THE SERPENT HANDLERS CHRISTIAN GROUP

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Cause like so talking the bad scene looking.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining us. Today. We
have a very intriguing show. Today we're going to learn
about what are the serpent Handlers. We have a special
guest professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga,
Professor Hood, who specializes in the psychology of religion. And
this part one we're going to be talking about serpent handlers,
and part two we're going to talk about is the

(00:41):
belief in God biological or not. Welcome Professor Hood, Thank
you for joining us.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
That's my pleasure.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
So this is really intriguing to me. So the first
question I have to ask is how you got involved
with the serpent Handlers.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
Well, when I first came to the University of Tennessee
at check there was a publicity had two deaths that
occurred in a church in Carson Springs, And while the
news media was speculating on what these people believed and
what their practice entailed, nobody really had studied these people

(01:17):
or documented the tradition. So since my area of interest
is in the psychology of religion, I decided to get
to know these people, to participate in their services and
to document their beliefs in practices.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
Now, is this only for that region of Tennessee or
in different states?

Speaker 1 (01:36):
No, the tradition has been in many parts of the
United States, but its great strength is in the Appalachian
Mountain regions, and that goes all the way from Alabama
up to Ohio. But it includes the state's Tennessee, Georgia, Carolina's, Kentucky,
West Virginia.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
So really the south, well yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
Southeastern part of the Appalationan Mountain regions. But there have
been handling churches all over America, including churches as far
west as California.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
Interesting, Well, let's go ahead and start exploring this. What
is the history of the serpent Halers. How long have
they been around?

Speaker 1 (02:14):
Well, the serpent Haller is really combined three traditions that
people might be familiar with. The first is the holiness
tradition in the Appalachian Mountain region. And holiness people are
people who believe that their lives should be lived as
an outward manifestation of an inward spiritual transformation. So there

(02:34):
are people who do not separate their beliefs from the behavior,
and they would find it curious if you'd have to
ask them what they believe were what the religion is,
because you should see it in the way they live
and practice their lives. And the second tradition that you're
probably familiar with is the Great Fundamentalist tradition, and that's

(02:57):
the tradition that's been grossly misunderstood by many social scientists
who who undertake study it because most people think that
people who are fundamentalist in any tradition take literal interpretations
of sacred text. But that's not true. And the reason
it's not true is no sacred text has only one

(03:19):
layer of meaning. So to take like a Christian fundamentalist,
they recognize that their Bible, the King James Bible, has
sometimes a plain meaning that simply says what it says,
but other times there's terables in other ways of talking.
So what fument really are people who simply believe that

(03:41):
one text is privileged over all other texts, and that's
a text that they think, for instance, is a sacred text,
like the Bible being the revealed word of God. And
the third tradition that links this serpar handling tradition is
the Great Pentecostal tradition, and Pentecostalism is a religion that
believes it's less important than the specific end of your

(04:04):
belief than the fact that how you believe, how you
experience the emotional attachment that you have to your God.
And so Pentecostalism says that religion is better felt than told.
And so they looked for evidence of legitimate emotional expression
in the terms of religious fundamentalism, and what they found

(04:29):
was speaking in tongues or glossalalia as evidence of baptism
and Holy Spirit. And that's how this part of the
tradition got studied, because wherever you have a textual reference
for speaking in tongues, who have other things. So if
there's a foundational text for this tradition, it's the Gospel
of Mark, verses sixteen seventeen eighteen, and it says these

(04:53):
signs shall follow them that believe. So superhandlers see themselves
as sign following believers. And then it says, in My name,
they shall cast out devils, they shall speak with new tones,
they shall take up serpents. If they drink in the
deadly thing, it shall not harm them. They shall lay

(05:13):
hands upon the sick, and they shall recover. So these
are the words in the King James Bible of the
Resurrected Christ.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
And are psyched Christianity.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
Yes, the serpent handlers believe that they are being obedient
to the Gospel of Mars and the Plain meaning where
it says they shall take up serpents. So, starting in
about nineteen oh nine, the Pentecostals Church of God, Church
of God of Prophecy began to practice the handling of serpents.

(05:46):
And they were aged because they could pick up battlesnakes
and copper heads and not get bid and not get maimed.
So they felt that the signs were following the believers
and this was the miracle as sign that this Pentecostal
movement was in fact reliving those great moments of the

(06:07):
Day of Pentecost. And so as they begin to handle
serpents more and more, they got publicity and people were
awed by this tradition. But something began to happen because
as they begin to handle serpents more and more, some
people begin to get bit, some people begin to get maimed,
and some people began to die. So the mainstream denominations

(06:34):
began to back away from the practice, and only the
renegade churches I call the renegade Churches of God throughout
the Appalachian Mountains continued the practice, and they continue the
practice today, despite the fact that people can get bit,
despite the fact that people get maimed, and despite the
fact that people die. And I have documented just under

(06:57):
one hundred deaths from of serpents in this tradition since
nineteen o.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
Nine, one hundred people over the last hundred years. Almost Yes, Now,
I guess we'll delve into a little bit in their practices.
How do they use the serpents? What kind of serpents
are they?

Speaker 1 (07:17):
The serpents they handle are the serpents that are common
to the indigenous appalach Mountain region, and the most common
serpents handled are rattlesnakes, copperheads, water moccasins, But they sometimes
trade for serpents, and they'll handle any kind of serpent
as long as it's a poisonous serpent, as long as
it's a.

Speaker 2 (07:37):
Viper, it has to be poisonous.

Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yes, that's interesting.

Speaker 2 (07:43):
Is there a significance for that.

Speaker 1 (07:46):
Yes, because the scriptures the life are essentially means a
poisonous serpent, one that can mane or kill, and they
believe it's the power of the holy Ghost that gives
them victory over engaging in what otherwise would be simply
a lethal practice.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
So if one of them gets maimed, for instance, by
a snake, does the rest of the congregations start wondering
is that person straying from the path.

Speaker 1 (08:14):
The serpent handlers that continue the practice don't have any
better explanation for what Theologians called the odicy than everybody else.
That is, they don't know why. Sometimes they get bit,
sometimes they get maimed, and sometimes they die. But here's
what they'll say, nobody gets out of this life alive.

(08:36):
So it's not a question of whether you're going to die,
it's how you're going to die. And what greater assurance
of your salvation is there? Then if in being obedient
to God, you handle serpent, and that's the way that God,
in their language, calls you home. So they believe it's

(08:58):
important that they live their life obedient to God, knowing
that everybody in the end dies. And what's important is
not your death, but your salvation, and your salvation is
assured by being obedient to God. So handling serpents has
an act of obedience, doesn't guarantee you that you won't

(09:18):
get bid. It doesn't guarantee that you won't die, but
it does assure you that if you're a firm believer
in the Gospel and practice the signs, that your salvation
is assured.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
That's fascinating, really fascinating, And I'm assuming the reason they're outlawed.
I think I forgot how many states are actually outlawed.

Speaker 1 (09:38):
In every state that the serpents have been handled in
have passed laws against the practice, except for West Virginia.
The first law was passed in nineteen forty in Kentucky,
and it's a law that is probably blatantly unconstitutional because
it says it is illegal to use any reptile in

(10:01):
a religious service. So the law is specifically directed against religion,
and it specifies not danger serpents reptiles, So that means
if your daughter brought a turtle to a Bible study
class in Kentucky, she's violating the law. But most of
the laws don't mention religion. For instance, Tennessee says it's

(10:25):
illegal to handle a serpent in a fashion to endangerself
or any other, and that law has been upheld on
appeal to the Tennessee State Supreme Court And one thing
that's confusing in the United States, and that's often misinterpreted,
is while the Supreme Court brants you the absolute right

(10:48):
to religious belief, a famous stain of the court, as
we know, no heresy, So they'll never challenge the right
of serpent handlers to believe in the Gospel of Mars.
But the state does have a right to control practice
if they have what they call a compelling interest. And
so while it's legal to believe in surpent handling, it's

(11:10):
illegal to engage in the practice. And the appellate courts
had reasons that the reason you can't engage in this
practice is believers from producing widows and orphans.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
So that compelling interest is really an ambiguous term.

Speaker 1 (11:27):
Yeah, it is. And I've testified in courts in favor
of the serpent handlers because I think that it's a
specious argument because as long as you're in consenting adult,
the States allow all kinds of high risk activity. You
can ride a motorcized injury rate in professional football now
is one hundred percent. Some ure entail risk when secular

(11:49):
activities can. So my argument, as long as someone is
a consenting adult, they have the right to not only
believe in the Gospel of Mark, but also to practice
what it plainly stays is a legit religious ritual, which
is the taking up of serpents. For those who believe.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
That's a great point. You know, it's really bizarre that
they had to do that, that constant had to ban
these individuals from doing it. I understand trying to protect
them from obviously getting maimed or killing themselves by accident,
but the violation of the constitutional rights is pretty evident.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
Sure. My argument has always been if they could get
proper funding, a proper case could go to the US
Supreme Court, and I believe that they would be sustained
in their practice. I would agree for at Tennessee. In
the last ten years we had whitewater rafting right here
in Chattanogga on the Akoi River. In the last ten years,

(12:48):
ten people have died whitewater rafting on the Koy, And
in the last ten years in all the Appalachian states,
only two people have died from serpent handling. But we
don't see people trying to whitewater acting. We just say
it's a risk that if you're willing to take, is
your constitutional.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
Right, not an excellent point. Excellent point. And the last question,
how many serpent handlers do you think there are in America?

Speaker 1 (13:16):
Nobody knows because they don't keep any kind of written
records or any kind of rows of membership, but scattered
juck appalation mountains. My estimate is there's about one hundred
and twenty five churches. And those churches are often small
in number and often virtually invisible. They're relatively underground. And

(13:37):
the reason they are is because in the states where
the sirparent handling is commonly practiced, it's against the law,
and therefore they maintain this very quiet practice, and the
local communities tend to protect them. So I could take
you to serpar handing churches all over Appalachia, where the

(13:58):
sheriffs know they handle serpents, the community knows they handle serpents,
but as long as they stay to themselves, both the
sheriff and the community simply refuse to enforce the law.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
So it seems like besides the serpent handling, the pretty
innocuous group.

Speaker 1 (14:16):
Yeah, And in fact, superhandlers would often say, we don't
know why you just emphasize handling, because if you took
the Pentecostals and the fundamentals and the holiness people. As
I suggested at the beginning of this little interview, they
overlap ninety five percent with them. The only thing they
differ in is actually believing in the taking up of serpents.

(14:39):
But otherwise you would simply know them as relatively conservative
Bible believing Christians.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
Fascinating and now you're writing a book on it, or
do you have a documentary coming out?

Speaker 1 (14:52):
Well done. I've done several books on the super handlers.
The one that's most exhaustive is a book called Them
That Believe the Power and meaning of the Christian separ
healing tradition, and that's widely available.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
So them that believe, yes, them that believe. I would
highly recommend it for everybody. Professor Hood has been doing
this for decades. He has a vast experience and he
knows about the world of religion and psychology and now
as well the world of serpent handling. Thank you so much,
Professor Hood for this fascinating show and interview. We really
appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (15:24):
I enjoyed it. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (15:26):
As we're coming up part two with Professor Hood, we
talked about the biological belief is that inside us do
we inherit the belief in God.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
Hi, Welcome to Alante.

Speaker 4 (15:47):
This is at Alante's Recovery and my name is Ebatte
Cooglin and I'm part of the staff.

Speaker 3 (15:54):
At Alante Recovery Center has helped people dual diagnosis for
five years. We accept most PEOPPO insurances and provide luxury
accommodations and twenty four hour support to speak with an
admissions counselor call one eight eight eight two four to
two four four five zero.

Speaker 4 (16:13):
A lot of time we don't even know what's wrong
with us, and sometimes we need to get away to
figure that out. So if you want to go for
a little retreat out in Corona do Mar, which is
a confidential location, we're here to help. So we're only
from hallway, thank you.

Speaker 2 (16:34):
So run out the gate. Here. Are we hard wired
to believe in God?

Speaker 1 (16:40):
Well, that's a that's an interesting kind of question, and
I admit upfront I have a little bias against that
kind of language, so let me lay it out real quickly.
The notion of being hardwired is often used to suggest that,
because of our biological needs, you're perhaps rooted in evolutionary

(17:03):
selective processes. We have certain kinds of beliefs and practices,
and that may be true, and we can talk talk
about that during this interview. But it's important to note
that even if we are hardwired, that does not believe
that the objects of religion or the content of religion

(17:25):
is not intendently true. You're hardwired to respond to hunger
pains to seek out food, and that simply means you
will seek out food and perhaps find food that's actually there.
And therefore, the fact that you're hardwired to believe in
God does not mean that God somehow is simply a

(17:48):
biological phenomena. What it can mean is that our biology
is selected such that we seek out some greater force
or power that is the object of religious worship in
many traditions and goes by the name of God. So
we shouldn't pit biology against culture or or culture against

(18:08):
religion and think that if we can look at biological
determinants of something, the phenomena itself doesn't exist at its
own level.

Speaker 2 (18:16):
That's beautifully stated, beautifully stated. I know there are someone
tried to do that.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
Yeah, and a long time ago, in one of the
great classics in psychology called the Variety of Religious Experience,
James attacked this biological reductionism by what he called medical materialism,
and he said, suppose you know, Saint Teresa was, you know,

(18:43):
some kind of neurotic. If she was, that doesn't mean
that her experiences weren't true. It may be simply that
God is fond of revealing himself to neurotics more than
other kind of people. So the you can't dismiss an
experience be case because you can trace it to its

(19:04):
bloglogical origins. I couldn't be talking to you now unless
certain biological processes were going on in my core tax,
in your core tax. But that doesn't mean therefore that
what I'm saying doesn't have meaning or is discounted, because
it's simply quote unquote based upon a biological process that

(19:24):
we can identify. So what we wind up with is
correlations between brain states and other kinds of experiential states.
But it doesn't mean that the experiential state is nothing
but the brain state. It means that the brain state
is necessary perhaps for that experiential state to occur, But
the occurrence of experiential state is not reduced to the

(19:45):
brain state. So people being threatened by this new form
of biological atheism should not be mistaken by this effort
to reduce something to what simply amounts to or correlate.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
It sounds like people are falling prey to the reductionist.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
Yes, exactly, And that doesn't make sense because when I'm
talking to you, all of the electro activity in my
brain is perhaps necessary for me to vocalize what happens.
But my vocalizations have meaning, and you struggle to interpret
and to understand them, and you don't do that in

(20:26):
terms of the electrical chemical activity that makes it all possible.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
Let's do this. Let's go ahead and start exploring. Do
you think, then, because you mentioned a little earlier, maybe
biologically we're designed to look for something that's transcendent.

Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah, I think there is a clear case that religion
appears to be one of those universals that anthropologists are
usually suspicious of. But nevertheless, there are some that appear
to survive the test of time. So your hard put
to find a culture that doesn't have some sense of

(21:07):
transcendence and some way of linking to worshiping that understanding
of that transcendence. So there may be this biological base
that tells us that in some sense we can't be
isolated within ourselves, and that we search for something greater

(21:29):
and larger than ourselves. And that may be one of
the bases for seeking out religions as a cultural universal,
because most cultures in fact find some way to link
up to what they identify as God, some higher power,

(21:50):
and the religious great faith traditions are protectors of that
awareness and the assurance that it's not simply a figment
of your imagination or simply a misfiring of a brain state.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
Well, that sparked the question in my brain right now, Okay,
good trying to figure out how to phrase this. Is
there any culture that we know of that was originally atheist?

Speaker 1 (22:22):
It's very difficult to trace the origin of religion, but
probably the easiest answer to that is we have no
of no culture that doesn't in some sense some vision
of the transcendence. So if there is an atheism, it's

(22:43):
not an early characteristic of humankind. It may be an
emerging characteristic of advanced cultures that are trying to abandon
religions in favor of a thoroughly secularized scientific world. But
those cultures are rare, and it's not clear that they

(23:06):
are going to be in any sense more frequent than
the cultures that maintain their faith. And we know in
the twentieth century efforts to eradicate religious beliefs through secular,
humanistic ideologies of the great efforts of Nazism, the great
efforts of Communism have failed miserably. So what happened is

(23:27):
the Communists tried to eradicate religion in Poland, the powerful
Catholic country. They failed. Poland remains its strong Catholic identity
after its Communists experience. The effort to eradicate religion in
East Germany largely failed because modern Germany has high degrees

(23:49):
of religious belief. So the sense that science somehow would
inevitably eradicate religion turns out not to be true. That
theory which sciences is called the secularization theory, which foretold
that as mankind progresses, they will drop off this illy

(24:10):
illusiory belief in God simply has not been true. And
in fact, if anything, the opposite is true. The more
you try to eradicate religion, the more it sustains itself
in alternative forms of expression.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Interesting, it's almost like a virus.

Speaker 1 (24:27):
In a way.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
Yeah, it keeps adapting in a positive sense.

Speaker 1 (24:32):
And I think what people don't realize is one of
the things that's going on in the contemporary American culture
is that people are less likely to identify themselves easily
as religious, and they'll want to add a qualifier, and
they'll usually say, well, it depends what you mean by religion.
And then they'll say, I may not be religious, but
I'm spiritual. And what that spiritual means is I'm open

(24:56):
to transcendent realities, but I'm not committed to a particular
expression of let's say, a particular dogmatic belief. So most people,
even when they have religious identities, are open with respect
to a wider range of spiritual practices. So that again
shows that religion can be powerfully adapted because as people

(25:19):
maintain their identities, they transform their spiritual practices and then
incorporate that into their religious identity.

Speaker 2 (25:27):
That's fascinating. We're going to go back here and delve
more into the brain. Now, I know there's a distinction
between the brain and the mind. I'm going to stay
with the brain for now, right, and then we'll go
to the mind in a little bit. Do you know
if we have any genes that are designed for spirituality
or the belief in a transcendent Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:48):
The question of the inheritability of religion and its genetic
basis is extremely difficult to assess, and one of the
reasons is we've got to get monozygotic twins and diezigotic
twins that were either raised in the same environments or separated.
And the famous studies where we have the biggest database

(26:11):
are called the Minnesota twins studies, and those studies have
tried to look at the correlation between what it's called
the inheritability index of people who have the same genes
but different cultural environments or different cultural environments and different
genes and every possible combination. And when those studies are done,

(26:33):
there's probably two conclusions. The first is there's some small
inheritable component of religion, so that genetically, the closest you
are genetically if one person is religious, the more likely
you are to be religious. But you don't inherit religious

(26:55):
beliefs directly. You probably link those up to other things
you inherit, like personality characteristics, and it may be that,
for instance, people who share similar personality components in their
genetic structure wind up adopting similar kind of religious beliefs.

(27:16):
As opposed to those have different genetic structures, So there
is some inheritable component, but it's probably indirect due to
things like personality, intelligence and things like that that do
have a degree of inheritability that is genetically based. But
having said all of that, nobody is arguing there's like

(27:38):
a single gene that could be identified that would be
the carrier of something as complex as a religious belief.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
And if they did, does it really matter in the
sense of does it take away from the existence of
God or the transcendent.

Speaker 1 (27:55):
No, it's the argument we've had before. If it's the fact,
it may be that it's my genetic nature that would
make me a mathematical genius, and if it did, you
would appreciate my mathematical genius, which I don't have as
of both of my genetics. So the fact that it's
genetically linked doesn't mean it's not true. That stands independent

(28:21):
of that. So people should never fear this effort in
biological reductionism, because we are, at one level embodied beings,
and whatever contributes to our embodiment also contributes to things
that we can leave and understand, and those things can
include religious beliefs whose truth or falsity can stand independent

(28:46):
of their biological basis.

Speaker 2 (28:49):
But now I come back to what I said earlier.
Can you give us a brief description between the distinction
of the brain and the mind, and then maybe we'll
explore at the end here if we have anything to
do with the mind in God, what is the brief
distinction between those two of them.

Speaker 1 (29:07):
The debate in contemporary science goes to two extremes. One,
vinew is kind of an identity view that really there
is no mind, the mind just as a code reference
for the brain. So that's the emergence of the new
forms of cognitive psychology and neural physiology, saying there's no

(29:27):
evidence you have a mind, there's strong elevancy you have
a brain. But the other group adheres to some form
of doualism that says we have brain states and we
have mental states, and they're not identical. That's why we
have different language. That's why we know how to distinguish
between movement of the body and action of the body.

(29:50):
So if you cross your legs and the doctor taps
your knee, there's going to be a reflex and you
shouldn't you know, if you shouldn't strike out at the
doctor or the doctor shouldn't come back and say, why
did you try to kick me? She should know that
that's just the reflex. On the other hand, if you
get angry at me and decide to kick me, that's

(30:10):
an action, and that's done initially by intent and by purpose.
And while you couldn't kick me, if you couldn't move
your leg, the fact that you can move your leg
doesn't explain that you kick me. So that group of
people is a group that says there are mental states,
there are brain states, and the mental states stand relatively

(30:31):
independently and at a different conceptual level than brain states.
So it's minds that believe in God, not brains that
believe in God.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
Interesting. Interesting, I guess the last question on this segment,
why do you think people have this desire to believe
in the transcendent?

Speaker 1 (30:51):
I think the answer fundamentally is in a two step process.
I think we The first is, as many psychologists of are,
there's always a search for the sacred. And my argument
is that is biologically perhaps programmed in us. And one
of the reasons we search for the sacred is because

(31:15):
because we know there are people who found the sacred.
So I think that the basis is not only do
we search for the sacred, but in fact we respond
to the sacred. And I think that as our biology advances,
it makes us more aware and more sensitive to respond

(31:35):
to the sacred because we have the sense that there's
always something more and that something more has always been
the province of religions and saying your search for something
more is not ill founded because there really is something
more and individuals have founded.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
That's interesting Now that now that's sparked, one more question,
is that sense of something thing more? Is that deriving
from the brain or the mind.

Speaker 1 (32:05):
My argument is that search for something more is rooted
in the substrate of biological processes, that those biological processes
are transformed through culture, and that leads to the quest
and search for religion, and religion is the answer that
affirms that, yes, there is something more.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
That's fabulous. Thank you so much, professor Hood for helping
us out with that difficult question. Is the belief in
God biological or not getting a good understanding of how
our brain and mine works in God? Thank you so much,
professor Hood. Thank you everyone for joining us. We hope
you enjoyed that show and we'll see you next time,
and also catch our web TV show Circle of Insight

(32:49):
on therapycable dot com.