After the Genome: A Language for Our Biotechnological Future

7. “Leave your Medicine Outside”: Bioethics, Spirituality, and the Rhetoric of Appalachian Serpent Handlers

123 Bill J. Leonard “leAve your medicine outside” Bioethics, Spirituality, and the Rhetoric of Appalachian Serpent Handlers 7 A lot of people don’t understand us. We are just normal people but we believe God’s word. —Rev. Gene Sherbert1 On August 6, [1995], Melinda [Duvall Brown] was bitten by a black timber rattler during services at the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus name in Middlesboro, Kentucky. She was twenty-eight years old and the mother of five. Before she reached for the serpent, she had begun to speak in tongues, which meant that she was fully anointed. The family grieves that it was her husband, Punkin, who handed her the snake, just as he had handed Melinda dozens of serpents in the past, and just as he himself had received them hundreds of times.2 So Fred Brown and Jeanne McDonald describe a dramatic moment in the annals of American serpent handlers, that small, theologically rarefied, and widely studied Appalachian Pentecostal-Holiness sect. The family saga continued when, barely three years later, Punkin Brown himself was dead, collapsing midsermon after being caught by the fangs of another rattler, dying near the pulpit of the Rock House Holiness Church in Macedonia, Alabama , on October 3, 1998. in life and death the Browns, Melinda and John (known as Punkin), might be considered poignant symbols of the nature of the serpent handling movement, its spirituality, dangers, and bioethical challenges. indeed, the deaths of the Browns and other serpent handlers open the door to multiple religio-medical issues, a collision of bioethics and sectarian spirituality that may well be larger than the serpent handling 124 g After the Genome tradition itself. For one thing, the Browns, like most other “serpent-bit” members of their sect, refused medical treatment. Melinda Brown lingered for some time after she was bitten, and Punkin recalled that when he urged her to go to hospital, she replied, “Have you lost your faith?” Punkin later reflected, Well, they wouldn’t have treated her as long as she refused treatment. . . . She was twenty-eight years, buddy. They wouldn’t have took her. She never lost her mind, never was out of her head. yes, sir, i guarantee you she would have refused treatment at the hospital. She done did.3 Brown recalled his own experience with EMS after one of the numerous occasions when he was bitten but survived, commenting, i got bit [one time] and they called the ambulance to come and get me. i don’t know who called them. But they come. i was living in a little ole trailer, and the ambulance driver stuck his head in. He wouldn’t even come in the door. That was in Georgia. He said, “We hear there was a snakebite victim here.” i was laying on the couch. i said, “yeah, me.” He said, “Do you want treatment?” i said, “no, i don’t want no treatment.” i said, “i got bit in church. That’s what i believe in. . . .” He said, “Well, we had to come and ask you. Do you care to sign this paper releasing us, saying that we come?” i said, “no, i’ll sign your paper, but leave your medicine outside.” So he come in, and i signed his paper, and he set there a minute, and he left.4 Brown’s words, “Leave your medicine outside,” provide a powerful image for examining elements of the serpent handling sect, a faith community that stretches certain medical and bioethical issues to the limit as they act on their beliefs in ways they think authenticate the total trustworthiness of God’s word. Through the rhetoric of gospel preaching, serpent handlers articulate their theological and hermeneutical identity in remarkably creative ways. in one sense, the Appalachian serpent handlers offer alternative approaches to medical treatment based on their distinct approach to biblical literalism and Pentecostal spirituality. Their extreme form of holiness asceticism sets them against “standard” medical procedures in certain matters of faith, authority, and toxic substances. Their actions are distinct from but parallel to health and ethics issues raised by Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science practitioners , and other faith healing movements. As they see it, their serpent handling , poison-drinking pursuits point beyond themselves by “confirming the “leAve your medicine outside” f 125 word” of God for the entire Christian church. The phrase “confirming the word with signs following” comes from Mark 16:17-20...