knowledge-based cultural capital, as forms of symbolic capital that are to some degree interchangeable with economic capital, and which enable the reproduction of social hierarchies from one generation to the next. Although Bourdieu’s formulations of capital focus on the strategies of the upper strata to maintain its position, I examine an alternative capital located in moral economies of the poor seeking to change their position. Critics of Bourdieu’s social capital theory question his assumption that the poor lack social capital (Lopez and Stack 2002). They broaden Bourdieu’s formulation of social capital by including non-mainstream social networks—such as those of churches—arguing that these alternative social assets and strategies are key for black and Latino communities because “the social capital that works through states and markets is not race-neutral” (Lopez and Stack 2002, 11).
Anthropologist Elizabeth Brusco (1995), writing of evangelical converts in Colombia, cites the “reformation of machismo” by their clean-living doctrine, which curbs male spending on alcohol, gambling, and extramarital affairs as a source of their upward mobility. Sociologist David Martin builds on this idea of alternate sources of capital to explain why Pentecostalism has won over so many converts from Catholicism in Latin America, writing that “Analysts of the post-modern city have referred without much exaggeration to the ‘impacted ghettoes’ and ‘ungovernable spaces’ of megacities. . . . This is where the domestic order and cleanliness of the Protestant, the secure family, and the church support systems create social capital out of nothing” (Martin 2002) (fig. 3 and fig. 4).
FIGURE 3. Evangelist with bullhorn in Ponce’s Town Square. Photo by Helena Hansen.
FIGURE 4. Billboard near Ponce: “I don’t question your existence.—God.” Photo by Helena Hansen.
Street ministries are self-help organizations in which ex-addicted sufferers become experts in their own healing. As ministry members progress, they gain authority and spiritual power, propagating themselves through a pyramid scheme of sequential recruitment and leadership. This contrasts with patients in biomedicine, who progress by submitting themselves more fully to the authority of medical professionals, becoming “compliant” or “adherent” patients. Across the Americas, a growing number of evangelical ministries are running residential drug-rehabilitation centers and gang recovery programs that address addiction (Flores 2013, Brenneman 2011).
The distinguishing feature of these ministries is their attempt to rework relationships. Converts are told to call on the Holy Spirit for spiritual strength to suffer through withdrawal and cravings, sleeping on bare floors, and feeding themselves on sparse donations from local stores. They are told to look to fellow worshipers for new “families in Christ” when their families of origin have rejected them, and to seek help from community congregations in order to live “por fe” or by faith alone—relying on donations and the ministries’ micro-industries (such as selling bottled water or chocolates on street corners). Although street ministries do not directly challenge the political systems and economic inequalities that produce narcotraffic, there are elements of the Pentecostalism of street ministries that serve as cultural critique. Ministries reject mass consumption and personal accumulation as a way to transcend the entrapments of popular culture.
Studies of Pentecostal rehabilitation in other parts of Latin America point to the influence of middle class white U.S. congregations and their neoliberal politics (O’Neill 2015), but many Puerto Rican street ministers see themselves as outside of worldly politics. Their discourse is otherworldly; converts renounce their bodily concerns to cultivate a connection to a dimension of spirits that gives them discernment—a way of perceiving and navigating the motivations and temptations of those around them. The less they rely on material comforts, the stronger their connection to spirits, the more elevated their consciousness and the more rewarding their emotional and sensory experience, as they become “addicted to Christ.”
This image of transferred addiction adapts a broader motif of rupture in Charismatic Christianity. Pentecostals urge adherents to break completely with the mundane, and to pursue salvation through contact with the Holy Spirit, marking a “split between the transcendental and the mundane [that] is thus as extreme in Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity as it is in any other form of Christianity or in any other world religion” (Robbins 2009, 62). This split contrasts with other religions, many of which “are not structured around a radical distinction between the transcendental and the mundane” (Robbins 2009, 59). Thomas Csordas builds on this idea of rupture when asking about the broader social significance of the global Charismatic Renewal; “whether we are witnessing an era of re-sacralization or re-enchantment” (Csordas 2009, 91). In using the term “re-enchantment,” he alludes to Max Weber’s classic work on the Protestant work ethic as the cultural foundation for a modern secular capitalism. Weber points to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination as producing a psychological need of followers to appear successful as a result of their material labor to signal that they were saved (although perversely hard work and success were no guarantee of having been predestined for salvation). This compulsion to labor and produce good works carried forward in the industrial era and shed its Calvinist roots in contemporary, bureaucratic forms of life that are “disenchanted” in their reduction of human activity to a calculus of maximization (Weber 1958). Csordas argues that the popularity of Charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity can be explained, in part, by the ways that Charismatic worship is “imbued with an aura of enchantment;” by a sense of alterity that is heightened through practices such as speaking in tongues, and by the “sensuous immediacy” of revelatory visions and spirit possession (Csordas 2009). Tanya Luhrmann further illuminates this dynamic in her description of middle-class American evangelicals who walk and “talk with God,” who see their worship as a way to cultivate a personal relationship with God, a relationship that infuses the everyday with the mystical (Luhrmann 2012, Luhrmann 2004). The worshipers in her study therefore describe their enchantment as relational.
Despite the received wisdom that charismatic Christianity is centered on personal, inward transformation, rupture and re-enchantment are social processes. As Courtney Handman points out, Protestant missions have been associated with a “modernist refusal of sociality” with the ethos of individualism and private property of John Locke’s social contract. Yet, ethnographies of charismatic Christianity reveal a rich social matrix of worshippers attempting to enact authentic Christianity with and against each other (Handman 2015). Thomas Csordas’ (1994) classic ethnography of charismatic faith healing describes healers’ manipulations of memory and sensory phenomena to craft a “sacred self.” Although the goal is to transform selves, transformation requires carefully choreographed communication between supplicants and healers. The charisma, or gifts, of participants in these rituals are manifest due to the skills of healers and the concerted participation of other converts. Thus, the rupture and re-enchantment of Charismatic Christians are produced by collective practices (see also Comaroff 1985). But how complete is this rupture? Who ultimately benefits, and how?
This book examines the ways ex-addicted Pentecostals work toward rupture. One strategy for rupture is the performance of alternative masculinities. Having lost credibility with their families in the course of their addiction, converted men present themselves to their parents and spouses as spiritual heads of home. They draw on images of Christ to convert mainstream masculinity into an evangelical manhood that is based on domesticity, emotional responsiveness, self-sacrifice, and spiritual knowledge. This contrasts with the rise and fall of one of the only street ministries in Puerto Rico to cater to women. In their bid to cultivate the respectability and upward mobility of its male recruits, the ministries adopt a middle-class, patriarchal model of the family, over the working-class, female-headed extended families from which most of its membership comes, ultimately limiting the possibilities for women in the ministries.
I
