salvation on sand mountain by dennis covington

Covington basically addresses the issue of snake handling and, ultimately, faith by immersing himself in the world of his subject and participating in their rituals, his faith mirroring theirs in fervency and degree at times.Īssumptions Underlying the Covington’s Thinking You’re too close to your subject” (Covington, 2010, p. Indeed, the more he got to know them, the more Covington forgot he was supposed to be reporting on them-not joining them-which is why his editor finally told him, “Step back. He saw in the snake-handlers a devout and pious people who truly believed in Christ and felt animated by the Holy Spirit to handle snakes as a kind of testimony of their faith.

Covington saw in them a reflection of his own family, his own inner soul seeking some form of expression, some form of truth, some outlet. They fed me with the Word and clothed me in the Spirit, and I began to think of them as genuine Christian mystics out of a heritage so revolutionary, deep, and otherworldly that the established church had no alternative but to deny it” (Covington, 2010, pp. 131) because he was, in his own words, “taken in by the handlers…as if I were homeless and they had given me sanctuary from the World.

Ultimately, the point of the book is faith, and Covington’s narrative acts as slow-burn.Ĭovington prayed that he “would be anointed to handle serpents” himself (Covington, 2010, p. Instead of staying a disinterested observer, he became interested-and then he became a participant.

Covington’s narrative thus does not really have one objective point or purpose: it starts off intending to do one thing-to write in a journalistic fashion on the Church of Jesus with Signs Following, where its preacher had been sentenced to 99 years in prison for forcing his wife to place her arm in a box of rattlesnakes, which promptly bit her. Covington does the same in his book, and the end result is that the entire work becomes like a phenomenological study-a journalistic exercise into a fringe religion that takes an unexpectedly personal turn and tone as the author begins to connect more and more with his subject and identify his heritage with its. The book thus follows in the genre of the documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee, who pioneered the aesthetic/ experiential form of non-fiction filmmaking by setting out to document a time and place but ultimately turning the camera on himself and his own experience of it.

The author becomes so immersed in the world of snake-handling that he himself becomes one. What begins as an objective exercise in describing this peculiar region and its religions practices quickly becomes a personal exercise in reflection and faith. Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington is a work of non-fiction that sets out initially to objectively describe a time and place-the rural South in the early 1990s, specifically the part of the rural South in which snake-handling is practiced by Christian sects. Finding Faith in Salvation on Sand Mountain

Salvation on sand mountain by dennis covington