Family Values

This chapter discusses how the long-term success of converts required reworking relationships with preconversion families and lives. Pentecostal rupture with the unconverted world in practice was not ever complete. Converts' success hinged on the uncertain prospect of exchanging spiritual capital gained in the ministry for the local currency of their fragile families. Ironically, those converts who had more resources before conversion were often those who could best capitalize on their new Christian relationships, their identities and authority both inside and outside of the ministries. Thus, the radical egalitarianism of each saved soul's worth was continually undercut by differential access in the present material world.

Spiritual Mothers

This chapter argues that addiction ministries' reliance on the victimhood of women as a key resource in the reformation of masculinity narrowed women's routes to spiritual power and capital. The ministries' rhetoric of women's victimhood coexisted with one of gender equality in moral standards: The insistence that both men and women demonstrate monastic discipline and dedication to the ministry over their families of origin. This apparent equity in expectation ignored the differential family responsibilities and relational histories of women. Addiction treatment is also profoundly gendered, because addiction is profoundly gendered. Although male rejection of alcohol and drugs figures neatly into the Pentecostal narrative of reformed machismo, there is no clear corresponding narrative of women's reformation.

On Discipline and Becoming a Disciple

This chapter details the many physical tests used to entrain converts. These include practices welcoming pain and of suffering—practices that, according to ministry leaders, left practitioners less vulnerable to addiction. These practices were a way to sanctify the addicted body and embody spiritual power. They were techniques of bodily and emotional discipline used to retool narratives of addiction, from those of descent and isolation to those of ascent and connection. Bearing pain also meant restoring the capacity for delay, to dampen the impulsivity and sense of desperation that many described as core problems of addiction. Ironically, converts use their bodies as a vehicle to spiritually transcend the limits of their corporeal, everyday worlds. The addicted and withdrawing body was, in the ministries, a sensitive instrument for channeling the will of God.

The Cosmology of Conversion

This chapter discusses Pentecostal cosmology, which holds that power is located not in people, but in spirits. In this cosmos, freedom is not human autonomy but liberation from evil spirits, enabling individuals to submit their will to the Holy Spirit. Converts weave a new web of relations with spirits that disrupt their over-determined relations with people and with drugs. Holy Spirit possession, for instance, channels supernatural forces through discarded addicts, disrupting not only the intrapersonal, but also the social, order. Pentecostal converts disrupt routines through sleep deprivation, fasting, prayer, and drone-like incantation. They induce a state in which mental activity becomes less structured, and the normal rules of hierarchy, class, and causality cease to apply.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. 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 adopted 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.

Bringing It Home

This chapter presents a synthesis of the key themes discussed in the preceding chapters. It argues that addiction is biocultural: the social imaginary determines biological outcomes, because what addicted people think of themselves and see as possible drives their risk of overdose, infection, violence, and incarceration. The question is how to cultivate social imaginaries and lattices of relationships that foster therapeutic ways of living. Pentecostalism can, at times, open spaces for marginal people to create a new order based on narratives of ascetic redemption, domesticity, and universal access to knowledge and gifts. At other times, it draws on elements of the old order—such as patriarchy—empowering some members at the expense of others.

The New Masculinity

In The Reformation of Machismo (1995), Elizabeth Brusco proposed an intriguing theory to explain the mass conversion of Latin Americans to evangelical Protestantism: Protestantism as gender strategy. Based on fieldwork in Colombia, Brusco argued that the Protestant Church is a female-dominated institution and that women convert their male partners to domesticate them. Enforcing the clean-living program of evangelists, Colombian women brought men into the domestic sphere as heads of household, and forced men to give up the male subcultural pursuits of alcohol, adultery, and domestic violence. Using Brusco's argument as a point of departure, this chapter describes conversion among addicted men in Puerto Rico as a male-driven—rather than female-driven—gender strategy that changed the relationship male converts had to their families and their work.

Visitations and Gifts

This chapter considers the question of how Puerto Rico, a formerly Catholic island with U.S. funding to biomedicalize its treatment system, become an epicenter for Protestant addiction evangelism? It fleshes out the connections between the moral economy of street ministries and the political economy of post-industrial Puerto Rico by reconstructing two parallel histories: one is a brief economic history of Puerto Rico's evolution from a Spanish colony to its current status as a “territory” of the United States, with partial eligibility for U.S. federal entitlements while serving initially as a labor pool and later as a tax shelter for U.S. industry. Another is the story of more recent debates surrounding the island's drug policy and addiction treatment under health reform, given that health reform has been a key element of the island's efforts to elevate its status in relation to the United States.