Appalachian Figures
On a cold Saturday night in February 2014, worshipers gathered on a narrow Middlesboro side street and filed into a low white church that most people in town knew by sight even if they never stepped inside. The sign over the door read Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name. Inside, the service followed a familiar pattern of songs, testimonies, and preaching, punctuated by a ritual that had defined this congregation for generations.
Near the end of the meeting Pastor Jamie Coots lifted a timber rattlesnake from a wooden box, just as he had done countless times before. This time the snake struck his right hand. Church members later told reporters that Jamie kept preaching and refused medical care, trusting that the same God who gave the command to “take up serpents” would decide whether he lived or died. A short drive and a few hours later, he was gone at forty two years old.
Within days his death was on ABC News and CNN, in British and Irish tabloids, and on religion blogs from Pop South to Psychology Today. For many viewers he became a cautionary headline about “extreme” faith. For others, especially the small circle of Appalachian serpent handling churches, he was a martyr whose passing marked the end of an era and the beginning of a new one.
This is the story behind that headline and the longer history that led from the back streets of Middlesboro to reality television and back again.
A Third Generation Serpent Handler
Gregory James “Jamie” Coots was born in Middlesboro on November 17, 1971, into a family where handling venomous snakes in church was not an oddity but a calling. According to the Television Academy biography and later reference entries, his grandfather Tommy Coots founded Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name in 1978, and his father Gregory carried on the work as pastor. Jamie grew up in that world and began handling snakes himself in his early twenties.
The church did not start as a media spectacle. In the 1980s and 1990s, scholars Ralph W. Hood and W. Paul Williamson documented services at major serpent handling churches across Appalachia, including Full Gospel Tabernacle, as part of a long running research project in the psychology of religion. Their field recordings, now housed in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga collections, show congregations singing, testifying, and worshiping in ways that would be familiar in many Holiness or Pentecostal churches, with one stark difference. At certain points in the service believers reached into wooden boxes and lifted copperheads and rattlesnakes in the air as the music swelled.
One video from August 3, 1996, preserves a Full Gospel Tabernacle service where a younger Jamie plays guitar while worshipers sing and sway. The camera lingers on the pulpit, the pews, and the snake boxes that will later make the church famous. It is a rare near primary glimpse of the congregation long before television crews arrived, and it confirms what longtime observers like Hood have argued for years. In their own eyes, serpent handlers are not sideshow performers. They are Holiness believers who happen to take one contested passage of the Gospel of Mark very seriously.
“These Signs Shall Follow”: Jamie’s Theology
If you ask serpent handlers to explain why they take up snakes, most eventually quote the same lines from the King James Bible. Near the end of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus promises that certain signs will follow those who believe. Among them is a sentence that has shaped a century of Appalachian worship: “They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.”
In a long interview with The Christian Post tied to the launch of the National Geographic series Snake Salvation, Jamie framed his entire practice through that passage. He described serpent handling as one of several “signs” that should accompany believers, alongside speaking in tongues and laying hands on the sick. He insisted that he was not tempting God or showing off but obeying a plain command. In a striking comment, he said that even if those verses in Mark were removed from the Bible, his call to handle snakes would still stand because he believed he had heard it directly from the Lord.
An audio interview recorded for the public radio program To the Best of Our Knowledge a few weeks before his death offers a more intimate version of that theology. Jamie talks about growing up in a family of handlers, about the first time he stepped out with a snake in his hands, and about the mix of fear and peace that fills the room when someone lifts a rattler during worship. He describes the bites he has already survived and the times he has watched others die. For him, all of those moments are wrapped up in a simple conviction. If God wants to heal, no hospital can match that power. If God chooses not to, it is time to go.
That conviction extended to his own family. In a widely circulated interview with National Public Radio, Jamie explained that his congregation did everything other Pentecostal churches did. They sang, preached, testified, took offerings, and prayed for the sick. “Just every once in a while,” he said, snakes were handled. He also acknowledged that snakes had bitten him nine times, cost him half of a finger, and killed at least one worshiper who died on his couch after refusing treatment.
From Field Recordings to Reality Television
Because serpent handling is illegal in Kentucky and most other Appalachian states, many of the early photos and films of services were made quietly by scholars and documentarians who spent years earning the trust of pastors and congregations. By the early two thousands, though, cable networks and reality television producers had discovered the phenomenon. Books like Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain and media coverage of snake related arrests had already primed audiences for a story about rural believers taking terrifying risks in the name of faith.
Snake Salvation, which premiered on the National Geographic Channel in 2013, placed Jamie Coots and his protégé Andrew Hamblin at the center of that story. Over the course of sixteen episodes, crews filmed services at Full Gospel Tabernacle and Hamblin’s church in LaFollette, Tennessee. Viewers saw Jamie in the pulpit, in his home “snake room,” on the road to revivals, and in courtrooms where wildlife officers and prosecutors challenged the legality of transporting venomous reptiles across state lines.
Commentators worried that the show might reduce Appalachian religion to a stereotype. Pop South blogger and historian Karen Cox later admitted that she first tuned in with a cynical eye, fearing a “retrograde reality show on the region.” After watching several episodes, she concluded that the series treated Jamie and his congregation with more seriousness than she expected, tracing the bond between him and his son Cody and the genuine devotion that animated their small church on the edge of town.
The exposure came at a cost. Cameras followed Jamie through his 2013 arrest in Tennessee for illegally transporting snakes, a case that ended with a plea bargain and the return of some of his animals. At the same time he published an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal arguing that snake handling deserved protection under the religious liberty provisions of the United States Constitution.
Life with Venom: Risk, Law, and Everyday Practice
By the time Snake Salvation aired, Jamie Coots was already a veteran handler whose body carried visible reminders of earlier bites. His son Cody and friends recalled a near fatal incident in 1993 and a 1998 bite that cost him part of his right middle finger. Newspaper accounts and later reference entries note that a young woman who worshiped at his church died in 1995 after a bite, and that Jamie faced charges in connection with her death, though a judge declined to pursue the case.
The congregation’s willingness to accept those risks reflects a wider serpent handling culture that has developed around a theology of “signs following.” As the scholar Gordon Burghardt has pointed out, handlers know the danger. Many have scars to prove it, and most can recite a list of preachers and relatives who died during services. Serpent handling families keep track of those deaths in their own oral histories, while scholars like Ralph Hood and Paul Williamson have tried to count them systematically. Their estimates range from roughly ninety documented cases to more than one hundred over the past century.
Kentucky law complicates that picture even further. Like Tennessee and Alabama, the state bans the use of venomous snakes in ways that endanger others, specifically mentioning religious services. Violations are punishable by fines, though enforcement has often been uneven. That legal framework has shaped everything from the design of church snake boxes to the decision by some congregations to keep services quiet and others to invite in cameras precisely to argue that their faith deserves constitutional protection.
February 15, 2014: Bite, Refusal, and Death
On the night of February 15, 2014, worship at Full Gospel Tabernacle unfolded much as it had on countless other Saturdays. At some point Jamie lifted a timber rattler from its box and the snake struck his right hand. Witnesses told local reporters that he put the snake down, continued preaching, and then stepped aside as the effects of the venom set in. Someone called for an ambulance, but by the time emergency responders reached the church he had already gone home.
Accounts from ABC News, Religion News Service, and local television paint a consistent picture of what happened next. Paramedics and police officers who reached the house urged Jamie and his family to accept transport and antivenom. His wife Linda signed a statement declining treatment in line with the family’s long standing stance against medical intervention for snakebite. Emergency workers left shortly after nine in the evening. When they returned less than an hour later, Jamie was dead.
Middlesboro’s police chief told reporters that no charges would be filed. The decision was unsurprising. For decades prosecutors in Appalachian snake handling cases have often concluded that consenting adults who refuse treatment for religious reasons are beyond the reach of criminal law, even when children and other dependents raise harder questions. In Jamie’s case, law enforcement seemed content to let the church and family grieve without turning his death into a test case.
Martyr, Cautionary Tale, or Case Study
Reactions to Jamie’s death reveal just how contested serpent handling remains in both popular and scholarly imagination. Within the serpent handling community, friends and fellow preachers described him as a faithful pastor who died in the line of duty, someone who knew the risks and accepted them as part of obedience to Scripture. The Guardian’s coverage captured that sentiment in the voices of handlers who hailed him as a kind of martyr and pledged to keep taking up serpents despite renewed scrutiny.
Religion reporters and commentators took more varied approaches. Bob Smietana’s obituary style piece for Religion News Service emphasized Jamie’s legendary status among “signs following” believers and the way his influence extended far beyond Middlesboro through books, documentaries, and Snake Salvation. Sojourners and the Washington Post ran a joint commentary arguing that his theology was not “crazy” when judged on its own terms. Instead, the writer suggested, serpent handling represents a coherent way of reading Scripture that most outsiders reject not because it lacks logic but because it frightens them.
Psychologist Gordon Burghardt added yet another layer in a Psychology Today essay titled “Faith, Play, and the Death of Jamie Coots.” Drawing on his own visits to Full Gospel Tabernacle and his willingness to testify on Jamie’s behalf in court, Burghardt argued that serpent handling services blend serious devotion with elements of play and risk taking. For him, understanding those dynamics is essential if outsiders hope to move beyond simple mockery or horror toward a more accurate picture of why people step into the snake line in the first place.
The Coots Family and the Next Generation
Jamie’s death did not close the doors of Full Gospel Tabernacle. His son Cody stepped into the pulpit, becoming the fourth generation of Coots men to lead the congregation. Within a few years he attracted his own wave of media attention. A short documentary series released on YouTube and later covered by the Lexington Herald Leader and other outlets, My Life Inside: The Snake Church, followed Cody through another terrifying bite, this time to the face. Cameras captured him collapsing with blood running down his shirt, then being airlifted to a hospital where doctors treated him despite his initial insistence that he would refuse care as his father had done.
Subsequent interviews suggest that Cody has wrestled openly with the tension between honoring his father’s legacy and reconsidering the strictest version of the anti medicine stance. Reporting from NPR and regional outlets notes that he has said he will continue to handle snakes but is more willing to seek treatment, especially in cases where his family’s safety is at stake. That evolution mirrors a wider pattern in some serpent handling churches where younger leaders look for ways to hold on to signs following worship while negotiating with twenty first century legal and medical realities.
Serpent Handling in the Appalachian Religious Landscape
Jamie Coots’s story belongs to a much older tradition that stretches back to the early twentieth century. Histories of serpent handling in American Christianity generally trace the practice to George Went Hensley, a Pentecostal evangelist in eastern Tennessee who began taking up snakes in services around 1910 and preached that believers who truly trusted Mark 16 would do the same. The movement never became large, but it spread in scattered congregations from the coalfields of Alabama to the hollows of eastern Kentucky and the ridges of West Virginia.
Most Appalachian churches, including the major Pentecostal denominations, have long condemned serpent handling as a dangerous misreading of Scripture. Yet the practice has persisted in small, often family based congregations like Full Gospel Tabernacle, where people see themselves as guardians of a hundred year old holiness tradition. Legal bans have pushed many groups into the shadows, but they have not erased the belief that God’s people are called to demonstrate faith with their bodies as well as their words.
For historians of Appalachia, serpent handling raises questions that run deeper than the spectacle of snakes. It touches on the region’s long standing tensions between local religious autonomy and outside authority, between rural poverty and state regulation, and between portrayals of mountain people as either heroic saints or backward caricatures. Jamie’s life, from the 1996 field recordings and his quiet work as a Middlesboro truck driver to the glare of reality television and international headlines, sits at the point where all of those forces collide.
Hearing Jamie in His Own Voice
Because Jamie Coots lived so recently and drew so much attention, anyone with an internet connection can now see and hear him rather than relying only on secondhand accounts. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s digital collections preserve a 1996 Full Gospel Tabernacle service in which he plays guitar while worshipers sing, testify, and move in and out of the snake line. The Ralph Hood and Paul Williamson fieldwork collection adds still more recordings and context for that era of the church.
The audio interview “Snakes and Steeples,” recorded for To the Best of Our Knowledge shortly before his death, captures his voice as he explains what it feels like to obey a command that even many fellow Christians consider misguided. Clips and full episodes of Snake Salvation, along with trailers and promotional pieces released by National Geographic, show him in the pulpit and at home, wrestling with the demands of ministry, the law, and television producers.
Later documentaries like My Life Inside: The Snake Church focus more on Cody and the next generation, yet Jamie’s presence still lingers in family stories, in snake room practices, and in the way church members talk about “Brother Jamie’s” faith. Put together, these near primary sources allow viewers to move beyond the simple headline of “snake handling pastor dies of snakebite” into a deeper understanding of the religious world that shaped him and that he helped shape in return.
Sources and Further Reading
Primary and near primary sources for Jamie Coots and Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name include the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s “Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus’ Name service, 1996 August 3” video and the broader Ralph W. Hood and W. Paul Williamson field recordings collection documenting serpent handling congregations in Appalachia. Digital Collections+1
Audio interviews and broadcasts that preserve Jamie’s own words include “Snakes and Steeples” and related segments from To the Best of Our Knowledge, along with public radio reporting on snake handling churches and National Public Radio pieces on “takin’ up serpents.” To The Best Of Our Knowledge+1
Television and online video sources range from National Geographic’s Snake Salvation series and associated promotional clips to Barcroft TV’s My Life Inside: The Snake Church and local Kentucky coverage of Cody Coots and the Middlesboro congregation in the years after Jamie’s death. Kentucky+3Christian Post+3Television Academy+3
Key contemporaneous reporting on Jamie’s death and its aftermath includes ABC News coverage of the fatal bite and refusal of treatment, Bob Smietana’s Religion News Service obituary also circulated by the National Catholic Reporter and Sojourners, local Knoxville and Louisville reporting from WBIR and WAVE, British and Irish coverage from the Guardian and the Independent, and CNN and USA Today pieces on the broader “Appalachian phenomenon” of snake handling. HowStuffWorks+7ABC News+7National Catholic Reporter+7
For interpretation and wider context, see Gordon M. Burghardt’s “Faith, Play, and the Death of Jamie Coots” in Psychology Today, Karen Cox’s Pop South essay “Faith and Conviction in Southern Appalachia: The Death of a Snake Handling Pastor,” and Jeffrey Weiss’s Religion News Service commentary “Jamie Coots’ snake theology was not that crazy.” These can be set alongside scholarly discussions of serpent handling in resources like Hood and Williamson’s work on serpent churches and general overviews such as the “Snake handling in Christianity” article that situates the practice in American religious history and law. shareok.org+5Psychology Today+5Pop South+5