Places like this used to be private, secrets tucked away in the hills. Now many people travel from across the country, even the world, to sit in a pew and bear witness to the sights and sounds of this church, to see these people flirt with death. But to the congregants — the families who have worshipped this way for generations, the former alcoholics and drug users who are looking for a sign — this is salvation.

The outsiders want to see the rattlesnakes, but snakes don’t always appear during worship. Sometimes they remain curling in a box on the edge of the altar, untouched. They only come out when there is a call, when God tells a believer to take up the danger and trust Him.

For nearly an hour the music plays, a blues sound with a contagious rhythm.

Then, a frenzy begins to build. The music intensifies. The cries grow louder. Some stumble in trances, each person immersed in his or her own experience.

Outsiders peer through the chaos to see what happens next.

The pastor, Hamblin, sets down his guitar and walks away from the pulpit toward the box on the floor. He says his soul is churning. He must obey.

There is death in that box, he likes to tell people. He’s been bitten before. He’s seen men die in moments like these, good men, righteous men.

But when he grips his hand around the middle of the rattler, almost no one seems afraid.

He juggles the coils of patterned scales until the head is erect, stretching toward him, and he believes that this time, like so many others, God will hold the serpent’s mouth shut.

To understand modern-day serpent handing you have to go back to White Oak Mountain, a ridge that straddles the Hamilton and Bradley county lines. You have to go back to the early 1900s and George Hensley, a man whom some have called a moonshiner, an illiterate.

While serpent handling may have surfaced in churches before Hensley, the Tennessee native is credited for evangelizing the practice across Appalachia and drawing the world’s attention to his audacious brand of Pentecostalism.

A drunk who often struggled to keep steady work, Hensley sought redemption, and believed it could be found in a portion of the Book of Mark where Jesus says to handle snakes in his name.

On White Oak Mountain, he picked up his first snake as an act of obedience and quickly began recruiting followers, traveling across Appalachia and the Ozarks to plant churches that all functioned independently.

But the main vehicle for spreading his beliefs was as a pastor in the Cleveland-based Church of God, now the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world. The church once embraced snake handling, but has disavowed the practice for more than half a century.

At churches inspired by Hensley’s revelation, snakes would wrap around bodies, sometimes crawling out of shirt collars, sometimes coiling into crowns that were placed on believers' heads. Members would fight over snakes or walk barefoot on buzzing serpents ready to strike.

“Cultists claim that often one of their members are filled with such strong power ‘like electricity’ that the snake being fondled is ‘shocked to death,'" Chattanooga News-Free Press reporter J.B. Collins wrote in a 1940s pamphlet about snake handlers in Hamilton County.

Then Hensley’s followers started dying.

In 1945, a truck driver in his 30s was bitten during a large church service at the Dolley Pond Church of God with Signs Following in Hamilton County. He refused medical care and died in front of news reporters 70 minutes after he was bitten.

During the funeral service, six live snakes — including the one that killed him — were placed in the coffin over Lewis Ford’s face, Collins wrote in his pamphlet on Tennessee snake handlers.

The words and images that came out of Dolley Pond became a sensation. Chattanooga newspapers sent stories across the globe. Southern states reacted by outlawing the handling of serpents, and believers were decried in the media as ignorant cultists.

And the publicity, the deaths, stunted the church, which had been spreading in Bible country.

Churches that had held homecomings with hundreds shriveled to almost nothing. The practice became part of Southern folklore, an oddity that many can’t believe still exists. Grandparents would tell their grandchildren, "Did you know there are people still worshiping with snakes around these mountains?"

The faith survived, even as the death toll climbed. Families passed down their beliefs and picked up a few converts along the way. Now scholars estimate 100 “signs-following” churches remain in states including Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and West Virginia with a few thousand members at most.

Congregants gather around Pastor Jamie Coots at the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name church in Middlesboro, Ky., where members handle fire, speak in tongues, take up serpents and drink poison. In this small sect of Pentecostalism, services are emotionally driven, filled with dancing, tambourines, guitars and fitful worship.

Hamblin grew up in an unincorporated town not far from the Northeast Tennessee church he founded and now pastors. Coal mining jobs were coveted and trailer homes dotted the terrain. Here, nearly a third of the people don't finish high school and the median family income is some 30 percent lower than the rest of the state.

His grandparents raised him after his parents divorced. His Papaw was a preacher at a Free Will Baptist church, a charismatic church that believed in speaking in tongues and the healing of the sick.

Hamblin believed what he heard in church but said he also made mistakes.

He got his girlfriend Elizabeth pregnant when she was 16 and had to drop out of high school to support the family. The two married a few years later and he paid the bills with odd jobs. He ran the register at Dollar General, worked the counter at a movie store and stood guard as a night watchman.

Then, at 17, he learned about serpent handlers.

He remembers watching a television show explaining the practice, and he was intrigued. He read books, watched Internet clips and studied his King James Bible, especially the passage in Mark on which serpent handlers base their practice. Biblical scholars, as noted in many study Bibles, say that these few verses were not originally included in Mark’s Gospel, but were added later. Many experts say early Christians didn’t even know about these verses.

But there they were in Hamblin’s Bible. The commands seemed clear.

“And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”

Anointing oil, flammable liquid, a propane torch and poison rest on the pulpit during a Wednesday evening service at the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name in Middlesboro, Ky. If they feel God has called them to, believers at this Pentecostal church will take a sip of poison, hold fire against their skin or pick up a deadly snake.

Two years later, Hamblin started posting dozens of pictures on his Facebook page of himself holding fat rattlers up in the air. Some people who posted called him stupid and chided him for testing God.

“Andrew you better be careful,” wrote one friend.

Others praised his path. Only the holy can handle snakes, some friends said.

“Take them up son, if you don’t obey the WORD OF GOD you will die lost and go to a DEVIL’S HELL!!!,” Coots wrote in response.

In 2012, the Wall Street Journal took notice and wrote an article about Hamblin and his efforts to reach young people with the “signs-following” tradition. Not long afterward, the National Geographic Channel noticed him as well.

Producers called Ralph Hood, a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga psychology professor and one of the nation’s leading experts on Appalachian snake-handing traditions, to see if he thought Hamblin would be willing to star in a show about serpent handling.

This was a position Hood had been in before. Journalists and television producers often asked him about his 30-plus years of research on “signs following” believers. At UTC’s Lupton Library, he had amassed the world’s largest collection of footage and photos documenting serpent handling back to its roots on White Oak Mountain.

When Coots and Hamblin got the call, they decided to break ranks with many older church leaders who believed media involvement would bring trouble. Coots had courted television before and made an appearance on a National Geographic show.

And in 2012, the two started filming “Snake Salvation.” Coots, Hamblin and others were paid for their appearances on the show and producers covered many expenses like hotels, meals and gas costs throughout filming.

The pastors, some of the first to speak so publicly about their faith, hoped it would draw empathy from skeptics. These churches are about more than snakes, they said. Attendees found forgiveness and started a righteous path.

“They didn’t come in here and handle a snake and get salvation,” Hamblin said. “They come in here and the blood was applied to their life. They met Jesus. Some of them ain’t never mentioned nothing about the serpents.”

But in the final cut, the show focused more on snakes than souls.

But the publicity drew negative attention, too. People called Hamblin a false prophet.

“...Ur nothing but an ignorant radical freak and im gonna laugh when one of those snakes u play w bites somebody and hurts them bad or kills them u freak,” Patrick Matlock wrote on Facebook.

On one episode, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency cited Coots for trafficking snakes through the state. A few weeks after the series finale, Hamblin was also charged with a misdemeanor.

Wildlife officers escorted him to his church, where they confiscated 53 venomous snakes. Many were emaciated and diseased, the officers said, and more than half died. The rest were later euthanized.

The TWRA charged Coots and Hamblin with violating the state’s wildlife laws. But many states, including Tennessee, have laws that ban handling venomous snakes — laws that have withstood court review thanks in large part to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling upholding bans on polygamy. The court ruled in 1878 that the government may regulate certain religious practices if they were viewed as dangerous to society.

So Mormons could believe in polygamy, they just couldn’t practice it. Same goes for snake handlers.

Hamblin saw the confiscation and his case as a chance to rally support. Outside the Campbell County Courthouse and in interviews, he called for a change in Tennessee’s strict laws that make it nearly impossible for a private citizen to own a poisonous snake.

Supporters wore red ribbons. His disciples were there, but so were Catholics, other Protestants and Vietnam veterans, who all said his church ought to be left alone.

At one time, fewer than a dozen attended church with Hamblin. Now more than 80 people could attend a service. Many have converted. Others come to gawk.

“Snake Salvation” wasn’t picked up for a second season. And some say Hamblin’s victory over the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency will make him even more of a target.

Still, he talks about the bright future of his church. He’s raising money to fix up the deteriorating building. He says he’s gotten letters from atheists and agnostics who say they didn’t believe there was a God until they saw him on television holding a snake in his bare hands.

Many of Hamblin’s followers say they are former drunks, drug addicts and potential suicides who have changed their lives for the better since coming to his church. And they are spreading the word of all the good found at his church.

“If you’re really addicted or you need something, you can find it here because God dwells here,” said Jeremy Henegar, a local 20-year-old middle school janitor who said he was an alcoholic before meeting Hamblin.

“[People] seen the change in me,” Henegar said. “They’re going to want to come figure it out, too.”

The stories feed Hamblin. He imagines a megachurch in years to come, a time when his faith isn’t hidden in the hills, when snakes are legal and the congregation can raise enough money to give food to the hungry and shelter to the homeless in this poor county, where many of the coal mining jobs have vanished.

“I guarantee you people’s going to put you down. They’re gonna talk about you,” Hamblin said in a recent sermon. “They’re going to do everything they can to find fault in you.”

He asked a church member to go out into the parking lot and fill a bowl full of gravel.

Hamblin walked down the center aisle, bowl in hand.

Who wants to cast the first stone? he asked.

No one lifted a finger.

Written by Kevin Hardy

Photography and multimedia by Dan Henry

Design by Nick Fowler

Production by Maura Friedman and Ken Barrett