Omnibus: The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment

by A. J. Jacobs

  “Oh, business stuff.”

  She’s not falling for that. “What business stuff?”

  “That I wish I could time travel back to 1991 and buy up hundreds of internet names like flowers.com and beer.com and cabbage.com, then I could sell them for millions of dollars to the flower and beer and cabbage industries, and then I’d never have to work again.” (This is an alarmingly common fantasy of mine.)

  “That’s the saddest daydream I’ve ever heard. Plus, that’s greed.”

  She’s right. I’m wasting my time with greedy and angry thoughts. Not always, mind you. Sometimes, when Julie pops the question, I’ll be thinking about something noble, like the environment or our son’s future. In fact, compared to my prebiblical life, the percentage of brain space allotted to gratitude and compassion has inched up. But I still have way too many thoughts like this:

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “The Bible, actually.”

  “What about the Bible?”

  “The story of Esther.”

  “What about the story of Esther?”

  “Well…what it would be like to be the king in the Esther story and get to spend the night with each of the most beautiful women in the kingdom, like a test-drive or something, and then get to choose your favorite.”

  “You’ve really evolved.”

  In the last couple of days, I’ve been focusing on cleaning up my brain. It’s possible that God is monitoring my thoughts, but it’s certain that Julie is. So I’ve commanded myself to think positive thoughts. And today, it paid off.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “How lucky I am to have a healthy wife and a healthy son and two so-far-healthy babies.”

  Julie pretends to gag. But it was true, that’s what I was thinking.

  Of making many books there is no end…

  —ECCLESIASTES 12:12 (NIV)

  Day 292. I’ve got a decent biblical library going now. Perhaps a hundred books or so. And I’ve divided them into sections: Moderate Jewish. Fundamentalist Jewish. Moderate Christian. Fundamentalist Christian. Atheist. Agnostic. Religious cookbooks.

  I’ve tried to keep the conservative books on the right side and the liberal ones on the left. When I started my year, I thought that nothing would go to the right of my Falwell collection. But of course, I was wrong. I just got in a book called A Handbook of Bible Law by a man named Charles Weisman.

  I’d try to summarize it, but the subtitle does a pretty good job, so I’ll just type that in: An Indexed Guide to over 1500 Biblical Laws, Commandments, Statutes, Principles, Admonishments, Exhortations & Guidelines under 22 Different Subject Headings.

  When I found The Handbook of Bible Law: An Indexed Guide to over 1500 (etcetera, etcetera), it seemed the perfect Fodor’s guide to my spiritual trek. All the laws in one place! It was so well organized, I figured it might be worth talking to the author. So today I Googled Charles Weisman, and I found out that he probably does not want to hear from me. And vice versa.

  Weisman runs a small publishing company in Burnsville, Minnesota, that distributes such gems as The International Jew, a collection of anti-Semitic rants originally published by Henry Ford. You can also buy a tome called America: Free, White & Christian, and books about how the “white Adamic race have [sic] been the innovators and builders of all advanced civilizations throughout history.” You get the idea.

  And when Weisman publishes The Handbook of Bible Law, it’s not out of academic interest. He wants a theocracy in America now.

  Weisman’s got company. There are thousands of beyond-the-pale fundamentalists who want to set up a biblical government based on both Testaments. As in a society that executes homosexuals, adulterers, and blasphemers. As in one that shuts down every synagogue, mosque, and moderate church. They are the American Taliban. Not all are racist like Weisman—in fact, most claim not to be—but all scare me. Unlike mainstream Christians, they don’t believe that Christ’s death voided much of the law. And unlike mainstream Jews, they don’t mute the harsher Hebrew Bible passages, the executions for adultery and blasphemy and the like.

  So they are on the fringe, yes. But perhaps not as much as I’d hoped. The movement is called reconstructionism or dominionism (the differences are subtle, but as far as I can tell, dominionism is for the slightly less-extremist extremist). And writers such as Garry Wills and Salon’s Michelle Goldberg argue that dominionism has undue influence on some more respectable members of the Christian right. It’s an influence they say far outweighs their numbers: Dominionists were a driving force behind the home-schooling movement and have helped shape Pat Robertson’s worldview.

  They’re doing what I’m doing, but they aren’t doing it as part of a spiritual quest/book project. They make me appreciate the comparative graciousness of the Falwell folks even more.

  They will pick up serpents…

  —MARK 16:18

  Day 297. If you want to slam Christian biblical literalism, I’ve noticed, the go-to epithet is “snake handler.” As in “The religious right is filled with knuckle-dragging snake handlers.”

  In fact, most evangelical Christians I met disapprove of snake handling. But it’s easy to see why this small sect has become shorthand for religious extremism in America. You watch the Appalachian snake handlers on the Discovery Channel, and they look as weird as the guy on Coney Island who hammers six-inch nails into his nostrils, or Nick Nolte after a couple of vodka tonics.

  I knew the basic idea behind serpent handling. I’d once assigned an Esquire article on the topic to Dennis Covington, a writer who penned a wonderful serpent-handling memoir called Salvation on Sand Mountain. As Dennis explains, the serpent handlers take their inspiration from a passage spoken by Jesus in Mark 16:17–18, which reads: “And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them…”

  Most Christians read the phrase “they will pick up serpents” to be a metaphor: Faith will help you overcome life’s “serpents,” its challenges and bad people and temptations. The serpent handlers don’t see it as figurative. They show their devotion to Jesus by picking up snakes—venomous snakes—during their services.

  You may criticize them for a loopy interpretation, but one thing is for sure: These are not the type of biblical literalists who had a preconceived political agenda and then dug up a few Scriptural passages to back up that agenda. They simply read a passage in the Bible and did what it said. They are the ultimate literalists. I needed to visit them.

  I called up a man named Jimmy Morrow, whose phone number I got from a professor of religion at the University of Tennessee. Jimmy was happy to hear from me and told me to come on down anytime.

  “Will I have to handle snakes?” I asked.

  “Absolutely not,” said Jimmy. “You can come to the church for one thousand years and not handle a single snake.”

  After church, “if all goes OK,” Jimmy says he’s having a picnic, and I’m invited. If all goes OK. That’s a scary concept. These snakes are real. Though it’s uncommon, people do get bitten and die—more than sixty of them in the last century.

  So, on a Saturday night, I fly to Knoxville, Tennessee, wake up in the morning, and drive ninety minutes to Del Rio, one exit past the Wal-Mart. I pull into the driveway of the Church of God with Signs Following. It’s a small, wooden one-room structure. Outside a white-painted sign quotes Mark 16:17–18.

  Jimmy arrives minutes later. He hugs me and invites me inside. He’s a tall, gray-haired fifty-one-year-old with a big, jutting Clintonian chin. And he has the thickest accent I’ve ever heard. It takes me a while to adjust my ears—for the first half hour, I have to strain the same way I do when Shakespearean actors first start spouting their Elizabethan English.

  Jimmy is the humblest fundamentalist you’ll ever meet. Even his slightly stooped posture radiates humility. “I’m just a mountain man,�
� he tells me. He peppers his speech with a lot of “Well, I think” and “It’s my interpretation.”

  “I just tell the word of God, and people can take it or reject it,” says Jimmy. “I’ve had Mormons here—I treat ’em good. I’ve had people from Finland here—I treat ’em good. I don’t say anything against ’em. Just tell ’em the word of God.”

  Jimmy was saved when he was thirteen. He saw a snake in the road, and the snake tried to bite him, but “God locked the snake’s jaws. So that’s when I knew it was true.” Since then, he’s amassed what he believes is the largest archive of serpent handling material in the world. He unlocks a large church closet to show me. It’s crammed with yellowed newspaper clippings, black-and-white photos, and videotapes of National Geographic documentaries. Here you can read about how serpent handling started—in 1908, when a Tennessee preacher and ex-bootlegger named George Hensley heard the word of God. You can read about how, since then, it’s spread to nine states and Canada, with about two thousand followers.

  Jimmy gets out his Bible. It’s the King James Version, and nearly every passage has been highlighted in one color or another: pink, yellow, blue. He shows me Mark 16:17 and reads it so fast that it sounds like it’s one long word.

  I ask Jimmy what else serpent handlers believe. Some practitioners also drink strychnine because the passage says, “if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them.” They also avoid jewelry in accordance with 1 Timothy 2:9—“…Women should adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array.” Some greet each other with a “holy kiss”—a kiss on the cheek or mouth—as instructed by Romans 16:16.

  Jimmy’s handled thousands of poisonous serpents. Most of them he picks up in the mountains right outside his house. He’s taken up copperheads, cottonmouths, rattlers, an eight-foot king cobra, and a “two-step Vietnamese viper.” Which is? “If you get bit, you fall in two steps. But God gave me victory over him.”

  He has been nailed, though. Twice. First in 1988. “It was just like a blow torch. I couldn’t sleep for five nights. It throbbed like a toothache.” The second time, in 2003, a northern copperhead got him in the chest. But he didn’t feel a thing.

  Jimmy built this church himself. It’s a simple church: There’s a linoleum floor, an electric organ, some wooden benches, and a dozen or so tambourines, some with crosses on them, one with a Fisher-Price turtle. Since I told him I’m Jewish, he points out a Bible passage on his wall written in Hebrew. “We believe the Jews are the chosen people,” he says.

  The Church of God with Signs Following doesn’t quite fit into my oversimplified liberal versus conservative evangelical schema. Politically, Jimmy’s a fan of LBJ-style Democrats. Theologically, he’s more in line with Robertson, with an emphasis on end times.

  The parishioners are trickling in. And I do mean trickle. Only about a half dozen show up, which makes me kind of sad. Jimmy doesn’t seem to mind. “One time nobody showed up. I still got up on the pulpit and preached. And this guy walking by, he stuck his head in and said, ‘What are you doing? No one’s here. No one can hear you.’ And I said, ‘Well, you heard me, didn’t you?’”

  A couple of minutes past eleven, Jimmy asks his friend Matthew to do a warm-up sermon. Matthew steps up. He’s young—twenty-eight—and looks a bit like the actor Steve Buscemi. He walks back and forth, his key chain jangling from his belt. He starts to preach.

  “People say to me, ‘I keep the Ten Commandments.’ That’s good. But there are many other commandments besides those ten. We should keep everything the Lord says.”

  Matthew’s voice fills the church. He preaches hard, hunched over, his back almost parallel with the ground, as if he were doing a Groucho Marx impersonation.

  “I’ve heard people say the Bible means this or the Bible means that. But, my friends, the Bible means exactly what it says. If God wanted it changed, He would have had the prophets change it.”

  “C’mon!” says Jimmy, who is sitting on a chair behind the altar. He lifts his hands in the air. “Amen!”

  Matthew’s carrying a blue handkerchief. Every minute or so, he wipes his brow or the saliva from the corner of his mouth. He’s working on three hours of sleep—he preached late last night at another church.

  Matthew was supposed to talk for only a few minutes, but it’s been twenty minutes, and he’s going strong. He jumps from topic to topic, wherever God takes him: healing, the chastening hand of God, his son’s injured leg, Jesus’ mercy, the war in Iraq (“We shouldn’t be in Iraq, and God will punish President Bush”).

  The Catholic and Lutheran services I’ve been to have been like well-orchestrated Bach concertos. This is like Ornette Coleman free jazz. All spontaneous.

  “I was trying not to get started again,” says Matthew, “but I believe in obeying the Holy Spirit…huh.”

  Matthew punctuates every sentence with a pronounced exhale. Huh. In the beginning, it was distracting, but now it seems sort of natural.

  “Today is the day for salvation, huh. Right here in this church, huh.”

  It’s been an hour now. Jimmy is stamping his feet. Jimmy’s wife, who is sitting behind me, is weeping and saying “Praise Jesus.” Another woman a few pews back is speaking in tongues. “Shamamamamama,” she says. Then her body jerks. “Shamamamam.”

  I feel myself getting hypnotized by those repetitive huhs. I feel like the top of my head is being swept upward. For a minute, everything fades to white except for Matthew and his shirtsleeves and his blue handkerchief and his godly riffs.

  I snap myself out of it. It was too much. How could I come back to New York and tell Julie I was saved at a serpent-handling church in Tennessee? I force myself back down. I’m not ready to surrender yet.

  Matthew preaches for an hour and a half before the Spirit moves him to stop. The warm-up act has gone on so long, there is no need for Jimmy’s main event. Jimmy wraps up the service by anointing his parishioners with olive oil. Jimmy feels badly that I had come all the way down and missed the big show. Not a single snake had been handled, no strychnine drunk.

  “Let me see if the Holy Spirit moves me,” he says. From under the altar, Jimmy slips out a wooden box with a clear plastic top. Inside, a copperhead, about three feet long, slithers over itself, flicking its tongue.

  Jimmy tells me he takes good care of the snakes. “I clean ’em, care for ’em, water ’em, and feed ’em mice.” And afterward, he lets them go back to the mountains. (Regardless, my animal rights activist aunt Marti was furious at me for coming down here at all.)

  Jimmy sits on a bench and closes his eyes. “Ha-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta,” he says. He’s speaking in tongues, a descending scale. “Ha-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. Oh, thank you Jesus Ha-ta-ta-ta.”

  Jimmy opens his eyes and reaches down for the copperhead. He picks it up with one hand near the head, one near the tail, moving his hands in slow little circles. “Ha-ta-ta-ta.” The snake just flicks its tongue. He does this for a minute, holding the serpent at eyes level. Then slowly, carefully returns the snake to its box. Jimmy is out of his trance. The weird thing is that his appearance has completely changed. He looks happier, fuller, transformed from two minutes ago. Maybe that’s how Moses glowed when he came down from the mountain.

  “How did the snake feel?” I ask.

  “Not cold and slimy. More like velvet.”

  “And what did you feel?”

  “It’s joyful,” says Jimmy. “Like a bucket of warm water pouring over your head.”

  I don’t handle the copperhead myself. I had promised Julie I wouldn’t. If I really needed to fulfill that literal part of the Bible, she pointed out I could always handle a garter snake, since the Scriptures never specify venomous snakes.

  Afterward, Jimmy takes me to a picnic at his friend’s house. We eat cake and chicken and look at his friend’s brightly colored Chinese bird. We talk about family and black bears and the Apocalyptic times we live in. And then Jimmy hugs me and tells
me I have to come down and stay with him for longer.

  As I drive back to the airport listening to a country song about Moses’s showdown with the pharaoh on AM radio, two things strike me: First, when you’re there, when you’re in that one-room church, serpent handling doesn’t seem as bizarre as I had expected. It’s like a great quote I once read: Religion makes the “strange familiar and the familiar strange.” Here the strange had been made familiar.

  My second thought is: I wish Jimmy would stop handling snakes. My college anthropology professors would be appalled. So would Ralph Hood, the religion teacher who hooked me up with Jimmy in the first place. He wrote a culturally relativist essay about how serpent handling is a valid mode of worship, how it lets the handler embrace life by conquering death. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

  But I still have my risk-reward mind-set, and here the risk to Jimmy’s life cannot outweigh the reward of transcendence. He’s one of my favorite people from this year, and almost every Sunday, he’s tempting death. And why? Because of a literalist interpretation of Mark 16:18—a passage that some New Testament scholars argue was not in the original Scriptures. I want Jimmy to find transcendence through dancing or hymn singing or Sufi spinning. Anything.

  Well, there’s an old mountain saying that Ralph Hood quotes: “If you don’t believe in serpent handlers, pray for them.” That I can do.

  Month Eleven: July

  “If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink.”

  —JOHN 7:37

  Day 306. I spend the morning at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen again. I’ve been studying who gets which job and why. I’ve noticed something: The beverage station—which is the very first stop in the main room, right next to the front door—is almost always given to…a hot female volunteer. Is this a coincidence? Or are they trying to give the place a little sex appeal?

  My hunch is the latter. Which could be unbiblical. Aren’t we supposed to be concerned with the spirit, not the flesh? I am stationed right next to today’s official pretty lady. I pour the pink lemonade, she hands it out. She’s a short, blond woman in a yellow T-shirt, the leader of a church youth group from Abilene, Texas. She hands out lemonades with a “Have a great day” and a smile out of a cruise line commercial. She seems to be doing well, but the soup kitchen elders can be tough. “Don’t step forward when dispensing the lemonade,” snaps a veteran volunteer. “It slows up the line. Just hand it to them.”