Risks
Some of the leaders in these churches have been bitten numerous times, as indicated by their distorted extremities. Hensley himself, the founder of modern snake handling in the Appalachian Mountains, died from fatal snakebite in 1955. In 1998, snake-handling evangelist John Wayne "Punkin" Brown died after being bitten by a timber rattler at the Rock House Holiness Church in rural northeastern Alabama. Members of his family contend that his death was probably due to a heart attack. However, his wife had died three years previously after being bitten while in Kentucky. Another snake handler died in 2006 at a church in Kentucky. In 2012, Pentecostal pastor and snake handler Mack Wolford died from a rattlesnake bite he had received while performing an outdoor service in West Virginia, as did his father in 1983.
In 1991, Glenn Summerford, pastor of The Church of Jesus Christ With Signs Following (in Scottsboro, Alabama), was arrested for the attempted murder of his wife, Darlene. Summerford, in a drunken rage, had put a gun to his wife's head, forced her to write out a purported suicide note and then forced her hand into a cage of rattlesnakes used in church services, until she was repeatedly bitten (his church condemned divorce, so he found it convenient to become a widower). She narrowly survived only because he soon fell into a drunken stupor and she was able to make her escape. He was convicted and sentenced to 99 years of prison.
Read more about this topic: Snake Handling
Famous quotes containing the word risks:
“The question is whether personal freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden and risks of self-reliance.”
—Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968)
“If the children and youth of a nation are afforded opportunity to develop their capacities to the fullest, if they are given the knowledge to understand the world and the wisdom to change it, then the prospects for the future are bright. In contrast, a society which neglects its children, however well it may function in other respects, risks eventual disorganization and demise.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)
“In America any boy may become President, and I suppose it’s just one of the risks he takes!”
—Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965)