Addicted to Christ

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Helena Hansen. Addicted to Christ

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Addicted to Christ

Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries

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The Book of Acts mentions faith healing as a gift bequeathed to early Christians during the Pentecost, along with speaking in tongues and prophecy, so faith healing—including prayer and laying hands on the ill with the expectation of their recovery—is widely practiced in Pentecostal ministries. Yet, I never heard street ministers speak of healing addiction. They measure their success not by the number of converts who return to their lives as they were before substance use, but by the number who devote their lives to the ministry, who live on the ministry grounds, who complete missions to other parts of the island or to other countries, and eventually open new ministry homes. Unlike Twelve-Step programs, whose twelve traditions forbid them to own property in the name of the organization, street ministries own, rent, or squat on properties that are full-time residences. In street ministries, conversion means gaining a new address, a new vocation, and a new identity.

Despite my biomedical training and my religious agnosticism, my own concept of addiction resonated with that of street ministers in unexpected ways. Where street ministers rallied to locate spirits, I saw a movement of people striving to relocate themselves. Where ministries made addicts into prophets, I saw social technologies of transformation. With the ministers, I wondered if the disease concept of addiction constrained the possibility of recovery. This paradox is highlighted by studies finding that defining addiction as a disease, rather than de-stigmatizing addiction as intended, can increase stigma against addicted people because the concept of disease casts them as irreversibly flawed (Pescosolido et al. 2010, Link and Phelan 2010).

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