“Revelation: A Search for Faith in a Violent Religious World”
Author: Dennis Covington
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Pages: 224
Price: $28.00 (Hardcover)
Impossible as it seems, it has been 20 years since Dennis Covington published “Salvation on Sand Mountain,” his report on the snake handling churches of Appalachia, those congregations that followed, literally, the passage in Mark: “They shall take up serpents.”
Covington the reporter became immersed so deeply in that culture, was so caught up in his subject that, ultimately, he was himself infused with the Holy Spirit, and at a service in Scottsboro he himself stepped forward and “took the snake with both hands.” He reports: “…I felt no fear. The snake seemed to be an extension of myself. And suddenly there seemed to be nothing in the room but me and the snake . Everything else had disappeared...all faded to white.”
This sensational subject and the powerful writing of “Salvation on Sand Mountain” made it a finalist for the National Book Award.
On February 16th Covington’s “Revelation: A Search for Faith in a Violent Religious World” was released.
Many things have changed.
Covington moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to Lubbock, Texas, and felt that he had lost his faith—at least as he had conceived of it. “My spiritual life…was a mess. I was in the middle of my fifties, with more broken promises to God than I could ever name.”
Living on the high plains outside of Lubbock, he began to “reimagine faith as an action rather than a set of beliefs.”
The text that he embraces, rather than Mark on serpents, is Hebrews 11.1: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Put the emphasis on substance.
On the premise that faith is intertwined with suffering, Covington embarks on a three-year series of journeys to sites where he might observe the suffering, thus participating in it, and by reporting, bear witness.
Like “Salvation,” “Revelation” is an eerie and powerful narrative.
In Juarez, Mexico he reports on the everyday carnage, the headless mutilated bodies found many mornings in the streets and the work of a few brave souls to help the afflicted. Covington reports on the work of Pastor, who runs a scruffy mental hospital. It looks hopeless, but Pastor perseveres, loving the unloved. “The conviction that life has meaning, I thought, must be the place where faith begins.”
Although there are autobiographical sections on the racial strife in Birmingham and the difficulties in Covington’s own family life, the bulk of “Revelation” is reportage on his half dozen trips in 2012-13, to Antioch, on the Turkish-Syrian border, and his unauthorized, very dangerous forays into the Syrian cities of Aleppo and Azaz. Why would a person do that, one might ask? The answer: “It was a war, where suffering and faith were inevitable, and I was drawn to it for those very reasons.”
He went as a freelance reporter, on his own dime, and Covington knew the risks, especially capture and torture, even beheading. He questions his own motives: he had reported on the war in El Salvador and was criticized then by friends as an adrenaline junkie. Did he seek fame as a reporter? Was it narcissism, bravado, a manifestation of self-destructive urges?
In any case he, went, repeatedly. We meet a cast of characters from a Graham Greene novel: Syrian rebel patriots, opportunistic translators, Omar the shifty documentary film-maker, the woman from Kyrgystan, surely a spy for someone, even a shifty Canadian. These characters all agree you can’t trust anybody.
But there are also idealists, aid workers, doctors, and reporters like James Foley, since executed by ISIS, who “in his work as witness to war, entered into the suffering of others, a definition of faith as clear any in the Gospel….”
There is suffering abounding, but heroism and sacrifice as well, and Covington himself does not emerge unscathed. As he was visiting the Great Mosque of Aleppo, an enormous explosion occurred nearby. Covington was externally unhurt but “[k]new then that I’d been injured internally.” In fact, a blood vessel in his brain had ruptured and he suffered a near-fatal subdural hematoma, with a pool of blood collecting under his skull.
Covington is well, and, as he had promised to quit handling snakes, he promises not to return to Syria.
He describes his book as the story of a man searching for faith, and believes it will not sit well with Christian readers. I think it is a book by a person drenched in faith, obsessed with faith, one of Flannery O’Connor’s “ Christ-haunted” Southerners.
Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark with Don Noble.” A shorter form of this review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio.