In Appalachian serpent handling congregations, time rarely flows linearly. Services stretch into the night, danger slows perception, and the promise of the end lingers just out of reach. Drawing on fieldwork in Appalachian Pentecostal communities, this paper examines how faith is lived in a rhythm of waiting: for the Spirit, for deliverance, for the end itself. Within these sanctuaries, time accelerates in song and testimony, then stills as a handler lifts a snake, producing a temporal experience that is simultaneously urgent, cyclical, and suspenseful.
These practices enact a form of worldbuilding through nostalgic apocalypticism, in which longing for the past coexists with anticipation of the world’s completion. Through attention to pacing, repetition, and the ethnographer’s own shifting sense of duration, this paper traces how handlers inhabit a time that is both promised and perpetually delayed. Their worship offers an anthropology of temporality in which memory, anticipation, and embodiment are inseparable.