Thread by @danielsilliman

I'm guessing they didn't think about how this would sound apnews.com/dc47bd30b2574a…

This is a silly story from the @ap, but it reminds me of a historical mystery I never solved. Maybe someone wants to take a crack at it (thread).

In American religious history, this picture is pretty famous. It’s one of *the* pictures used to illustrate stories about snake handling, and even though just a fraction of a fraction of pentecostals have ever picked up snakes, the practice has latched on to the imagination.

The sign of snake handling has never been broadly accepted by pentecostals. But it has signified quite widely.

In part because of iconic like this one, taken by Russell Lee in Harlan County in 1946. nyx.uky.edu/fa/findingaid/…

I was looking at this photo a couple of years ago, when teaching a class on pentecostal history, to see if I could find out more.

I did: like, the guy on the right is Eli Sanders. Part-time minister. Lost his arm in a mining accident. He made ends meet by scroungin coal off the railroad tracks and selling it. Not relevant to the mystery, but I think it’s good to remember this guy had a name.

I also learned there are other pictures of the same service from the same church. You see this one over and over and over, but there are others.

Like this one:

This picture has something going on in the background. What is that on the wall?

It looks like a picture of Jesus, of some sort. An icon.

Pentecostals don’t typically do religious iconography. Or, rather, they believe their bodies should be icons of the power of God. So they don’t need pictures.

Here’s another, with more snakes:

You can see the Jesus picture again, on the right. It looks similar to Warner Sallman, I think, but not his famous white Jesus painting. Then on the left: what is that?

It looks like the icon Sacred Heart of Jesus?

It’s hard to tell, behind the woman’s hat.

And it seems wrong. One thing pentecostals don’t like more than pictures is *Catholic* pictures. I mean American Protestants in general have been pretty anti-Catholic until pretty recently, and pentecostals more so.

Pentecostals are anti-formal. Anti-creedal. Anti-hierarchical. Anti-traditional. They don’t tend to look at Catholics and think “those guys are pretty OK”—at least not before the Catholic Charismatic Movement in the 1970s. But this is ’46.

Here’s another picture of Eli Sanders, with another views.

Yep.

That is the icon of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, on the wall of a snake-handling pentecostal church in 1946 Kentucky.

But that makes no sense. Why isn’t that too Catholic for them? Is it possible they don’t know it’s Catholic? Is there something about this picture, particularly, that makes it OK? Who put it there, anyway?

I don’t know what it means. It remains a mystery. But every time I see that super famous photo of homegrown eccentric American religion, Appalachian snake-handlers, I know that just out of scene is a Sacred Heart icon, confusing everything.

Which maybe makes it more representative of American religious history than anyone even thought. /fin.