Addicted to Christ
Addicted to Christ
Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries
Helena Hansen
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
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University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2018 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hansen, Helena, 1969- author.
Title: Addicted to Christ : remaking men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal ministries / Helena Hansen.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017045427 (print) | LCCN 2017050267 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520970168 () | ISBN 9780520298033 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520298040 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Recovery movement—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Recovery movement—Puerto Rico. | Masculinity—Religious aspects—Pentacostal churches. | Masculinity—Puerto Rico. | Substance abuse—Religious aspects—Pentacostal churches.
Classification: LCC BT732.45 (ebook) | LCC BT732.45 .H36 2018 (print) | DDC 289.9/40811097295—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045427
ClassifNumber PubDate
DeweyNumber′—dc23 CatalogNumber
Manufactured in the United States of America
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Mark, Kirin, and Ananda, coauthors of this tale
Contents
2.On Discipline and Becoming a Disciple
3.Visitations and Gifts
4.The New Masculinity
5.Spiritual Mothers
6.Family Values
7.Bringing It Home
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
Between a Clinical and an Ethnographic Gaze
In the early 1990s I worked for the National AIDS Fund on assignment in the poorest city neighborhoods in New Jersey. My job was to walk street after street of public tenements and condemned buildings that sheltered people who were injecting heroin or smoking cocaine, looking for those living with HIV who could design peer interventions.
I found Leila recruiting for her storefront ministry in Newark. Before her Pentecostal conversion, she earned money for heroin through sex work and was infected with HIV. She also gave birth to ten children and had custody of her youngest child, a six-year-old boy with AIDS. In between clinic visits for her son, she ran her ministry’s residential drug program and preached on corners where there was heavy drug traffic. Through Leila I met her pastor and his wife, ex-addicted migrants from Puerto Rico who had converted to Pentecostalism at Victory Outreach Ministries and then opened a drug program of their own.
The program was something that Leila, her pastor, and his wife had created from the institutional models they knew—storefront churches. In a city with the nation’s highest HIV infection rates among women and children, within a state that served as world headquarters for many pharmaceutical and health insurance companies and that had the country’s wealthiest suburbs and poorest cities, there was little public investment in HIV prevention or addiction treatment. Leila worked sleeplessly to save the souls and lives around her.
After meeting Leila, I began to notice Pentecostal ministries in the low-income Latino and Black neighborhoods of every American inner city that I visited, including San Antonio, New York, Providence, Worchester, Chicago, Oakland, Hartford, and New Haven. Ex-addicts in these ministries held evangelist rallies in front of crack houses and shooting galleries,1 performed youth theater in urban schools, and ran outreach programs in the prisons (Leland 2004). I asked myself if addiction ministries were a form of working-class, grassroots health activism.
My fascination with grassroots health activism led me to study medicine and anthropology in an MD-PhD program. In the early years of the HIV epidemic, anthropologists entered shooting galleries and crack houses to observe the social hierarchies of drugs and sex that fueled HIV transmission (Ratner 1992, Epele 2002) and the ways in which interlocking “syndemics” of substance abuse, violence, and HIV (Singer 1996) were killing an entire generation. I reasoned that if clinical medicine would take field research on the social causes of disease to the bedside—just as it takes research on the molecular causes of disease from the laboratory bench to the bedside—it could have an impact on health outcomes.
Five years later I was a medical student in an urban Connecticut hospital, admitting a nearly unconscious homeless man for abdominal pain. He had injected drugs for years and the staff called him a frequent flyer: a regular in the emergency room. His legs buckled under him, his belly poked through the folds of his hospital gown. After an ultrasound and an enema, his colon released twenty pounds of feces. As he cleared fecal toxins from his bloodstream he became more alert. The hospital staff could not have been less pleased. He demanded morphine for his pain, and when he did not get it, he grabbed a syringe and needle from his nurse and threatened to stick her with his HIV-positive blood.
The
