knows everything. I came back to my mother’s house. When she learned I used crack she was so hurt. My clothes on the porch—“You have to go.” I said I don’t have no place to go. [I] dismantled the car of a friend. When I came home the police were waiting. The friend knew it was me and called the police. That night I wanted to die. One month in jail. My sister said “You’re leaving here but going to this place [Restoration House].” When I left [Restoration House] I was very blessed—I studied at the University, worked. I went to church, I had rose-colored glasses. Didn’t know that [people in the church] have defects too. On that test I got an “F.” I left church and went 6 months without drugs, then used drugs 2 months and came back here. God didn’t leave me alone.
I asked, “What happened when you turned away from the church?”
When I left here [for the first time] I practiced everything I learned here. But I believed everyone was good people. I met a girl, but I didn’t talk with her. One day I say God that’s the woman you have in mind for me? The preacher said [during culto] “I don’t know why I say this, but she’s not the one.” He said it 3 times [while preaching], “No.” One day she said she’s in love with me. I said how you in love with me, I don’t talk to you. She said “Because I see in inside you—have a beautiful heart.” She said let’s pray. I forgot that God had told me “No” before. Then her mother, her friends rejected me. I didn’t understand people [who had been] in church 30 years acting like that. She is still a woman of God. The problem was obedience. When you meet God, have to do what He say.
I wanted clarification: “You stopped going to church because they rejected you?”
Satan is intelligent too. When I was praying he said look how they treat you. I felt hurt. Satan used a person, a good person, not drugs. I changed churches, but I felt bad there too, because I have to pass a test when I get it.
Concerned that I was dredging up painful memories, I said, “I imagine it feels bad to look back.”
No—to the contrary. I learn from that. It’s like taking a test about life. You know you’ll have to pass a bigger one on the same theme later [drawing a staircase in my notebook], and again, an even bigger test. . . . When we pass any test we’re closer to God. . . . God is a pottery maker, molding me.
Juan made hand motions of spinning a pottery wheel. He pointed to the fog surrounding the mountains. “Look how beautiful the mist, the water. Everybody needs it.”
The tape recorder stopped because the cassette was full. Juan nodded knowingly. “See, God knows when story is stopped.”
I came to see, though conversations with many converts, that tests were a continuous part of Christian practice. The tests were not only of Juan’s resolve to follow God’s commands, but also of his ability to reinterpret the world around him in a manner pleasing to God. They tested the acuity of his spiritual eyes and ears; that is, knowing to whom he should listen, whether they were acting as God’s agents or Satan’s agents, and when to see events as signs from God. Listening and interpretation were abilities cultivated in prayer, meditation, and Bible study.
To prepare for God’s tests, Juan undertook small, everyday acts of faith. They developed his ability to discern God’s will and to maintain a transcendent perspective, abilities that over time, he hoped, would free him from earthly desires.
CHOICE AND POWER
The tension between obedience, choice, and freedom implied by Juan’s tests is common to both Pentecostalism and other Protestant-derived North American approaches to addiction such as Alcoholics Anonymous. As Valverde (1998) points out, they define freedom not as absence of external control but rather as the presence of internal controls; internal controls that are built by the exercise of willpower in small, everyday practices that (re)form habits. They are rooted in an ideal of ascetic self-sacrifice; as Margaret Mead said that she learned in childhood, “virtue was distinguished by pain followed by pleasure, vice was pleasure followed by pain” (Mead 1973: 178). They reflect an ambivalent Protestant view of willpower which tries to reconcile the tension between the Calvinist doctrine of human frailty, and the liberal belief in every individual’s limitless capacity to empower him or herself (Valverde 1998: 34).
Pentecostal concepts of addiction center on power: addiction as due to the unconverted individual’s vulnerability to malignant spiritual forces. Addicted people can align themselves with a more powerful force, through fusion with the Holy Spirit, in which the frail, human subject channels tremendous transcendental power. Individuals must continuously renew this fusion in order to rise above the toxic influences to which they are exposed.
This is a concept of addiction that acknowledges its social nature. It problematizes everyday social relations that trap individuals into cycles of consumption and debt or withdrawal, and it calls for a social realignment to transcend them. The realignment 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
