Addicted to Christ. Helena Hansen
(Whitehead 1987: 25).
To achieve this altered state, 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.
Themes of rupture and the discontinuity of the Spirit from the worldly or profane predominate in Pentecostal discourse internationally (Robbins 2004), ruptures that alter the social coordinates of converts. Pastor Mendoza of New Faith Academy, who had served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, put it to me this way:
When you accept Christ, you see things differently. Your priorities change . . . if you know [about God] but haven’t experienced Him, you are not saved. It is an experience. . . . I didn’t understand what happened when I converted. I [went through it] first and explained later. Suddenly I read the Bible. I saw my wife and children differently. I didn’t see myself as Puerto Rican. I didn’t see Vietnam. I didn’t see racism.
I understood him to be pointing out that death of his old, carnal self on conversion also meant the end of his subordination, as a Puerto Rican on the U.S. mainland, and as a veteran of an unpopular war. His new self was sacred, above the reach of human oppressions. In Juan’s words, “God is a pottery maker, molding me.” In the words of Samaria, a former heroin user at Victory Academy, “God breaks you up and puts you back together again the way He wants you.”
The pastor’s reference to losing his perception of himself as Puerto Rican also alludes to what Arlene Sanchez-Walsh (2003) has described as a current within Latino Pentecostal movements to reject ethnic solidarity in favor of an idealized global, Pan-Pentecostal community membership. This re-imagining of community as expansive and inclusive is appealing to Latinos who have experienced ethnic and racial marginalization in the United States, and perhaps even more so to ex-addicted converts who struggle with rejection from their own families and neighbors.
Converts speak of this re-imagined Christian self as timeless, as unmarked by ethnicity or class. Among Puerto Ricans, this re-imagining contrasts with struggles over identity politics that contend with anti-Latino, nativist sentiments on the U.S. mainland, and with Puerto Rico’s liminal status as a U.S. territory without statehood or U.S. voting rights, in the midst of economic crisis and pervasive drug trade. Pentecostals across Latin America espouse total liberation, beginning with inner transformation, collectively creating small oases of healing in this world, and preparing for the Kingdom of God (Westmeier 1999). They call for separation from the world, for living a holy life as a critique of society.
Here the word “critique” might capture the moral righteousness of Pentecostal asceticism, but it misses the Pentecostal ethos of exhilaration, fascination, and engagement with the spirit realm that some describe as enchantment. Contemporary Pentecostalism seems to contradict Max Weber’s classical thesis that the Calvinist-derived Protestant Ethic would be carried to its secular logical extreme in modernizing society, to a hyper-rationalized, bureaucratized, and disenchanted “iron cage.” (Weber 1958). Juan, Octavio, and Pastor Mendoza’s narrative of addiction and salvation is full of enchantments, beginning with enchantment by narcotics and their illusion of human self-control, ending with recognition of that illusion, and a new perception of the spirits that guide human events.
2
On Discipline and Becoming a Disciple
A WORK DAY
Dawn cast pink hues on the mountain as I pulled my mud-spattered station wagon past roaming chickens and empty fruit stands on the road to Victory Academy. I parked, hoping that the men of the ministry did not clean my car while I attended Bible study, as they had the week before. This morning I already was embarrassed by arriving half an hour late, knowing how much Academy leaders valued punctuality.
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