The distinguishing feature of these ministries is their attempt to rework relationships. Converts are told to call on the Holy Spirit for spiritual strength to suffer through withdrawal and cravings, sleeping on bare floors, and feeding themselves on sparse donations from local stores. They are told to look to fellow worshipers for new “families in Christ” when their families of origin have rejected them, and to seek help from community congregations in order to live “por fe” or by faith alone—relying on donations and the ministries’ micro-industries (such as selling bottled water or chocolates on street corners). Although street ministries do not directly challenge the political systems and economic inequalities that produce narcotraffic, there are elements of the Pentecostalism of street ministries that serve as cultural critique. Ministries reject mass consumption and personal accumulation as a way to transcend the entrapments of popular culture.
Studies of Pentecostal rehabilitation in other parts of Latin America point to the influence of middle class white U.S. congregations and their neoliberal politics (O’Neill 2015), but many Puerto Rican street ministers see themselves as outside of worldly politics. Their discourse is otherworldly; converts renounce their bodily concerns to cultivate a connection to a dimension of spirits that gives them discernment—a way of perceiving and navigating the motivations and temptations of those around them. The less they rely on material comforts, the stronger their connection to spirits, the more elevated their consciousness and the more rewarding their emotional and sensory experience, as they become “addicted to Christ.”
This image of transferred addiction adapts a broader motif of rupture in Charismatic Christianity. Pentecostals urge adherents to break completely with the mundane, and to pursue salvation through contact with the Holy Spirit, marking a “split between the transcendental and the mundane [that] is thus as extreme in Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity as it is in any other form of Christianity or in any other world religion” (Robbins 2009, 62). This split contrasts with other religions, many of which “are not structured around a radical distinction between the transcendental and the mundane” (Robbins 2009, 59). Thomas Csordas builds on this idea of rupture when asking about the broader social significance of the global Charismatic Renewal; “whether we are witnessing an era of re-sacralization or re-enchantment” (Csordas 2009, 91). In using the term “re-enchantment,” he alludes to Max Weber’s classic work on the Protestant work ethic as the cultural foundation for a modern secular capitalism. Weber points to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination as producing a psychological need of followers to appear successful as a result of their material labor to signal that they were saved (although perversely hard work and success were no guarantee of having been predestined for salvation). This compulsion to labor and produce good works carried forward in the industrial era and shed its Calvinist roots in contemporary, bureaucratic forms of life that are “disenchanted” in their reduction of human activity to a calculus of maximization (Weber 1958). Csordas argues that the popularity of Charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity can be explained, in part, by the ways that Charismatic worship is “imbued with an aura of enchantment;” by a sense of alterity that is heightened through practices such as speaking in tongues, and by the “sensuous immediacy” of revelatory visions and spirit possession (Csordas 2009). Tanya Luhrmann further illuminates this dynamic in her description of middle-class American evangelicals who walk and “talk with God,” who see their worship as a way to cultivate a personal relationship with God, a relationship that infuses the everyday with the mystical (Luhrmann 2012, Luhrmann 2004). The worshipers in her study therefore describe their enchantment as relational.
Despite the received wisdom that charismatic Christianity is centered on personal, inward transformation, rupture and re-enchantment are social processes. As Courtney Handman points out, Protestant missions have been associated with a “modernist refusal of sociality” with the ethos of individualism and private property of John Locke’s social contract. Yet, ethnographies of charismatic Christianity reveal a rich social matrix of worshippers attempting to enact authentic Christianity with and against each other (Handman 2015). Thomas Csordas’ (1994) classic ethnography of charismatic faith healing describes healers’ manipulations of memory and sensory phenomena to craft a “sacred self.” Although the goal is to transform selves, transformation requires carefully choreographed communication between supplicants and healers. The charisma, or gifts, of participants in these rituals are manifest due to the skills of healers and the concerted participation of other converts. Thus, the rupture and re-enchantment of Charismatic Christians are produced by collective practices (see also Comaroff 1985). But how complete is this rupture? Who ultimately benefits, and how?
This book examines the ways ex-addicted Pentecostals work toward rupture. One strategy for rupture is the performance of alternative masculinities. Having lost credibility with their families in the course of their addiction, converted men present themselves to their parents and spouses as spiritual heads of home. They draw on images of Christ to convert mainstream masculinity into an evangelical manhood that is based on domesticity, emotional responsiveness, self-sacrifice, and spiritual knowledge. This contrasts with the rise and fall of one of the only street ministries in Puerto Rico to cater to women. In their bid to cultivate the respectability and upward mobility of its male recruits, the ministries adopt a middle-class, patriarchal model of the family, over the working-class, female-headed extended families from which most of its membership comes, ultimately limiting the possibilities for women in the ministries.
I revisited several converted men and the outcome of their strategies of gender and domesticity two years after my original field research. Through these individuals we see that Pentecostalism—premised on the ultimate authority of personal, mystical experience—often is billed as an individualist replacement for extended family networks of the poor. In practice, however, Pentecostalism builds on these networks and its success is contingent on them. Together these chapters flesh out the promise and the limitations of Pentecostal strategies to rework gender and family as social technologies of transformation.
CHRONICITY AND CHANGE
Is addiction a disease?
Eight years after my research in Puerto Rican street ministries, in my last month of an addiction psychiatry fellowship, I was assigned to the inpatient addictions unit of a large New York City hospital. The staff hastily passed patients’ rooms, hovering two feet from the door. Thick glass insulated the nursing station from patients who frantically knocked on its window to ask for phone calls—and for sedatives.
I made a point of greeting a Puerto Rican woman who the medical assistants warned me was “unpredictable.” She was admitted the night before, had been sleeping all morning, but sat upright when I approached. Her hospital gown slipped off of her shoulder, showing skin as grey as the roots of her brassy hair. “Where is my methadone?!” she barked. Explaining that we hadn’t started morning medications, I caught her fist squarely in my chest, all she could muster from her withered arm. I froze, leaning toward her bed. Within seconds someone pulled me into the hall as medical assistants and nurses formed a circle around her. The crisis team appeared: African American former high school football stars hired from local housing projects. They told her she was going to get some rest, and held her to the bed as she screamed for methadone. A Filipino nurse injected her with tranquilizers.
Six hours later, nodding from the medications, she called me in to apologize. “I’m sorry about that—it’s just, you know, I need my methadone.”
My supervisor scolded me for walking so far into the patient’s room. “You see how the drug hijacks their brains.” In our classroom he had stood at the chalkboard, drawing dopamine receptors in the nucleus accumbens of the brain and its pathways to the forebrain, the seat of conscious decision making. He cited experiments derived from the behaviorist conditioning