Addicted to Christ. Helena Hansen
had been sullen that week. The pastor and guest preacher must have sensed his need for renewal. In Juan’s words, it was the Holy Spirit working through them, reminding Juan of his privileged relationship with the Spirit.
Juan looked at me standing next to my car and said:
Okay, go home, because otherwise you’ll be here all night. But you’ll be safe. It will be as if the car was driving itself, and you’ll end up right at home without knowing how you got there. And don’t worry, your family will be safe, God has you all in his hands.
I seated myself in my station wagon and indeed, floated around the pitch-black bends of the roads leading to my house. Putting a cassette of Christian music that Juan had given me into the tape deck, I exhaled into my seat, and tried to hear the beauty that Juan found in the music. What was my spiritual ear and eye, and how did I know when I was using them? Was it as simple as noticing a banana blossom or catching a view of Orion and the Big Dipper? I knew that Juan would answer, “No.”
He would point me toward the two trees we saw behind the chapel, to the forces that kept one tree green and thriving, and the other dried and cracked on the brink of death, despite that to my eyes they shared the same soil and water. He would remind me of the gray-shirted man who gave testimony that night, to whom God spoke through the television, and of the young man who gave testimony that he was shaken from his spiritual slumber while in solitary confinement, from the brink of a twenty-year prison term. He would cite the new recruits that he had shown me in the withdrawal room, whose heads were so full of malignant craving that they tore the speakers from their wall-mounts to silence the word of Christ.
IMMERSION
Evangelists had been a welcome sight in the decaying neighborhoods where I worked on HIV projects just after college. Evangelists exuded privileged knowledge, and their gaze was fixed above the decay, on an alternate reality. But I did not get to learn more about them until I was in my last year of medical school. With referrals from street ministries in Newark and Hartford to their branches on the island, I left for Puerto Rico—the epicenter of Pentecostal street ministries—for what stretched into a year, and then two additional years of follow-up visits.
From the beginning, I faced a methodological dilemma. Street ministries were gender segregated and the majority were for men. As a married woman with an infant, I could not live at a facility long term to get an intimate view of their cultural logics and practices. Reasoning that I needed to survey local ministries before taking root in one for participant observation, I rented a unit in the shadow of the Ponce cement factory with my husband and one-year-old daughter, next to a friend who worked for the Puerto Rican mental health worker’s union. Ponce was a center of both drug trade and addiction ministries, and the cement factory was a reminder of Ponce’s thriving industrial past, just one mile north of the abandoned Schering-Plough pharmaceutical plant that had anchored its once thriving manufacturing industry.
I enrolled my daughter in the local daycare, bought an aging Ford Escort, and (between its breakdowns) drove to every street ministry in Southwest Puerto Rico—from Añasco to Ponce—that I could identify by asking health administrators, addiction programs, and the programs’ clients for referrals.
In the end, I visited thirteen ministries and interviewed their directors about their history, structure, treatment philosophy, curriculum, and clientele. The directors of Restoration House and Victory Academy2 were especially welcoming and invited me to participate with, observe, and interview their residents for the year. The two ministries provided contrasts: one accepted government funds and hired state-licensed professionals; the other more radically evangelical ministry did not. These represented two poles of evangelical addiction treatment: one radically evangelical, which rejected the pre-conversion world in favor of a lifelong mission, the other a hybrid of clinical and evangelical techniques designed to produce Christian citizens that could re-enter everyday Puerto Rican society.
Neither program referred to its residents as “clients” or “patients.” As the pastor’s wife at Victory Academy explained it, “We don’t call them clients, because that implies they’re paying for something. Here we say brother, or sister, because we are like a family, or students, because it is an Academy.” Long-term residents got the titles of program leaders or co-directors. Program directors did not see addiction as the primary reason that residents needed help. Instead they saw addiction as a symptom of moral weakness. At times, people who had never used drugs came to the ministry; one woman asked to live at Victory Academy to pray about the fact that her husband physically abused her, and another was there to earn custody of children that were in foster care because of alleged neglect.
In this atmosphere of open admission, the program leadership accepted that I was studying evangelism as a treatment for addiction, but told me that God led me to them, whether I knew it or not. They called me the student or, jesting about my broken Spanish, la Gringa (“the North American”). They were convinced that my writing would help the Holy Spirit to reach readers on the mainland. I was invited to baptisms, weddings, and family homes. I took my daughter with me. With their pro-natalist ethos, my daughter’s presence made me easier to place. Coincidentally, or not, family relations emerged as central themes in the stories they told about themselves.
I participated daily in culto (worship services), Bible study, training sessions for program leaders in discipleship, and the everyday life of the ministry. Helping to prepare meals in the kitchen and listening to conversation while cleaning the dormitories gave me a window onto the backstage performance (Goffman 1973) of ministry residents and staff. I was privy to gossip, conflict, and anxieties that people concerned about setting a Christian example did not make public. Taking part in the daily routine of ministry residents also taught me about the physical, embodied aspects of evangelism. Indoctrination was not only a matter of the spoken and written biblical Word, but was also a matter of upright posture, seating that was segregated by gender and seniority in the ministry, sleep deprivation, and emotional release while dancing to music at culto.
Ministry leaders reminded me that I could only truly understand Christian treatment for addiction by accepting Christ myself. And I was often mistaken for a convert: instead of the tight shorts and halter tops worn by unconverted young Puerto Rican women, I wore loose shirts that covered my shoulders, long skirts, and no makeup. On one occasion, Pagan, a former prison guard–turned–ministry program leader at Restoration House, stopped midsentence in our conversation to eye my ankle-length navy dress. “But you look so Christian!” he said plaintively. “Maybe you will find God this year.”
I also tended to pass for “nuyorican” (New York Puerto Rican); with my curly hair and brown complexion, I was called “trigueña” (“wheat colored”) in the rich Puerto Rican vocabulary for describing skin tone.3 It was easy for me and my informants to begin talking as if I were a convert. I reflexively greeted familiar faces with “Que le bendiga” (“May God bless you”), and carried a Bible. At times, I wondered if God was asking me to go native. I knew that, for Pentecostals, there could be no fence sitting, and there was no true knowledge external to faith. To keep his job, my husband spent much of his time on the mainland, so I often was with my daughter in the ministries, and it was there that I felt most connected and a part of a community. This immersion planted a seed of doubt in my agnostic worldview.
Although I was disturbed by this doubt, I also saw it as a source of insight.4 I, too, was affected by their evangelist techniques, and I felt the same need to belong that my informants did. I saw that the boundary between believer and non-believer was permeable, that crossing over and back again was common, and that conversion could be tenuous. Sermon after sermon in culto was about doubt, and the need for Christians to be vigilant of their faith. I suspected that the drama of conversion and evangelical performance reflected converts’ anxiety about this tenuousness.
COSAS OCULTAS (“THE OCCULT”)
A few weeks passed at Restoration House before Juan introduced me to Octavio. Like Juan, Octavio was a program leader. Dark half-moons under his eyes accentuated his pale face and bony frame. Octavio was in a constant state of prayer; he was said to have given up sleep to talk with God without interruption. I had noticed Octavio in the front of