Andrew Hamblin’s Facebook page is filled with snippets ... them with spiritual ecstasy — the chance to hold life and death in their hands. Brother Micah Golden felt it first while standing ...

But while Coots’ death valorized a tradition for many observers, it represented a sea change for Andrew Hamblin. “Since Jamie died,” he told me, “I’ve offered a rattler to no one.

Andrew Hamblin, 21, pastor of Tabernacle Church of God in La Follette, Tenn., holds up two rattlesnakes during church service. For more than a 100 years, small Pentecostal churches in East ...