The film itself is based on filming done over the period of a year in a small church in a small community in West Virginia, a state in which there are no legal restrictions on any of the activities that have been filmed. The filmmakers came in and out of the community and were welcomed by the church members. Their filming was entirely open, and fulfills better than any modern film I know, the basic anthropological tenet of full disclosure of purpose. It contrasts sharply with the current cinematographic rage for presenting scenes and postures that could never be viewed by participant observers, and which are, therefore, a violation of the privacy of both subject and viewer. It also contrasts sharply with films in which the abnormal is stressed without reference to the wider context in which such behavior occurs. The shots of the landscape, place, the people, and frequent scenes of infants and children in happy interrelation to their watchful or tranced parents provide a sense of wholeness to the occasion. At the same time the film fulfills the demand for movement and excitement that is a general overall requirement of contemporary filmmaking, rising from a series of self-portraying studies of individuals to the long multi-climaxed meeting, punctuated by seizures and speaking in tongues (glossology), to the culminating excitement of releasing and handling the poisonous snakes. -- Margaret Mead, American Anthropologist, June 1968
[Source Filmforum Program Notes, 1/22/1976]