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Yesterday Jamie Coots, pastor of Full Gospel Tabernacle of Jesus Name, died of snake bite in Middlesboro, KY. I visited his church several times, met his family, and was prepared to testify on his behalf at his trial in Knoxville for illegally transporting snakes through Tennessee until the case was plea-bargained at the last minute (an event depicted in the National Geographic series on Snake Salvation). This is a sad event and I grieve for his family, friends, and church members. Yet this tragedy led to some reflections that may be more germane than one might suspect. They revolve around the phenomenon of play and the enduring “faith versus reason” debate that has animated Christian theology for many centuries, and is alive and thriving yet today. The death of Jamie Coots, while certainly not unusual among adherents of the snake handling tradition, has brought some truths home to me in a personal way. But first a little backstory.
As a scientist focusing on snake behavior, I have long had an interest in the role of snakes in human culture and how we react to them. When I moved to the University of Tennessee 45 years ago I had heard about the snake handling Pentecostal tradition but knew little about it. Ralph Hood, at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga has subsequently studied them extensively with colleagues and among other publications, has a fine book (Hood & Williamson, Them that Believe, Univ. Cal. Press, 2008) that corrects many of the misconceptions about this practice and its adherents, especially by those who disparage the handlers as fanatics, ignorant, and theologically grossly misinformed.
Although my love for studying reptile behavior is undiminished, I also study play and among other things developed criteria for identifying play in animal species and contexts where it might not have been thought to exist (The Genesis of Animal Play, MIT press, 2005). Although my initial interest in snake handling focused on the snakes and their behavior, something students of snake handling typically ignored, I had an epiphany experience at Jamie's church a few years ago when it became clear to me that snake handling was, in fact, play. These folks are engaged in a form of risky play, certainly known to adolescent males, but much more widespread than one might think.
While I have written a little about this and given talks making my case, currently I am a Fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton where my project is to develop the thesis that play is the source of rituals in religion and other contexts. While this is not an original idea, it has not been empirically tested. My project is to use snake handling as a test case, since it is a relatively young (about 100 years old) and well documented ritual. Furthermore, Ralph Hood and his colleagues have amassed hundreds of hours of video from many churches in several states in the Southeast over decades, including two and more generations of handlers, many of which are on my computer as I write.
While the handlers may not view their behavior as playful, but serious worship of God, these views are not incompatible. In fact, a handler in Tennessee was quoted in a radio talk show as saying that his relatives, not from the tradition, say he is “like a kid in a candy store” when handling snakes, a quotation he confirmed to me. My analysis of videos shows that for these highly traditional and conservative folks, the services allow them to dance, sing, speak in tongues, and play music in a most uninhibited way (often discouraged in secular contexts), as well as play with snakes and fire.
My time at the Center in Princeton has exposed me to colleagues who are examining long-standing theological issues concerning virtue, morality, happiness, mysticism, religious experience, and relating them to current findings in human evolution, neuroscience, psychology, and other fields. Many work in schools or departments of theology and conduct their research in relationship to a particular Christian tradition, working on interdisciplinary projects that require an interaction between the findings of science and the commitments of these traditions. While the vast majority of theologians have no problem with biological evolution, an old earth, modern medical treatments, and other views and practices that were once considered incompatible with Christianity (and sometimes still are), they are also dealing, to varying degrees, with the faith versus reason dialectic that goes back to St. Augustine, Aquinas, Occam, and others, entertaining topics—like the incarnation, trinity and resurrection of Jesus—that they view as outside the explanatory reach of science, to be accepted on faith, even when science is rather unsupportive.
The death of Jaime Coots and churches such as the Full Gospel Tabernacle raise, for me at least, a different level of conversation. I am not interested in the fact that the snake handling tradition is based on a literal interpretation of the end of the Gospel of Mark that virtually all Christians reject. Rather, it highlights recognizing that faith, indeed life itself, is serious play, the ultimate game.
What often perplexed me, as well as others, was that snake handlers, if bitten, refused medical treatment, which also occurred with Jamie. Why would they do this? Hood and Williamson interviewed many handlers who received serious bites, and while their explanations varied as to why they were bitten, the bites themselves engendered feelings of suffering, surrender, and ultimate victory regardless of whether they survived or died. It was up to God, at this point, to determine their fate, not mortal men with their medicines. Handlers accept medical treatment for other illnesses, so this is far from total reliance on faith healing. What I think is going on reinforces snake handling as play, a risky game. For if one loses a game, or a call goes against you, you do not protest if the infraction or loss was fairly rendered or claim to be a victim of cheating. Only poor sports, sore losers, and whiners try to reverse the call or scoreboard. Putting one's faith in God is the way faith in religious matters plays out! And, as a matter of fact, most bites by venomous snakes are not fatal. Many handlers are missing digits (as did Jamie) and have horrible scars, often on their arms and faces, from nonfatal bites. Could this be a slot machine gamble in reverse?
Returning to faith versus reason, how many of those who espouse the primacy of faith over reason would do so to the extent of the handlers? To accept or not the trinity or incarnation is, today in the US, not a matter of life or death. One is not really testing anything or putting faith ahead of reason except for a posited reward after death. But the snake handlers do so by really acting on their beliefs, and with joy and acceptance. Are they then, truer followers of Jesus than the many who find numerous excuses to ignore the clear teachings of Jesus on compassion for the poor and prisoners, turning the other cheek, the evils of wealth, and other inconvenient claims? The 84-year-old nun, Megan Rice, is willingly facing spending the rest of her life in prison for breaking into and harmlessly defacing, in playful fashion, the nuclear bomb production facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near my university, where I live. Acting on her faith as to what Christianity demands might also be considered irrational, for she and her convicted compatriots are considered dangers to the state, traitors to be convicted, rather than exposing the poisonous evils in this world and a danger most Christians choose to ignore or explain away. Serpents come in many guises and so does play. I do not have answers, only questions.
