Snakehandlers, Pentecostals, Raconteurs, and Religious Narratives: Is Extremism in the Defense of Religion No Vice?
by Arlene M. Sánchez-Walsh
When the Washington Post covered the death, by snake-bite, of a West Virginia pastor, Rev. Randy
"Mack" Wolford last week, and linked it to a story they'd been
working on for months on snake handling churches, I knew what the response
would be among the general population, among my fellow Pentecostal travelers,
and for those who like their religion exotic-this was exactly the kind of
spectacle these churches often provide to a general population convinced that
extremism in the defense of religion is one of the worst of all vices.
My interest in this
story is not to defend Mack Wolford, but rather to get at what the deeper issue
is here, as someone who has studied Pentecostalism for over 15 years, and seen
some rather extreme behavior--the issues of extreme views and actions lie at
the heart of how some Pentecostals choose to interpret the Bible. Hermeneutics
is the academic word that many of us have tried to unpack as we try to make
sense of people like Wolford. Wolford knew how dangerous his faith was, he saw
his father bitten and later die of a snake bite. To be sure, these churches are
not representative of Pentecostalism, in reality, they number less than 100
churches and their membership continues to dwindle. But still, the exotic
nature of this type of Pentecostalism, (which is over 100 years old), always
attracts journalists and academics because it seems so unbelievable. Why
would anyone take that verse (Mark 16) literally?
Indeed, that is
the deeper question. Biblical literalism, as sociologist Christian Smith
argues-is impossible and often leads to incoherent theologies. More to the
point, Ralph Hood, who's been studying snake-handling churches for over two
decades says that he knows of no one who reads the Mark 16 passages
independently and seeks membership in a snake-handling church, but, notes,
Hood, all snake-handling church members know how to interpret Mark 16.
How do they know this?
How do Pentecostals know
anything about this text? How do they know that speaking in tongues means
speaking in an unknown language, when one of the key proponent of that
theological concept, Charles Parham, did not believe it was unknown languages,
but the ability to speak known languages as missionaries helping to usher in
the parousia? How do they know to distinguish between the
literal-tongues, exorcism, healing, laying on of hands, and the
metaphoric? take up serpents, whatever they drink will not harm them? Why is
poison the drink of choice? Certainly enough benign beverages will do you in if
you drink enough of it--note the war on SuperGulps in NYC.
Pentecostals often revel
in their ability to fluster those of us who have tried to understand them
through our own lenses and have often disregarded their own lens. There
is probably no greater tension between those of us who study religious
communities and the believers in those communities when we seek to analyze
their beliefs and practices without adhering to the same hermeneutical schema
at the core of their faith. It frustrates us as well, since to note my
colleague Ralph Hood again, "the most common assumption is that any
theology that emerges from Appalachian religion is an impediment to the
people's inevitable necessity of accommodating to modernity." Scholars and
journalists alike want to rush pastors like the late Rev. Wolford from the
premodern phase to the modern phase where, presumably, an enlightened church
would not think of snake handling and drinking poison worthy of their faith.
Even for those of us for
whom biblical literalism has little or no theological currency, modernity is
not an attractive alternative because it does not value
experience-Pentecostalism is an experience-driven faith that requires the
accumulation of countless narratives of healing, salvations, being snatched
away from the jaws of death, (in the case of snake-handlers, literal death),
joyful, wistful stories of being something one day, and turned around to being
something else the next--Pentecostals are the best raconteurs I have ever
studied. Narratives are theological currency, it's what makes Pentecostalism
plausible. While biblical literalism may be Pentecostalism's intellectual
failure, that is of little consequence to the hundreds of Pentecostals I have
met over the years.
Most of us in the
academy and in journalism value intellectual depth more than faith measured by
experience--the Washington Post picture essay and the follow-up essay by the
photojournalist Lauren Pond, and more terse, unsympathetic piece by Sally Quinn
both failed to move beyond the surface of what Wolford died for.
According to Ralph Hood, and journalist Dennis Covington, whose notable
ethnographic trip chronicled in "Salvation on Sand Mountain,"
snake-handling preachers Wolford, and most of those Pentecostals in Appalachia
who practice snake handling are guided much more by the two verses that bookend
Mark 16-17. They are guided by the desire to evangelize because they believe
this to be the last command Jesus gave. Perhaps it is the placement of
the these verses that drives much of this dangerous and reckless behavior, the
verse attributed to Jesus that commands his followers to evangelize and baptize
followers of the Way (what the earliest Christians called Christianity), and
the last verse of that section where Jesus leaves his followers with a glimpse
of what all who follow will eventually be in store for--eternity with God. It
is a beatific vision.
Still, does that mean
that Wolford should not be criticized for such reckless and dangerous behavior?
No, all one has to do is look at Pond's picture in the Washington Post of
Wolford's mother massaging her dying son's feet to see the pain, and be
reminded of the deep ties that this symbolic picture has in Christian
history--where a mother watching her son die an agonizing death is iconic and
not to be pitied.
I have seen Pentecostals
make some questionable choices about their health care, ceasing critical
medical treatment because they believed someone had "spoken" a word
of health over them and in effect, allowed their cancer to enter the terminal
phase. Perhaps more reckless is the ministry I studied in graduate school who
allowed ex-cons to live with their families with little regard to the effect
that it may have on their children and other family members. There are
documented cases where children were placed with unstable caregivers because
the family, wanting the ex-con to start living as a "redeemed"
person, decided that they could handle their anger issues without proper psychological
counseling-all one needed was prayer.
It is the same
religious impetus that disallows medicine for Christian Scientists, blood
transfusions for Jehovah's Witnesses, snake-handling in West Virginia (the only
state that has not outlawed the practice). What academics and journalists
may not grasp is the hold that this literalist hermeneutic has on certain
religious communities. Pentecostals reach a level of security, comfort, and
certainty that a hermeneutic built on biblical literalism that trumps nearly
every other kind of knowledge. Perhaps the tension here lies also in the idea
that for those of us who study and have worshipped with Pentecostals to not
adhere to literalist views, our knowledge is derived from "worldly"
sources and that usually is enough for believers to doubt our veracity to
explain them to an unbelieving world.
Comments
You are correct. I offer my apologies to Professor Sanchez-Walsh and have withdrawn my comment.