Salvation on Sand Mountain

Our book club decided to read Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia by Dennis Covington and discuss it in November.

This is definitely one of the oddest non-fiction books I've read this year. At times I thought I was reading a story by Flannery O'Connor, but this was real. Dennis Covington wrote of his experiences with snake-handling churches, especially the Church of Jesus with Signs Following. (Doesn't that church name sound like something straight out of a Flannery O'Connor novel or short story?) He visited churches in Alabama on Sand Mountain and others in Tennessee, Georgia, and West Virginia. His own fascination with these congregations carried the book for me, because otherwise I don't think I could have finished reading it.

While Covington investigated the churches and the people as a journalist, he allowed himself to be drawn in deeper as a believer. He actually preached and handled venomous snakes in services and brought along his wife and young daughters to participate and observe. He developed friendships with many of the people in these churches, although the relationships did not last after he finished gathering his information.

I was vaguely dissatisfied at the end of the book because I wanted to know what motivated these men and women to continue to drink strychnine and handle venomous snakes after being bitten (some of them numerous times) and after seeing close friends and family members die from poison or snake-bites. I did not see a credible answer.