That night, outside the Tabernacle Church of God, mild light pollution from the turnpike stains the thick clouds a warm, pink tone. "If I were to be sent to prison, boy, I just think that would set off such a blast," Hamblin says, shaking his head. "You'd just have a total rebellion on your hands."

It's 9:35 p.m. and a handful of congregants have been laying hands on a newcomer inside the church — either to heal or exorcise her, depending whom I ask — for almost half an hour. A woman from the Channel 10 News tells me she was supposed to air a report on Hamblin at 10 p.m. But the parking lot looks like a frozen game of Tetris, and the reporter's car is boxed in by at least two dozen others. "Think you're gonna miss your deadline," I say, unhelpfully. She nods.

The congregants include a mother, Judith Carolyn Rutherford, and daughter, Machelle Tinch, whom I'd met the night before. Their long hair is the same blonde shade of curl, and their upper lips have the same Kewpie-doll shape. I saw them both at the church in October, but this is the first time we've talked. "What part of Florida are you from?" Tinch had asked me; she'd seen the plates on my car. When I explained that the car is a rental, Rutherford wanted to know who I came to Campbell County with. I tell them I didn't come with anyone, that I flew down alone that afternoon, and they look at each other, horrified, before turning to face me."

You came to a meth county alone?" Tinch hisses, challenging me to explain my apparent death wish. "Honey," Rutherford says to me, patting my arm with a chiding hand, "you're in the middle of good ol' boy country. The cops take enough bribes to leave most of the worst cooks be. Meantime, there ain't hardly a family in town that don't have somebody in it that's a meth head — "

"Or a pill popper," Tinch adds, "or just a good old-fashioned alcoholic.

"Earlier during tonight's service, Andrew raised a black timber rattler as thick as my calf over his head while preaching, one of two replacement snakes Coots had brought down. The snake flicked its black forked tongue, tasting the warmth emanating from incandescent bulbs in the ceiling fan above the altar. Alongside the ceiling's unfinished wood paneling, the ill-secured fan wobbled in place like a dashboard hula figurine.

"I am a soldier in the Lord's army," Hamblin shouted, caressing the snake under its jaw, "and I will fight for our right to take up serpents!" When sweat broke out on his brow, he wicked it away with the snake's back. That's when I figured I could use some air.

I rub my hands together against the chill, blowing into them for warmth, and watch my breath curl. It was unbearably hot inside the church. There's really no such thing as bad press. Attendance shot back up following the TWRA's raid. Tonight, 98 people packed into the pews. "If you're an addict, I'm telling you, you don't need to take another pill," Hamblin said to them from the pulpit. "If you're an alcoholic, you don't gotta take another drink. You just got to see this glory here, and get the Lord into your heart."

Earlier that day I read a drug control report issued for the state of Tennessee that said 1,000 people died "as a direct consequence of drug use" — meth mostly, and opiates — in 2009 alone. Since serpent handling began over a century ago, there have been fewer than 100 documented deaths from snakebites.

That night, Jeremy Henegar, a 20-year-old convert with an infectious smile and piercing eyes, hung out and helped Andrew clear away tambourines and other odds and ends. "I can tell you now," Henegar told me earlier, "until I started coming here a month ago and let God move on me, I was a raging alcoholic. If I hadn't started coming here, I can promise you: I'd be dead or worse." When he felt the anointing, "I knew I didn't need drink anymore. It feels like a perfect calm." Was it like being drunk, I asked. Or high? "Being drunk, being stoned," he said, his face relaxing with remembered ecstasy, "that don't even come close."

Hood has his own theory of his about serpent-handling converts who struggle with substance abuse. "I think certain faith-based groups, depending on what they're about and how they worship, are really good at appealing to certain kinds of people," he says. "Serpent handlers happen to be very good at rehabilitating drug addicts and alcoholics, I think, because they can replace that high with another kind. They can give you that emotional high." In the long history of religion, drugs have been used to facilitate highs, inspire visions, and cultivate physical sensations that transcend what the human body can achieve on its own. Some Native American tribes use peyote, for instance. "But here's a group that doesn't use drugs," Hood says. "They use snakes."

Around 10:30 p.m., the service winds down. Inside the church, the future dances in the center of the aisle.

The third-to-last episode of Snake Salvation starts with Hamblin pulling up to his church with his twin boys in tow. "I want my children to follow in this faith because we feel this is right. I do want my children one day when they come of age to handle serpents," he says during the episode, taking a milk snake — small, gray, and nonvenomous — out of an aquarium in his church's annex for his sons to play with. "You know," he says, "they mimic everything they see in church when you handle 'em. I mean, hangin' it around their neck, shoutin' with it, pattin' his foot. They mimic what they see us do with it."

While men and women around him keen and sing, a small boy stamps his feet between the pews. In either hand, he holds a red rubber coral snake. He doesn't shout "amen" or "hallelujah" like Hamblin, but that makes sense. He can't be much more than a year old, the age when most babies start to toddle, but not all have learned to speak. He raises the toy snakes out in front of him, up and over his head.

A man sitting in the row beside him watches. "Lookit him go!" the man says. "We got a pastor in training."