When the Cameras Came to Church: Serpent Handling and the Digital Future of Ritual

In the late twentieth century Appalachian serpent handling largely vanished from scholarly and public view following early portrayals like Holy Ghost People (1967) and later controversies surrounding Salvation on Sand Mountain (1995). The practice persisted and has recently entered a media age: worship is livestreamed, pastors preach to remote audiences, while congregants sustain fellowship through social media and digital testimonies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines how digital mediation reshapes ritual presence and continuity in these Pentecostal communities. I argue that this mediated worship is not the dilution of a once-secret rite but its transformation into a mediated form of presence—a “digital afterlife” through which practitioners imagine a future for their faith. Returning to a tradition long absent from the scholarly gaze, this paper asks what happens when ritual moves from mountain sanctuaries to social feeds, and how embodied presence is made visible, archived, and replayable.