Addicted to Christ. Helena Hansen
is prompted by moments of revelation. It then requires daily practices that, from a secular point of view, are inward and develop the self, but that, from a Pentecostal point of view, are relational and develop mutual recognition and emotional exchange between human hosts and their spiritual inhabitants.
Using this framework, Pentecostals make power relations accessible to intervention. Converts break open an apparently closed loop of personal desire, consumption, and depletion by channeling spiritual power. They see themselves as moral entrepreneurs: explorers and traders in a dimension outside of ordinary perception.
Cheryl Mattingly (2010), in her ethnography of African American families with seriously ill children, coins the term “the practice of hope” to make visible a space of possibility in which marginalized families resist defeat. As she points out, post-structural theory focuses on totalizing networks of power and the illusory nature of resistance (cf. Foucault 1976). It omits the experiential and phenomenological perspectives of subjugated actors whose tactics (à la De Certeau 1984) to counteract oppressive strategies of dominant groups often only are perceptible in everyday acts. In Puerto Rican street ministries, the discourse of addiction—despite its reference to sin—is not a discourse of blame. It is a discourse of vulnerability, requiring self-defense with spiritual cultivation and empowerment.
In this self-cultivation, bodily desires are washed clean in a spiritual rebirth, starting with baptism. Baptism marks the beginning of a lifelong commitment to self-perfection. Other addiction treatment approaches call for adherence to medications, or to meetings, to manage an incurable disease. Charismatic Christians promise a complete transformation of the self through rebirth in the Holy Spirit.
Juan’s image of the beautiful fruit inside of its rough shell is a metaphor for converts’ revelation of their inner sanctity. Culto features rhythmic alabanza (music of praise) and dance to create a celebratory mood. Saved ex-addicts give their testimony over loudspeakers in parks, schools, and shopping centers. They see their stories not as shameful but rather as testaments to the miracle of their rebirth.
Rather than the stoic inventory of past wrongs and present weakness required by Alcohol Anonymous’ twelve steps, designed to break through denial of members’ powerlessness over substances,6 street ministries focus converts on “spiritual victory.” For unemployed Puerto Rican men, the revelation of inner power, rather than the admission that they have no power, might be appealing.
ADDICTION TO CHRIST
The Pentecostalism of Restoration House cultivates a way of relating to the spiritual realm that is reminiscent of West African polytheistic traditions. Historian Ian MacRobert (1988) attributes ecstatic Pentecostal spirit possession, oral liturgy and witness, participatory prayer and sermons, and the extensive use of rhythm and dance in worship to early African American Pentecostals whose invocation of spirits derived from West Africa. Although other scholars of American Christianity argue that such African continuity theses might be oversimplified—African American religious practices that resemble West African oratory or musical practices also resemble Welsh and Irish bard traditions (Pitts 1993, Jacobs and Kaslow 1991, Raboteau 1978)—it is true that Pentecostalism emphasizes bodily enmeshment with spirits. Additionally, though Pentecostal theology is certainly monotheistic, in Puerto Rican street ministries the Holy Spirit is the ruling member of an unseen realm peopled with lesser spirits—both good and bad. This rich pneumatic universe resonates with other religious traditions with which Puerto Rican Pentecostal converts are familiar, including Catholic saints and angels, and the Orishas of Santería. Pentecostals call upon or exorcise lesser spirits with the help of the Holy Spirit.
In Restoration House, a good culto is one where the group really feels the Holy Spirit, where worshipers are moved to tears, to speak in tongues, and to rest in the Spirit, where they are held unconscious on the floor by a supernatural force. It is one where the preacher does not speak but lets the Spirit speak through him, pulling new converts to the altar to accept Christ even against their own volition.
The most devoted converts talk about the Holy Spirit as dominating and obsessing them, as something they crave: once they have felt the Holy Spirit’s presence, they cannot stop thinking of it. They talk about the touch and voice of the Holy Spirit in the way that heroin and cocaine users talk about the rush from an injection or inhalation: as a euphoric sensation spreading throughout their bodies, removing their earthly cares. They talk about looking for the Spirit as a way of life, the way that habitual drug users talk of their constant search for drugs. They talk about wanting to reach a state of constant communion with the Spirit, much in the way that drug users talk about their fantasy of a high that never ends. They are willing to endure hunger, physical pain, and public ridicule to make contact with the Spirit, just as they had endured to score drugs before their conversion.
Alternately, worshippers speak of their relationship with the Holy Spirit in romantic terms. They speak of always wanting to please the Spirit, of wanting to show the Spirit their love and wanting to feel love in return. They speak of their guilt when they betray the Spirit, of their efforts to win the trust of the Spirit again, to prove their devotion, to grow in their relationship with the Spirit over time, and to maintain their relationship with the Spirit in the long haul. As the director of an addiction ministry in Yauco told me, “Knowing Christ is like your first love.” Bomann (1999) points out that this language of love is characteristic of Pentecostals in Latin America and elsewhere. Cox (1994) relates this ecstatic devotion among Pentecostals to ancient and medieval erotic mysticism in Europe, in which saints described their desire for physical union with Christ (see also Burrus 2004). It is notable that, in contemporary times, active drug users also talk about drugs as a romantic love object, describing their first experiences with drugs as falling in love, and joking about their drug of choice as if it were a demanding spouse (Courtwright, Joseph, and Des Jarlais 1989).
In street ministries, however, the Holy Spirit is idealized; it is not seen as the source of temptation, cruelty, and destruction as drugs are. In their view, the Holy Spirit in itself is perfect. It is the object of desire because it is never fully attained by mortals for more than fleeting moments. In fact, as Chapter Three illustrates, Christian historians write that such fleeting moments inspired the Pentecostal movement itself. The emotional pull of Pentecostal worship—its affective concentration on the Holy Spirit as the singular object of ecstatic devotion—resembles the self-conscious monotheism of early Christianity, in its language of saintly passion and desire for Christ.
Pentecostal cosmology holds that power is located not in people, but in spirits. In this cosmos, freedom is not human autonomy, it is liberation from evil spirits, enabling individuals to submit their will to the Holy Spirit. As an observer of Pentecostal treatment for alcoholism in Brazil noted, for Pentecostals,
Being free means being free to reject evil. . . . According to this model, the individual is fragile and the force of his own will is not strong enough to escape evil. . . . For this reason, accounts of conversion do not stress repentance of sins but deliverance from evil (Loret Mariz 1998, 205, 219).
In the eyes of its charismatic Christian leadership, the most successful graduates are those who learn to inhabit the dimension of spirits that discretely directs the events around them. In this dimension, 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.
Ethnographers of spirit possession in a wide range of contexts have analyzed it as a mode of resistance to hierarchies of power; Alexander’s (1991) study of African American Pentecostal spirit possession identified it as ritualized social protest. In his analysis, the speaking in tongues and unpredictable body movements of possession contradict middle-class European American behavioral norms, simultaneously rejecting dominant definitions of the worshippers’ social status as inferior and affirming their sense of personal worth through union with the Holy Ghost. Janice Boddy (1989), in her study of trance possession among women in a gender-stratified Muslim Sudanese society, found that possession allowed them to speak in the voice of powerful men. Aiwa Ong (1987), in her classic study of young women factory workers in Malaysia, highlighted the ways that their spirit possession disrupted factory