Serpent handling began, by the practice's own tradition, on White Oak Mountain in Tennessee around 1910, when a Pentecostal preacher named George Went Hensley, reading Mark's gospel's promise that believers would take up serpents unharmed, caught a rattlesnake, brought it into a revival meeting, and challenged the congregation to prove their faith the same way he had. The practice spread through independent Holiness and Pentecostal congregations across the Appalachian coalfields of Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia and West Virginia over the following decades, and as snakebite deaths accumulated among practitioners, most of those states eventually passed laws banning the practice outright. West Virginia alone among its Appalachian neighbors never did, and it remains, by most accounts, the only state where handling venomous serpents in worship carries no specific legal prohibition, which is part of why a handful of independent congregations in the state's coalfields still practice it openly today while the tradition survives elsewhere only in more guarded form. Hensley himself died from a snakebite in 1955, decades after he had first climbed White Oak Mountain, a death his own tradition's theology treated as a possible failure of faith rather than as evidence against the practice.
Coal camp religion more broadly, built around company sponsored and independent Baptist and Methodist churches, shaped community life across the southern coalfields through the twentieth century, often the only social institution a mining town had outside the company itself. Evangelical Protestant identification leads the state at thirty seven percent of adults, per Pew's 2023-24 study.