Tag Archives: Stephen Prothero

Crash Helmets and Snake Handling

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In my sermon for Pentecost, I quoted Annie Dillard on mainline worship. At Pentecostal churches, people still expect amazing things to happen. On the fringes of Pentecostalism, there is snake handling. Reports came out yesterday of the death of Mack Wolford, a leader among snake-handling Christian groups in Appalachia. He died after being bitten by a rattlesnake. His father had also died of a rattler bite. More here and here. A profile of Wolford, written by Julia Duin, that appeared last year in the Washington Post, is available here.

I had thought about using snake-handling as an example in my sermon, but then thought better of it, because I had preached about snake stories only a couple of months ago, during Lent.

A worthy read about the practice, and about the subculture in which it survives is Salvation on Sand Mountain, by Dennis Covington. Covington got interested in it while reporting on an attempted manslaughter trial in which a snake-handling pastor was accused of forcing his wife, whom he thought was having an affair, to put her hand into a cage of rattlers. Covington followed various snake handlers around for quite some time, and finally handled himself during a service before extricating himself from the movement.

His experience, and his writing about it, became the focus of an interesting debate between Stephen Prothero and Robert Orsi over the scholar’s role in studying religion, especially to what extent the scholar should engage his or her own beliefs and practices while studying another’s. Orsi applauded Covington’s engagement with snake-handling;  Prothero was critical. The exchange appeared in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, but seems no longer available online, although the original essay by Orsi to which Prothero was responding appeared as a chapter in Orsi’s Between Heaven and Earth.
When I taught Theory and Method in the Study of Religion, I used Orsi’s book, and Prothero’s critique of his position as a central element in helping students understand how to negotiate the complexities of the discipline of Religious Studies.

Ralph W. Hood, professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, has also studied the phenomenon quite intensely for decades. He has collected a marvelous archive of videos detailing the practice

The Hinduization of death? Please, give me a break!

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An article in the New York Times today about the growing appeal of cremation in the US quotes Stephen Prothero of BU:

“America is becoming Hinduized in this way,” said Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University and the author of “Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America.” “We’re increasingly seeing the human as essentially spiritual and gradually giving up on the Judeo-Christian idea of the person in the afterlife.”

He might want to talk to some people involved in caring for those facing decisions about burial. Yes, it’s economic. When I served in Greenville, I could tell people that cremations done by the South Carolina Cremation Society cost $600, as opposed to whatever funeral homes were charging. To choose cremation in those circumstances is not about the resurrection of the body, it is about stewardship. For people who no longer have close ties to particular places, to think about tying their bodies, and the emotions of their loved ones, to a particular place in a cemetery seems inappropriate, especially when they may never return there.

We have a columbarium at Grace where the ashes of former members and members’ loved ones can be inurned. It is a symbol of the community of the faithful that extends beyond death and the grave and includes us all in the great cloud of witnesses.

Yes, there is a transformation in Americans’ attitudes toward the body and how one treats a body at death, but whether that has anything to do with an changing understanding of what constitutes a human person seems to me very much debatable. My father, for example, donated his body to the Medical College of Ohio, not because he didn’t believe in the resurrection of the body, but because he considered his body something that might be of use to society. He died in sure and certain hope of the resurrection, confident that if his body could be raised, so too could his ashes.

A decision like this is often one of the most difficult an individual, or the surviving loved ones have to make. Of course, economics plays a role, so do many other factors, including our transient society, and personal experiences related to places other than cemeteries. I think the choice of cremation has as much to do with the American funeral industry as it has to do with changes in the understanding of the bodily resurrection. And it doesn’t take more than a glance to experience the radically different spiritual experience of a typical cemetery with a beautiful place like the memorial garden at St. James Episcopal Church in Greenville, SC.