Touching Death: The Turbulent Life of One of America’s Last Snake-Handling Preachers - The Ringer

Cody Coots looks comfortable, standing in the spot where his father was killed. Behind him sits a guitar, before him a glass of strychnine poison. To his right there’s a drum set, to his left a few venomous snakes. He’s at a lectern in a large room in an old house on a back street in Middlesboro, Kentucky, deep in rural Appalachia. This is his pulpit. Before that it was his father’s, and before that his father’s father’s, and before that his father’s father’s father’s, all of them pastors here at Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name, a church that promises salvation but sometimes delivers death.
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Now the congregants kneel, and together they pray, all out loud, a cacophony of voices filling the room. When they finish, the music starts — Cody on guitar, his mother, Linda, on the drums, voices rising and feet stomping all across the room. They sing and they shout, songs about Jesus and about the Devil, about living right and doing good, about strychnine and serpents and heaven’s streets of gold. Soon a few start jumping, hopping up and down across the room with their eyes closed. A few more start speaking in tongues, a practice common in Pentecostal churches throughout the United States and much of the rest of the world, wherein worshipers utter a prayer language, often unintelligible to most listeners, that they believe emerges only when the Holy Spirit descends.

Touching Death: The Turbulent Life of One of America’s Last Snake-Handling Preachers - The Ringer