I wrote a paper in college about the serpent handling Holiness Christians of Appalachia. I found that, when you consider the history of those areas and what the people were experiencing at the time that serpent handling was popularized, there is way more going on under the surface than just handling snakes. My paper concluded that serpent handling was a form of anti-systemic protest, or "weapons of the weak". It was, and is, a means of protest by a people who feel they are in a marginalized and powerless position. It is not a coincidence that serpent handling came about in some of the poorest places in the USA where large manufacturing and mining companies ran the show and were in collusion with governments, even owning the very towns where people lived and producing their own currency in the form of scrip. Serpent handling, along with Holiness theology and lifestyle, was an act of defiance against an evil world determined to keep them down. It offered the promise of (eventual) justice in the form of God's judgment on the wicked and a better life that was cruelly denied to them on Earth.