(240 pages. Addison-Wesley. $20) is the mesmerizing, creepy description of Covington’s spiritual investigation. Holiness snake handlers, mostly poor white Southerners, take literally the Biblical injunction that believers “shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.” Finding no place for themselves in modern industrial culture, they embrace a radical faith that allows them “the only power some of these people have.”
“Christianity without passion, danger and mystery,” Covington argues admiringly, “may not really be Christianity at all.” But he never loses sight of the sect’s outlandishness. His book is full of graveyard humor, as when one preacher describes the first time he saw his future wife: “She was speaking in tongues and handling a big rattlesnake. I told Daddy, ‘I’m gonna marry that girl’.” With care that approaches reverence, Covington makes the story of their struggle not only fascinating but almost comprehensible. And if that’s not a miracle. nothing is.
