, speaking in tongues, he thought, Hey,

they ain’t much different than we are and I want to know if this is real or not.

Hamblin handled a serpent for the first time in Coots’ church when he was 18, shortly

after he and Elizabeth married. The snake he picked up — a black rattlesnake — hadn’t been

handled before. “I just went numb all over,” he says, “I only handled it for 30 seconds before I put

it back in the box, but it felt like a lifetime, like time stopped.” He assumed responsibility for the

Tabernacle Church of God a few years later, after being ordained online.

At the front of the church, Hamblin warms up, tapping out an upbeat tempo with his foot.

His guitar is a Squier Bullet Strat with tremolo — a Fender known not for having the best sound,

but for staying in tune for hours on end. Capped with a maple neck and a rosewood fretboard, its

basswood body is a shade Fender calls Daphne blue. “Praise the Lord, everybody!” Hamblin

cries, starting the service. Unless he is preaching, music plays ceaselessly during the service —

gospel only, because snake-handling churches consider other forms ungodly — but what songs I

couldn’t say. The amp’s feedback is extreme; the woman who sings along — a miniature blonde

with curiously sunken cheeks — sings from her throat, too close to the mic. Six people speak in

tongues during the service, which lasts about four hours. It sounds like some long dead language,

like guttural, vowel heavy panting. I lose count of the number of people who weep.

Pentecostalism began as a heavily emotive brand of worship, and like crying, speaking in

tongues — glossolalia — can be thought of as an expression of emotion, and evidence of a faith


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strongly felt if inexplicable. In serpent-handling churches, feeling is doubly important. “It’s a

belief better felt than told,” as Hood puts it. Congregants “take up” serpents (which can mean

anything from holding them in their bare hands to whirling, or even juggling them) in one of two

ways: by faith — saying a prayer and hoping for the best, essentially — or when they feel what

they call “the anointing.” By most accounts, the anointing is a bulletproof vest with a get-out-of-

jail-free card pinned to its front — a palpable blessing from the Holy Spirit, God’s tangible,

protective hand.

Or, as Hamblin sums it up: “When you feel the anointing and God moves on you to take

up serpents, even if one of ‘em lays fangs into you, you shall not be harmed.”

Unslinging his guitar strap, Hamblin hands his Fender to a congregant and reaches under

a bench by the altar for the snake box — a hinged-topped, handmade pine affair with a plexiglass

window below the carved warning WAIT ON GOD. If I had to guess, I’d say Hamblin wears a

29-inch inseam. If it weren’t coiling itself up into a lasso around his forearm, I’d guess the timber

rattlesnake he pulled out of the box is almost as long. “If anyone should see this here — if an

unbeliever could see this power, then there ain’t no way on earth they could keep from shouting

with joy,” he says. “This is real, children, and there must be a God for man to do a thing like

this.”

The snake’s scales are mottled, yellow, and brown. Its head is shaped like a heart.

Rattlesnakes, like copperheads and cottonmouths (aka “water moccasins”), are vipers.

Their venom is partially neurotoxic — meaning it’s a paralytic, freezing a bite victim’s

diaphragm until one suffocates — but also hemotoxic. The hemotoxic enzymes in rattlesnake

venom lyse proteins, snapping them down to their constituent polypeptide chains and amino acids

by dissolving the molecular bonds that make and keep their shape. Rattlesnake venom stops

blood from clotting and all but dissolves soft tissues, allowing the venom to spread. It is widely

recognized as they most painful sort of snake venom. At Wolford’s church in Jolo, a handwritten

sign on the altar reads: “The Paster [sic] and Congregation are not Responsible for anyone that


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handles the Serpent’s [sic] and gets out. If you get bit the church will stand by you and pray with

you. And the same goes with drinking the poison.” Most serpent handlers choose not to see a

doctor if they’re bitten. When Wolford was bitten in his thigh by a timber rattlesnake during a

service in 2012, he refused medical treatment until it was too late. Imagine: Ten hours after being

bitten, you’re lying on a couch in your mother’s home while she holds your hand. Imagine: Her

husband, your father, died in that same house, from the same kind of bite, 30 years before.

Imagine: The venom is destroying the flesh around your very nerves, and your best friend, who’s

there with you, asks you if you want to go to the hospital. Imagine telling him no.

*

After the services end, Hamblin sits down next to me on a pew at the front of his church’s

sanctuary, crosses his legs, and folds his hands in his lap. I can hear cars pulling out of the

parking lot outside. He and I are alone in the church but it’s not uncomfortable. In fact, even

though I know a rattlesnake is in a box under the altar, barely 10 feet away from us, I feel

remarkably safe. There’s something about Hamblin — he’s just open. Wide-eyed, and totally

candid.

“I miss Pastor Mack so much,” Hamblin tells me. He wasn’t there when Wolford was

bitten, but he was one of several pastors at his funeral who preached and handled serpents over

their friend’s open casket. “But, it was his time. God called him home and he went,” he says as he

massages two fingers on his right hand, crippled from a rattlesnake bite. He cannot make a fist

with that hand. “You know, he” — Wolford — “was the one who convinced me to let reporters

come here. He always had journalists and photographers up at Jolo. Then we got wrote about in

that article there,” Hamblin says, pointing to a framed Wall Street Journal article hanging in the

entryway, “and it was after that we got asked to do the show.”

There are two more scars from snakebites on the back of Hamblin’s neck — milky

pinpricks I wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t pointed them out. A copperhead latched on at the

base of his skull, released, and sunk its fangs into Hamblin for a second time, lower down. When


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I ask him what the bites felt like, he says the rattlesnake bite had been the most painful thing he’d

ever felt. “I was foolish. I picked it up from pride, not because God moved on me to.” The

copperhead, though, “didn’t feel like anything. That’s the power of the anointing. I was not hurt.

No harm done. No swelling or itching or nothing. Just a little blood was all.”

“The snakes that I use in my services are dangerous enough to kill you. If they couldn’t

kill you, then there wouldn’t be no point in havin’ ‘em,” Hamblin explained on an episode of the

show.

In early September 2013, before the show premiered, Hamblin told Time he didn’t want

snake handlers to come off sounding like “illiterate rednecks that holler, ‘For God so loved the

world, let’s handle a snake!’” Because of the “shall” in “they shall take up serpents,” most serpent

handlers — including Coots — consider taking up serpents a commandment on par with “Thou

Shall Not Commit Adultery,” and everything else Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. That’s

how serious they are when they talk about “literal interpretations” of the Bible. But Hamblin

doesn’t buy it, in this instance at least, and he doesn’t insist everyone at his church handle snakes.

“This is about souls, not snakes,” he says. “What matters is getting people saved.”

Before the first episode aired, Testa, the executive producer of Snake Salvation, told NPR

that snake handling fascinated him because it’s “such an extreme gesture of faith.” While filming

the series, he said, “we set out to tell this story from the snake handlers’ point of view, to really

humanize them, not to judge them, and to show how important religion is in their daily lives with

their daily struggles.”

It is difficult to overemphasize how severely they missed the mark.

Between the deep-voiced narrator’s imitation of James Earl Jones, (multiple) shots of

Coots’ son walking balls-first into a log, and the banjo music in the background (always, for

comedic relief), the series played like a mockumentary of ethnographic voyeurism. Although

church services and interviews with snake handlers did get airtime, the show’s focus was

overwhelmingly on Coots’ and Hamblin’s hunts for snakes. The pastors were also shown


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trafficking snakes across state lines, and that same baritone narrator repeatedly mentioned that

Hamblin was unemployed and on welfare, which embarrassed Liz to no end. Hamblin himself

seemed all right with the way he and his faith were portrayed, so long as the show allowed him to

spread the Word.

*

On Oct. 22, the National Geographic Channel aired the final four episodes of Snake

Salvation back-to-back. “Unfortunately the audience for the series was not what we had hoped it

would be,” a spokesman for the National Geographic Channel wrote to me, adding the series

averaged 300,000 viewers. On Facebook, Jamie Coots updated his status: National Geographic

contacted him to say it wasn’t renewing his contract and didn’t plan to shoot a second season.

On Oct. 27, Hamblin stalls Sunday service until 1:30 p.m., waiting outside the church for

crowds that never show up. The family from Georgia doesn’t come back. That afternoon, I count

22 people in the pews.

Like the couple from Maryville, some people who attend Hamblin’s church on Fridays

attend a different church on Sundays, which might account for the number of folks missing. But

it’s an overcast morning, and causes are difficult to see, and their effect makes Hamblin

nervous. When the service finally starts, he paces the floor. “I’m sure yinz heard the news about

the show, but I don’t want anyone to worry. Some people out in Middlesboro like to tell folks

they’re bound for hell if they don’t do this and they don’t do that,” he says, walking faster,

speaking louder. “Some people say, if you don’t handle serpents, you can’t get through heaven’s

gates. Well I say, if you want to get to heaven, all you got to do is to get right with God!”

A couple weak “amen”s sound back at him from the pews. “Well those people, those

people who’re all fire and brimstone, they’re the ones got their contract canceled. Ain’t nobody

from National Geographic called me. No, sir.” Stomping in circles around the altar, swinging his

arms wide, Hamblin yells until he’s red in the face: “You know what I think, children? I think

we’re gonna see a new sort of show, with more preaching and less runnin’ around in the woods


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after snakes! They know, the producers — they know what people watch for, what’s been filling

this church every week!” Serpent-handling pastors aren’t seminary educated; they’re “called” to

the church, and they build and keep their congregations solely on the strength of their message

and charisma. When they sermonize, they do so extemporaneously, in keeping with the

Pentecostal notion that religious experiences, including testimony, should be spontaneous. The

way they see it, if acts of faith can be preplanned, then they can be also faked.

Panting, Hamblin stops in front of the altar. His shirt sticks to his back, soaked to

translucence with sweat. Just watch, he tells the few and faithful sitting before him, stammering

and repeating himself. Just watch, he promises. The pews will fill again.

Within two weeks, his snakes would be gone too.

*

The night of the TWRA raid, Hamblin crashed a fundraiser at a country club in nearby Oak

Ridge, trying to speak to Bill Haslam, the governor of Tennessee. Depending who you ask, it was

either a “stunning,” “pathetic,” or “shameful” display of bravado. According to the LaFollette

Press, a Republican representative from Jacksboro, Dennis Powers, was surprised to see

“someone on food stamps” (which Hamblin is, despite the show on Nat Geo) at the event.

Apparently admission cost $100 a head. The Press also quoted Powers saying, “This is about

endangerment,” highlighting the public safety issue venomous snakes might pose. Later, the

TWRA tweeted: “PSA for the day: Please please leave venomous snakes alone!” According to

the law, Class 1 Wildlife are animals that “pose a significant danger” to humans. Although

Hamblin tried to create a safe environment for his snakes and his congregation by keeping the

snakes in their own containers (either an aquarium or stackable Tupperware) and by feeding them

regularly, the 53 animals confiscated from his church certainly weren’t kept to the standards

trained professionals maintain.

“You do not want to go in there,” Liz Hamblin told me when I asked to see the church

annex where snakes were kept, pinching her nose to demonstrate: It smelled. “They shed and he”


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— referring to her husband — “just leaves them skins around like worn socks.” In Tennessee,

only zoos and circuses may be issued permits to keep Class 1 Wildlife; private individuals are

ineligible. Because Hamblin was cited to court on these charges and not Tennessee’s direct ban

on snake handling, Powers says, “This is not about First Amendment rights.” Andrew Hamblin

and his lawyer disagree. “Of course my client maintains his innocence as the case against him is

not cut and dry and reaches a little deeper than it appears on the surface,” Mike Hatmaker,

Hamblin’s defense attorney, told the Christian Journal-Leader. Hatmaker also told the Journal-

Leader that he and his legal team had uncovered “at least four” arguable defenses, adding, “I

think that one of our defenses that I am willing to share is separation of church and state.”

“It’s unconstitutional is what I think,” Hamblin says when I ask him about the TWRA’s

raid. “They just walked right into the church and took every snake I had. There’s supposed to be a

separation between church and state! I mean, what’s next? Who’s to say they can’t come in and

take away our King James Bibles too?” Supporters and members of the congregation planned to

rally at the courthouse before the hearing, set for 9 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 15, and Hamblin started

a petition — as a means for what end, exactly, I never could find out.

Over the weeks before his hearing, Hamblin’s Facebook friends left posts on his wall

with various degrees of capitalization and an almost unanimous use of multiple exclamation

points. Most posted about the TWRA, calling it villainous and corrupt. Some confused the

wildlife agents with police officers, asking questions like: “Why don’t they leave Andrew alone

and go after the drug dealers in town?” Others referred vaguely to the “War on Christianity,”

while one or two foretold divine comeuppance for the “snitch” or “rat” who “sold out” Andrew

Hamblin to the TWRA.

Meanwhile, the TWRA already announced its source: Snake Salvation, it said, provided

all the proof it needed of Hamblin’s illegal animal possession.

After the raid at Hamblin’s church, Matthew Cameron, a TWRA spokesman, commented

on the agency’s wildlife restrictions: “The list just goes on and on for the qualifications you have


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to meet to possess these species. Obviously a small church building with a locked door doesn’t

qualify. Anyone could get inside the building and let the snakes out as a joke.” Andrew Hamblin,

Cameron said, “doesn’t have the knowledge to possess these things and care for them as they

need to be cared for.” Local herpetologists said much the same. Speaking to NPR, Kristen Wiley,

the curator of the Kentucky Reptile Zoo, said that snakes rehabilitated from snake-handling

churches were often sick, and far less likely to strike than a healthy animal. Churches like

Hamblin’s were “setting themselves up for a safer encounter during their services when they

[used] a snake that [was] in bad condition to begin with,” said Wiley.

“If the animal is not able to cycle its body in the way it was created to, it’s totally

disruptive to their life cycle,” Al Coritz, a biomedical engineer who has kept venomous snakes

since 1973 (keeping but not handling them is legal in Pennsylvania, where he lives), tells me. “If

humans weren’t allowed to sleep for several days, you wouldn’t be at the top of your game

either.” “I’ve been aware of religious snake handlers,” Coritz says. “I tend to ignore them

because I hate to rain on anybody’s religious parade. Mostly, I’m worried about the animals. First

of all, timber rattlesnakes are the most common snake they use, and those aren’t the easiest

snakes to care for. They’re mucking with a species that’s not the best species for private

individuals to keep.” What serpent handlers do with their snakes “really stresses them out,” Coritz

says. “All that shaking, rocking, and rolling during the ceremonies. And they don’t feed well in

captivity, even if you’re know what you’re doing.”

And timber rattlesnakes have a very short year compared with other species. In the wild,

they’re active from April through September. That’s pretty much it, Coritz emphasizes: “These

snakes have got to hibernate. People who don’t understand the natural history of the snakes don’t

let them do this, and as a consequence they don’t live very long in captivity.” A healthy, wild

snake’s typical parasites — tapeworms and roundworms, mostly — won’t harm their host

terribly. But, if a snake isn’t allowed to hibernate, its immune system becomes compromised. Its

parasites get out of control, stressing the animal. The snake stops drinking, its kidneys fail, and


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you have a dead snake shortly thereafter. “If these were cute little puppies or bunnies,” says an

audibly angry Coritz, “people would be down on them like a ton of bricks, but because they’re

rattlesnakes, nobody cares. The wildlife officials did the right thing in shutting them down. The

Bible says we’re stewards of the earth, of plants and animals. You’d think a Christian group

would know better.”

Currently, Hamblin’s snakes are held as evidence at the Knoxville Zoo, in facilities the

TWRA sanctioned and built. Speaking with a local news station, Phil Colclough, a herpetologist

in charge of special collections at the zoo, said that snakes could live up to 35 years in captivity,

provided they are well cared for. Hamblin’s longest-living snake hung on for three years. It had

been his favorite: a yellow timber rattler, like the snake that bit Mack Wolford. Hamblin keeps its

corpse in his kitchen freezer. He wants to make a guitar strap out of it.

*

Outside the Campbell County Courthouse at 8:42 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 15, ribbons are tied to

every still thing: telephone poles, stop signs, car antennas, the slim upper wrist of the lady to my

right. The morning sun is mushed under a pallid gauze of cloud. The ribbons are red, and a man

wearing a T-shirt in a matching hue tells me the color choice represents the blood of Christ. At

the base of the courthouse steps, I count 56 matching T-shirts. Hamblin stands above them,

shouting: “This ain’t no longer just a fight for snake handling. This is a fight for freedom of

religion!”

An enormous white-haired man wearing an acid-washed denim jacket and matching jeans

hands me his business card. His phone number and the line “Larry Watters, Tiger Trainer,

Ponderosa, Tennessee” are printed in white Comic Sans over a picture of him wearing that very

same blue-jean tuxedo, spooning an adult Siberian tiger. “The TWRA is out of control,” Watters

says. “Who are they to say what animals we should and shouldn’t have?”

Two construction workers standing nearby remove their hard hats and bow their heads

when Hamblin leads his supporters in prayer on the courthouse steps. When he walks inside, the


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rally’s attendants all try to follow at once, creating such extreme gridlock at the security

checkpoint that exasperated guards, whose numbers were doubled in anticipation of Hamblin’s

hearing, have to lead them like ducklings around to an auxiliary entrance at the building’s side.

Past the devoted sea of red shirts, I can make out Liz Hamblin through the courthouse’s

open doors. Two days before the hearing, Andrew had to drive her to the emergency room.

Terrified that she’d lose her husband, not to a snakebite, but to prison, she’d started having panic

attacks. “I handle snakes plenty too. Yes, I worry, but it’s not for me to fear,” she said, when I

asked her if she was ever afraid that her husband might, well, die. Compared with death by

snakebite, the thought of Andrew in jail seemed to scare her more: “I just woke up in a panic like,

you know, ‘You can’t leave me!’” The only time she lets go of Andrew’s hand is when she walks

through the metal detector.

Hamblin pleads not guilty. The Tennessee grand jury will hear Hamblin’s case on Jan. 8.

When he gets to the bottom of the courthouse steps an hour and a half later, Hamblin embraces

Ralph Hood like a nephew greeting a favorite uncle. Slapping Hood on the back, he says, “Here’s

a man that knows more about serpent handling and anyone alive and he ain’t never handled a

one!” Hood places a wide, calloused hand reassuringly on Hamblin’s shoulder, smiling beneath a

beard that almost reaches his chest: “Well, well, well, youngblood. You got yourself a battle

plan?”

That night, outside the Tabernacle Church of God, mild light pollution from the turnpike

stains the thick clouds a warm, pink tone. “If I were to be sent to prison, boy, I just think that

would set off such a blast,” Hamblin says, shaking his head. “You’d just have a total rebellion on

your hands.” It’s 9:35 p.m. and a handful of congregants have been laying hands on a newcomer

inside the church — either to heal or exorcise her, depending whom I ask — for almost half an

hour. A woman from the Channel 10 News tells me she was supposed to air a report on Hamblin

at 10 p.m. But the parking lot looks like a frozen game of Tetris, and the reporter’s car is boxed in

by at least two dozen others. “Think you’re gonna miss your deadline,” I say, unhelpfully. She


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nods.

The congregants include a mother, Judith Carolyn Rutherford, and daughter, Machelle

Tinch, whom I’d met the night before. Their long hair is the same blonde shade of curl, and their

upper lips have the same Kewpie-doll shape. I saw them both at the church in October, but this is

the first time we’ve talked. “What part of Florida are you from?” Tinch had asked me; she’d seen

the plates on my car. When I explained that the car is a rental, Rutherford wanted to know who I

came to Campbell County with. I tell them I didn’t come with anyone, that I flew down alone that

afternoon, and they look at each other, horrified, before turning to face me.

“You came to a meth county alone?” Tinch hisses, challenging me to explain my

apparent death wish. “Honey,” Rutherford says to me, patting my arm with a chiding hand,

“you’re in the middle of good ol’ boy country. The cops take enough bribes to leave most of the

worst cooks be. Meantime, there ain’t hardly a family in town that don’t have somebody in it

that’s a meth head — ” “Or a pill popper,” Tinch adds, “or just a good old-fashioned alcoholic.”

Earlier during tonight’s service, Andrew raised a black timber rattler as thick as my calf

over his head while preaching, one of two replacement snakes Coots had brought down. The

snake flicked its black forked tongue, tasting the warmth emanating from incandescent bulbs in

the ceiling fan above the altar. Alongside the ceiling’s unfinished wood paneling, the ill-secured

fan wobbled in place like a dashboard hula figurine.

“I am a soldier in the Lord’s army,” Hamblin shouted, caressing the snake under its jaw,

“and I will fight for our right to take up serpents!” When sweat broke out on his brow, he wicked

it away with the snake’s back. That’s when I figured I could use some air.

I rub my hands together against the chill, blowing into them for warmth, and watch my

breath curl. It was unbearably hot inside the church. There’s really no such thing as bad press.

Attendance shot back up following the TWRA’s raid. Tonight, 98 people packed into the pews.

“If you’re an addict, I’m telling you, you don’t need to take another pill,” Hamblin said to them

from the pulpit. “If you’re an alcoholic, you don’t gotta take another drink. You just got to see


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this glory here, and get the Lord into your heart.”

Earlier that day I read a drug control report issued for the state of Tennessee that said

1,000 people died “as a direct consequence of drug use” — meth mostly, and opiates — in 2009

alone. Since serpent handling began over a century ago, there have been fewer than 100

documented deaths from snakebites.

That night, Jeremy Henegar, a 20-year-old convert with an infectious smile and piercing

eyes, hung out and helped Andrew clear away tambourines and other odds and ends. “I can tell

you now,” Henegar told me earlier, “until I started coming here a month ago and let God move on

me, I was a raging alcoholic. If I hadn’t started coming here, I can promise you: I’d be dead or

worse.” When he felt the anointing, “I knew I didn’t need drink anymore. It feels like a perfect

calm.” Was it like being drunk, I asked. Or high? “Being drunk, being stoned,” he said, his face

relaxing with remembered ecstasy, “that don’t even come close.”

Hood has his own theory of his about serpent-handling converts who struggle with

substance abuse. “I think certain faith-based groups, depending on what they’re about and how

they worship, are really good at appealing to certain kinds of people,” he says. “Serpent handlers

happen to be very good at rehabilitating drug addicts and alcoholics, I think, because they can

replace that high with another kind. They can give you that emotional high.” In the long history

of religion, drugs have been used to facilitate highs, inspire visions, and cultivate physical

sensations that transcend what the human body can achieve on its own. Some Native American

tribes use peyote, for instance. “But here’s a group that doesn’t use drugs,” Hood says. “They use

snakes.”

Around 10:30 p.m., the service winds down. Inside the church, the future dances in the

center of the aisle.

The third-to-last episode of Snake Salvation starts with Hamblin pulling up to his church

with his twin boys in tow. “I want my children to follow in this faith because we feel this is right.

I do want my children one day when they come of age to handle serpents,” he says during the


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episode, taking a milk snake — small, gray, and nonvenomous — out of an aquarium in his

church’s annex for his sons to play with. “You know,” he says, “they mimic everything they see

in church when you handle ‘em. I mean, hangin’ it around their neck, shoutin’ with it, pattin’ his

foot. They mimic what they see us do with it.”

While men and women around him keen and sing, a small boy stamps his feet between

the pews. In either hand, he holds a red rubber coral snake. He doesn’t shout “amen” or

“hallelujah” like Hamblin, but that makes sense. He can’t be much more than a year old, the age

when most babies start to toddle, but not all have learned to speak. He raises the toy snakes out in

front of him, up and over his head.

A man sitting in the row beside him watches. “Lookit him go!” the man says. “We got a

pastor in training.”

serpentecostal gemma de choisy it’s the morning of … wind ruffling fallen oak and maple leaves....

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