The Snake Handler’s Church: A Field Report in Two Services
Part One – North Georgia, Spring 1983
I was twenty-something, drunk on theory and the unearned certainty that comes with a scholarship and a beat-up notebook. Dr. Hill needed a sacrificial lamb for Cultural Anthropology 420, I needed an A, and the snake handlers needed somebody to repent of their wicked ways. Perfect symbiosis.
Past Dahlonega, on the left, The Church of the Signs smelled like a feed store that had discovered Jesus and cheap perfume. I took the back pew, clutching my Bic pen like it might ward off both tetanus and the serpentine Holy Ghost.
Brother Elzie clamored in with a pine box that looked suspiciously like a budget coffin. Air holes drilled in the lid. Subtle. He parked it on a card table older than most of the congregation and commenced preaching straight from Mark 16, the part every sensible seminary skips: take up serpents, drink poison, cosplay Indiana Jones for the Lord.
First rattler came out thick as a beer can and twice as mean. Brother Elzie dangled it overhead like he was auditioning for a metal album cover. Congregation speaking in tongues that sounded like dial-up modem having an aneurysm. A lady in a floral overcoat tried to hand the snake to me. I gave her the polite smile one reserves for roadkill potluck and active grenades.
Nobody died. I drove home smelling of kerosene and superiority, wrote a paper dripping with condescension, collected my A, and spent the next twenty-seven years pretending poor people with actual convictions were the weird ones.
Part Two – North Florida, December 2025
Medicare mailed me a love letter. Eighty pages of foreplay titled “Summary of Benefits and Coverage.” I made coffee strong enough to strip paint and started reading.
Page three: hands went numb.
Page nine: started laughing the way people laugh in psych wards.
Page twelve: full-blown religious experience, except the angel speaking was a claims adjuster named Karen from Utilization Review.
Turns out the serpent never left the building. It just got a rebrand, a 401(k), and a corner office. Same fangs, better dental.
Every thirty days, the federal government reaches into my Social Security like a mugger with a badge and hands Humana $201.12 because I committed the crime of turning sixty-five. I haven’t seen a doctor since before Clinton smeared the blue dress. My medicine cabinet contains a bottle of expired generic ibuprofen and a half-empty jar of turmeric. Doesn’t matter. Tithe is mandatory.
I dug out the 1983 notebook. The pages had gone the color of nicotine teeth, but my handwriting was still there, smug as ever:
“Subjects display blind faith in supernatural protection despite repeated fatalities. Continue financial contributions without evidence of reciprocal benefit.”
I laughed so hard I pulled something. Somewhere in the afterlife, Brother Elzie is nodding, like Yeah, rookie, welcome to the big tent.
The Recognition (With 400 % More Venom)
Brother Elzie was a lot of things (illiterate, reckless, possibly brain-damaged from previous bites), but he was not a liar. He showed you the goddamn snake. Told you it could kill you in fifteen minutes. Said only Jesus could fix it. Some of his flock proved him right by dying swollen and purple. Brutal, but transparent.
Humana prints smiling grandmas on the brochure and hides the fangs in footnote 47(b). They call you “valued member” while calculating how many diagnostic codes it takes before you become “unprofitable insured.” The faith they demand isn’t in the Lord; it’s in the hope that whoever reviews your claim had a decent lunch and isn’t up for promotion this quarter.
Brother Elzie never charged admission. You could keep your last five dollars and still hold the rattler if the Spirit moved you. Medicare Advantage? Pay up front, forever, or enjoy the tender mercies of original Medicare, which is Latin for “die quickly and quietly so we don’t go over budget.”
The New Liturgy (read it aloud while on hold)
I believe in one Network, the Provider Almighty,
maker of in-network and out-of-network,
of all that is covered, partially covered, and “subject to medical review.”
I believe in Prior Authorization, His only begotten process,
conceived by the Actuary, born of the Fax Machine,
suffered under endless peer-to-peer calls,
was denied, appealed, and denied again.
Should I dare seek care without the sacred pre-cert,
let me be cast into the outer darkness of balance billing,
where the credit score gnaws its own liver and the teeth do Pilates.
Amen.
Epilogue – North Florida, Still 2025
I’m sixty-nine, blood pressure boring, cholesterol happy, legs still willing to pass men half my age on the walking trail. I am the dream congregant: I pay, I shut up, I never touch the snake.
That’s the genius. The old church needed dramatic proof (blood, swelling, occasional corpse) to keep the myth alive. The new church runs on the opposite fuel: the quiet terror that this might be the month the snake box finally gets opened.
Every month I stay healthy is another month the serpent sleeps and the quarterly earnings soar.
I keep the Summary of Benefits next to the 1983 field notes like holy relics. Sometimes I read them aloud for the cat, who is unimpressed:
“Quantity limits apply…”
“Step therapy required…”
“Please allow 10–14 business days for appeal processing…”
It’s speaking in tongues for people who went to business school.
Every thirtieth day they siphon their $201.12, and I picture Brother Elzie in whatever reward he earned, looking down at my EOB, shaking his head:
“Boy, you finally met a serpent meaner than mine.”
He’s not wrong.
Still vertical. Still unbitten. Still billed.
— the beet
North Florida, where the premiums grow faster than the palmettos