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The Cosmology of Conversion
Pentecostal knowledge is experiential. It is based on a sensory theology, a theology of emotional and tactile encounter—some call it possession—that is all-encompassing. The encounter heightens awareness of the motives of others, and of one’s own interior state. Street ministers describe the encounter as intimate contact with the Holy Spirit, marked by the sensation of being filled or embraced. They use the encounter to retrain desire, by giving personal testimony, by reinterpreting sensory experiences as signals from an occult spiritual realm, and by reframing setbacks as spiritual tests. The ultimate goal of the encounter is to achieve a complete break with pre-conversion ways of seeing the world, and to re-people the world with enchanted experiences, beings, and passions. Christian knowledge, then, only is gained through radical rupture with everyday perception.
This concept of knowledge presented me, a non-Pentecostal, with a dilemma of understanding. As Pentecostals are fond of saying, to know it, you have to live it. I could have dismissed their point as a ploy to convert me, but I sensed that it was also correct. The core of what sustained them and shaped their view of the world was not available through books, charts, or scientific instruments; not in the way that I’d acquired biomedical knowledge. To appreciate Pentecostal knowledge, I had to travel new ground.
• • •
The road to Restoration House is lined by wild grasses and mango trees, crossed by chickens and thin, balding dogs. The route passes old Spanish colonials of the town plaza—their boarded windows covered with graffiti, rows of tin shacks with peeling paint—over bridges, through fallow fields, and past shirtless men sipping beers in the heat on the porch. After a half mile on a dirt road up a mountain, I came upon a tall white gate attached to a twelve-foot iron fence. A young man sat in the guard’s booth. He greeted me with “Te bendiga” (“God bless you”). I explained that I was there to see the director, and the gates slowly drew open.
Inside the gate, trimmed hedges, planted flowers, and rocks painted with biblical quotations contrasted with the wild grasses outside. The asphalt driveway from the gate implored those exiting the program in white and blue paint: “Detente, Piensa: Cristo te Ama” (“Stop, Think: Christ Loves You”) (fig. 5). The muraled stucco buildings encircling the grounds read “Cafetería,” (Cafeteria), “Capilla” (Chapel), “Barbería la Fe” (Faith Barbershop) (fig. 6), “Biblioteca” (Library), “Dispensario” (Dispensary). The quiet of midday siesta penetrated the banana grove and the basketball court (fig. 7), as well as the dormitories, each named for a book of the Bible, including “Corintios” (Corinthians) and “Romanos” (Romans). I noted how much the Christian programs resembled each other physically: on a mountain, with carefully groomed grounds and open space for games and gardens. The grit of condemned buildings and abandoned cars in the urban neighborhoods from which converts came was washed away in this bucolic rendition of a home for addicts. No more than five miles from the town center, the small compound nonetheless evoked the pilgrimage of prophets into the wilderness, its elevation conjured Moses on the mountain. The gates might have referenced New Jerusalem had the twelve-foot iron fence that enclosed it not been topped with barbed wire, as much to keep residents in as unwanted visitors out.
FIGURE 5. Gate to exit Restoration House. The sign reads, “Stop, think: Christ loves you.” Photo by Helena Hansen.
FIGURE 6. Faith Barber Shop at Restoration House. Photo by Helena Hansen.
FIGURE 7. The basketball court at Restoration House. Photo by Helena Hansen.
The guard led me through a glass door to Director Menocal’s desk. Stocky and gray-haired, Menocal was flanked by plaques from the city recognizing his service to the community, and from a seminary in San Juan for his scholarly achievements. His curriculum, he explained, involved three basic steps: Detoxification in the dormitories for six months, recuperation while living on program grounds for up to twelve months, and spiritual growth in the community after that. As residents reached the recuperation stage they got weekend passes to leave the compound. They attended culto, or religious services, Bible classes, and were assigned tasks such as cleaning or cooking. They also learned potential occupations such as frame making, lamination, and barbering.
In the last phase, that of spiritual growth, some took university courses or got married to the women with whom they’d been living before treatment. Menocal pointed to wedding photos of program graduates on his desk. Success, he told me, is that the residents work, attend school, have a family and children, and that they are a Christian presence in their community.
Twenty-eight years prior, Menocal himself was a heroin user, living on the streets of San Juan. He went to prison and was rehabilitated in Silo, one of the original evangelical addiction treatment programs in Puerto Rico. He found the Lord there, and his calling in life; he graduated from seminary in Bayamón, then came to the South side of the island to found Restoration House with the help of local Pentecostal and Baptist churches, as well as a grant from the mayor. He was now a professional administrator, and some on his staff had state certification in counseling, social work, and nursing. For him, though, it was significant that he had been addicted.
There are so many churches in the South of Puerto Rico, but few rehabilitation programs. It’s hard work. You have to have had the experience (of addiction) and feel it in your heart.1
Menocal pulled over a staff member, Juan, a round man with a round face and a closely cut greying afro. “This one is a university student,” Menocal said with a grin. “You have a lot in common.” Juan led me across the compound to a room with plastic flowers framing the doorway and a metal desk in the center. The moist air weighed down on us.
He launched into testimonio (testimony) with no further prompting: this was his third time at Restoration House. The first time he came from jail. His mother was Catholic, and the Catholics let you smoke and drink, they don’t teach that God is against that. Then he heard who Jesus was. Holding up a cup, Juan explained “I was like an empty glass. If you want to change, you have to do it inside,” pointing inside the cup. “When I came, I cried for three days, I didn’t know why. I heard ‘Who wants Jesus? He’ll change your life.’ I said ‘Me!’ ”
Juan saw the events of his conversion as auspicious.
Why three days the first time? Because Jesus rose in three days! . . . I was in the program three days, closed my eyes, woke up on the floor. I wanted [Jesus] from the bottom of my heart. I wanted to talk with God. I read the Bible two times in three years. I learn so much.
Juan explained that what he and the other men who come to the program need is love. When he converted, he asked for God’s love, but did not know he had it until he physically felt God’s presence: “One day I asked Him to raise me. [He] took me by hand and (lifted) me, like a drug, then I said God is real.”
God began to use Juan, to grant him powers to see and talk with spirits. When he first came to the program, someone was selling drugs inside the program. He prayed in a chain with a group of men through the night, each man taking a one-hour shift to lead prayer. With his eyes closed, he saw demons inside the program’s walls. Channeling the Holy Spirit, he called them out and exorcised them.
Since then, Juan had been working with new recruits who were en frio (quitting “cold turkey”), and suffering through withdrawal with chills, aching bone pain, and insomnia. He saw how God was using him with them; when he laid his hand on their foreheads their withdrawal symptoms disappeared.
The first time he graduated from the program, Juan initially did well. “I went home, went to church every day. [I said] ‘God, I want to study.’ ” God answered this prayer, and Juan enrolled in the Inter-American University. “I had [high grades] in the University, I had money. Why? Because I was praying every day. If not I’d lose everything.”
Juan continued to guide others as he had in Restoration House: “I worked as a tutor for the handicapped. I liked it so much. I had to explain the sky and constellations to a ciega (blind person) using a pen.”
He pointed to ridges on a pen, to indicate spatial relationships: “Here is to here as there is to there.” Those times still inspired Juan. “I want to be a missionary, go to Africa, help the people. I can do that through the Pentecostal church.”
Despite the possibilities he saw for himself in the church, however, after graduating from the first time Juan still struggled with temptation and disillusionment.
“When I had a relapse it was like God had one hand and [the Devil] the other. ‘He’s mine—no he’s mine.’ I felt like that.”
Back to using cocaine after accepting Christ, Juan’s faith was tested like never before.
“Jesus says ‘It’s much better not to know me than to know me and leave me.’ In my church, they tell me pray, pray. They knew I was relapsing.”
After a few months of crack use, Juan came back to Restoration House and begged for re-admission. “God is never late.”
Juan found Restoration House to be a quiet place where the voice of God could be heard.
I like to pray at 4 a.m. You’ll have a wonderful day if you pray at 4 a.m. God says, “they’ll find me when they wake up early in the morning.” When you feel the bed shaking, it’s God. He’s waking you to pray.
Surviving the spiritual war that tested Juan required him to sharpen new senses.
God gave you spiritual eyes and ears . . . [you] have to know Satan [was once] an angel. To know the difference, who is lying. If you want to do this work you have to know when a person wants to change.
I left Restoration House that day knowing that Juan would be an important guide. He was connected to a spiritual dimension not visible to outsiders leading secular, everyday lives. For fleeting moments, he was possessed by the Holy Spirit, and the memory of those moments kept him seeking more, moving him from a singular focus on drugs to a singular focus on the Spirit. Juan had offered me an astronomy lesson; I was to be his ciega (“blind person”), to whom he would describe the constellations using ridges on a pen.
SPIRITUAL EYES AND EARS
One night, after two months of attending evening culto, the worship service, at Restoration House, I found myself listening to testimony after a round of “You Are Sacred,” a salsa-inspired hymn—complete with conga drums and timbales. The chapel pulsated with men’s voices and percussion on drums, cowbells, and hands slapping the backs of metal folding chairs. Bright light spilled out into heavy night air, blanketed by nothing but the calls of tree frogs and crickets for miles. The music ended, and the men leafed restlessly through their Bibles. They looked over their shoulders for signs of the usual Wednesday night preacher, a graduate of Restoration House who was now a pastor in Guayama several miles away.
While they waited for the preacher, a program leader introduced the young man who was to give testimony to relapse as part of recuperation. The young man began with a shy smile, joking about Menocal’s discipline. After three months at Restoration House, because he used drugs again, he was held for eighteen days alone in a room. He praised the Lord for waking him up during those eighteen days of isolation.
Juan plopped down next to me. His face was grey and drawn; he had been up around the clock with a new recruit who was “rompiendo en frio” (“going cold turkey”). As the pastor’s car pulled up to the chapel, Juan explained that the young man giving testimony was sent by the drug court, and that if he had one more relapse he would spend twenty years in prison.
The pastor from Guayama entered, flanked by guests from his church. A trim, middle-aged man professionally dressed in wire-frame glasses, a pressed white shirt, and a bright yellow tie setting off his dark skin, he called on guests from his church to speak. A man in his thirties in shirt and tie gave his personal testimony. He had grown up in the church, but when he married he wanted to know the world and he forgot the church. It was the Devil saying the world is better. He began to drink a little, and then more, eventually he lost his job and his wife moved to the United States with their three children. He was watching a Christian program on TV one day and felt tear tracks on his face.
I knew the message was for me. God was saying “I still love you.” I went to the U.S. to find my wife and kids. ¡Gloria a Dios! [“Glory to God!”] I returned with them to Puerto Rico and my old job took me back. [But then] I found a blank check at work, I signed it and cashed it. . . . I went to prison, and my father signed away his house to bail me out. On the street corner, someone said “There is an answer for your problem.” [Making motion of man handing him a pamphlet]. I reconciled with El Señor (the Lord), and he cleaned my legal record of all my cases!
Fidgeting in his seat, Juan whispered an offer to show me the grounds. We exited onto a grove of banana trees. “Have you ever seen this?” Juan asked. He moved the petals of a fist-sized purple blossom to uncover miniature green bananas inside.
We continued on a dirt path behind the chapel, passing a hardwood tree. The tree was missing most of its leaves, and shadow covered its cracked bark. Suddenly, a chill took me over. I stood on the path, speechless; I had a visceral urge to avoid the tree. Juan broke the silence in a harsh tone.
See this tree? So dry. This is an ugly tree. The other tree next to it, it gets the same water, when it rains both of them get rain, and it looks beautiful. Why this one look like that? I’m gonna tell you a story. When I first got here I was passing this tree late at night with two people and all of a sudden I felt like God was hugging me and pulling me down. I fell on the floor. The guy ahead of me called for help. As he was helping me up we both saw demons in the tree. He started to pray, to pray. He said “God casts you out of here!” I used to be scared of things like that, but now I’m not. I know God protects me . . . when you look at this tree, what do you see?
I looked up and hesitated. “I feel cold,” I said. “And I don’t know if I should mention this, but when we first walked up that vine looked like a noose.”
“What’s a noose?” Juan asked.
“A rope to hang someone.” I answered. Juan shook his head and told me there was a lot I could not see because I was at a different spiritual level.
We walked past the laundry building and the basketball court where Juan said he often slept in order to see the stars. I looked up and caught sight of Orion and the Big Dipper.
I love it! I pray, I hear God. I think about the people on the streets that night, nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep. I say, please God, help the people, give them something to eat. I know he hears me.
We looked to the detoxification room adjacent to the court, where four men lay motionless on cots. Christian rock music piped in at high volume. Juan told me he had to bolt the speakers to the wall. “They don’t know what they’re doing when they’re in detox,” he said. “They just tear out the speakers.”
As we walked back to the chapel, culto was letting out, and two men ran up to us: “Juan, Juan, they’re calling you!” Juan entered the chapel and talked with the pastor and two assistants while I stayed outside. Though I couldn’t see into the chapel, I heard the ebb and flow of loud group prayer for several minutes.
Suddenly Juan ran out of the chapel door with tear stains on his cheeks, his eyes round and bright. “I don’t know how to explain to you what just happened. I had something in my heart that God didn’t like, and he just took it out! I feel light as a—what you call what you see on birds?” He made a hand motion imitating a feather floating to the ground. Juan then explained further.
That man that came with the pastor, that preached, I never seen him before. Last night he had a dream about me, he knew my name. In the dream I came to his house, I asked him for clothes, for shelter, to feed me. He gave me these things but I ran away. He said that meant I had something in my heart God didn’t like. When they prayed for me [just now in the chapel] I felt this heat all through my body, it went up to my head, I felt like it would explode! But when I woke up I felt great. I had had a headache all night long and it was gone. ¡Gloria a Dios!
I told him how glad I was that God helped him, because I’d noticed that he was not as happy as usual. He interrupted me, pointing to the sky behind me, “See that? There, again!” He was seeing flashes of light from his guardian angel.
Juan had been sullen that week. The pastor and guest preacher must have sensed his need for renewal. In Juan’s words, it was the Holy Spirit working through them, reminding Juan of his privileged relationship with the Spirit.
Juan looked at me standing next to my car and said:
Okay, go home, because otherwise you’ll be here all night. But you’ll be safe. It will be as if the car was driving itself, and you’ll end up right at home without knowing how you got there. And don’t worry, your family will be safe, God has you all in his hands.
I seated myself in my station wagon and indeed, floated around the pitch-black bends of the roads leading to my house. Putting a cassette of Christian music that Juan had given me into the tape deck, I exhaled into my seat, and tried to hear the beauty that Juan found in the music. What was my spiritual ear and eye, and how did I know when I was using them? Was it as simple as noticing a banana blossom or catching a view of Orion and the Big Dipper? I knew that Juan would answer, “No.”
He would point me toward the two trees we saw behind the chapel, to the forces that kept one tree green and thriving, and the other dried and cracked on the brink of death, despite that to my eyes they shared the same soil and water. He would remind me of the gray-shirted man who gave testimony that night, to whom God spoke through the television, and of the young man who gave testimony that he was shaken from his spiritual slumber while in solitary confinement, from the brink of a twenty-year prison term. He would cite the new recruits that he had shown me in the withdrawal room, whose heads were so full of malignant craving that they tore the speakers from their wall-mounts to silence the word of Christ.
IMMERSION
Evangelists had been a welcome sight in the decaying neighborhoods where I worked on HIV projects just after college. Evangelists exuded privileged knowledge, and their gaze was fixed above the decay, on an alternate reality. But I did not get to learn more about them until I was in my last year of medical school. With referrals from street ministries in Newark and Hartford to their branches on the island, I left for Puerto Rico—the epicenter of Pentecostal street ministries—for what stretched into a year, and then two additional years of follow-up visits.
From the beginning, I faced a methodological dilemma. Street ministries were gender segregated and the majority were for men. As a married woman with an infant, I could not live at a facility long term to get an intimate view of their cultural logics and practices. Reasoning that I needed to survey local ministries before taking root in one for participant observation, I rented a unit in the shadow of the Ponce cement factory with my husband and one-year-old daughter, next to a friend who worked for the Puerto Rican mental health worker’s union. Ponce was a center of both drug trade and addiction ministries, and the cement factory was a reminder of Ponce’s thriving industrial past, just one mile north of the abandoned Schering-Plough pharmaceutical plant that had anchored its once thriving manufacturing industry.
I enrolled my daughter in the local daycare, bought an aging Ford Escort, and (between its breakdowns) drove to every street ministry in Southwest Puerto Rico—from Añasco to Ponce—that I could identify by asking health administrators, addiction programs, and the programs’ clients for referrals.
In the end, I visited thirteen ministries and interviewed their directors about their history, structure, treatment philosophy, curriculum, and clientele. The directors of Restoration House and Victory Academy2 were especially welcoming and invited me to participate with, observe, and interview their residents for the year. The two ministries provided contrasts: one accepted government funds and hired state-licensed professionals; the other more radically evangelical ministry did not. These represented two poles of evangelical addiction treatment: one radically evangelical, which rejected the pre-conversion world in favor of a lifelong mission, the other a hybrid of clinical and evangelical techniques designed to produce Christian citizens that could re-enter everyday Puerto Rican society.
Neither program referred to its residents as “clients” or “patients.” As the pastor’s wife at Victory Academy explained it, “We don’t call them clients, because that implies they’re paying for something. Here we say brother, or sister, because we are like a family, or students, because it is an Academy.” Long-term residents got the titles of program leaders or co-directors. Program directors did not see addiction as the primary reason that residents needed help. Instead they saw addiction as a symptom of moral weakness. At times, people who had never used drugs came to the ministry; one woman asked to live at Victory Academy to pray about the fact that her husband physically abused her, and another was there to earn custody of children that were in foster care because of alleged neglect.
In this atmosphere of open admission, the program leadership accepted that I was studying evangelism as a treatment for addiction, but told me that God led me to them, whether I knew it or not. They called me the student or, jesting about my broken Spanish, la Gringa (“the North American”). They were convinced that my writing would help the Holy Spirit to reach readers on the mainland. I was invited to baptisms, weddings, and family homes. I took my daughter with me. With their pro-natalist ethos, my daughter’s presence made me easier to place. Coincidentally, or not, family relations emerged as central themes in the stories they told about themselves.
I participated daily in culto (worship services), Bible study, training sessions for program leaders in discipleship, and the everyday life of the ministry. Helping to prepare meals in the kitchen and listening to conversation while cleaning the dormitories gave me a window onto the backstage performance (Goffman 1973) of ministry residents and staff. I was privy to gossip, conflict, and anxieties that people concerned about setting a Christian example did not make public. Taking part in the daily routine of ministry residents also taught me about the physical, embodied aspects of evangelism. Indoctrination was not only a matter of the spoken and written biblical Word, but was also a matter of upright posture, seating that was segregated by gender and seniority in the ministry, sleep deprivation, and emotional release while dancing to music at culto.
Ministry leaders reminded me that I could only truly understand Christian treatment for addiction by accepting Christ myself. And I was often mistaken for a convert: instead of the tight shorts and halter tops worn by unconverted young Puerto Rican women, I wore loose shirts that covered my shoulders, long skirts, and no makeup. On one occasion, Pagan, a former prison guard–turned–ministry program leader at Restoration House, stopped midsentence in our conversation to eye my ankle-length navy dress. “But you look so Christian!” he said plaintively. “Maybe you will find God this year.”
I also tended to pass for “nuyorican” (New York Puerto Rican); with my curly hair and brown complexion, I was called “trigueña” (“wheat colored”) in the rich Puerto Rican vocabulary for describing skin tone.3 It was easy for me and my informants to begin talking as if I were a convert. I reflexively greeted familiar faces with “Que le bendiga” (“May God bless you”), and carried a Bible. At times, I wondered if God was asking me to go native. I knew that, for Pentecostals, there could be no fence sitting, and there was no true knowledge external to faith. To keep his job, my husband spent much of his time on the mainland, so I often was with my daughter in the ministries, and it was there that I felt most connected and a part of a community. This immersion planted a seed of doubt in my agnostic worldview.
Although I was disturbed by this doubt, I also saw it as a source of insight.4 I, too, was affected by their evangelist techniques, and I felt the same need to belong that my informants did. I saw that the boundary between believer and non-believer was permeable, that crossing over and back again was common, and that conversion could be tenuous. Sermon after sermon in culto was about doubt, and the need for Christians to be vigilant of their faith. I suspected that the drama of conversion and evangelical performance reflected converts’ anxiety about this tenuousness.
COSAS OCULTAS (“THE OCCULT”)
A few weeks passed at Restoration House before Juan introduced me to Octavio. Like Juan, Octavio was a program leader. Dark half-moons under his eyes accentuated his pale face and bony frame. Octavio was in a constant state of prayer; he was said to have given up sleep to talk with God without interruption. I had noticed Octavio in the front of the pulpit during culto. With a dimpled smile, he chanted ¡Santo! ¡Santo! ¡Gloria a Dios! (“Holy! Holy! Glory to God!”) into the microphone and sang the opening lyrics to a salsa-inflected hymn. The congregation picked up the tune, and he kneeled to the far left of the altar and remained there, head down, for the duration of the two-hour culto.
Interviewing Octavio was no easy task. I had trouble maintaining the thread of our conversation. Octavio received messages from God every few minutes, and excused himself from our conversation to listen and answer out loud. A mysterious force also seemed to keep me from arriving for our interviews at the appointed time and place. This time I could not get my daughter down to sleep at the usual hour. By the time I arrived at Restoration House, culto had long since ended and Octavio was settled into evening prayer. His eyes were bloodshot. He and the other leaders had been praying around the clock on a difficult case.
The Bible says: “call on me; I will answer and show you grand and occult things that you have never known,” in that order. There is a young man here because of his behavior, strange behavior. It is [due to] more than a trauma. In the name of Jesus we will get it out. It’s something spiritual. Psychologists talk about multiple personalities, [but these spirits], in order to destroy, they have to be human, they enter the body. . . . The Bible talks about our struggle not being against blood, or flesh, but against spirits of evil in the celestial regions. We fight something that we can’t see.
He warned me that these forces were operating even as he and I spoke about them: “In the name of Jesus. . . . Maybe you’ll listen to this tape [that is recording the interview] and hear voices that aren’t human.”
Octavio told me that just as the Holy Spirit enter the body when called, demonic spirits can enter human bodies. The wounded heart is particularly vulnerable.
It is a mystery how a God so large can enter our hearts, [which are] so wounded, so small, having suffered . . . the young man last night, somewhere [in his past] there is a trauma. Something happened, someone abandoned him . . . science studies only what can be seen. We’re talking about something which can’t be seen.
The spirits also work externally, driving events in ways that appear coincidental. Talking about my daughter’s cries at bedtime, which had kept me from attending culto, Octavio was clear that more was at work than met the eye: “It was something occult.”
As I listened to him, I sensed intention in the winds. Was it Octavio’s scanning of the spaces behind me as we talked that was so contagious? Or was it his rhythmic incantation of the hidden? Was it the fact that he drew my story into his, weaving in my own struggles and superstitions?
I found myself taking the mystical realm seriously in my own life. Starting my car that night, I wondered if its stalling was a sign that I should stay at the ministry. Once it started, I thought the car’s quick acceleration was a sign that I needed to get home.5 I drove away from the scene, attempting to pass from Octavio’s world, crowded with spirits, back to the innocence of the mundane. But this was in vain. His narrative had altered mine.
Of all the men I met at Restoration House, Octavio was the one that lived most immersed in the dimension of spirits. He told me that God had cured him of the HIV and hepatitis that he’d gotten while injecting cocaine, and that he had not had any AIDS-related opportunistic infections since he accepted Christ. Octavio’s communion with the Holy Spirit was his lifeline, a type of existential intravenous drip. This communion gained him the respect of his colleagues in the church; as they said, “Octavio is a man of God. He knows the Bible very well.” They named him a medium. His communion with the Spirit sustained him in both the spiritual realm and in the everyday world.
Juan’s teachings on spiritual eyes and ears helped me to understand why ministry converts did not see Octavio as mentally ill, but instead celebrated him as a beacon of spiritual health. Had I met Octavio in a medical clinic, without an understanding of Pentecostal cosmology, I would have diagnosed him with a psychotic disorder or with HIV dementia based on his limited attention to my questions, and his communication with beings that others could not see or hear. In the ministry, his unending dialogue with spirits was a coveted state that required focused self-discipline and skill.
And it was Octavio and Juan’s testimony that allowed me to imagine, if not experience, the spiritual eyes and ears with which they perceived the occult realm and channeled spiritual power. Testimony was the narrative tool bridging the everyday world to the enchanted world of spiritual knowing that opened up to converts, a world in which hidden meaning was revealed, in which the apparent disorder of addicted pasts became part of a grander design, and which portended a victorious future. Juan and Octavio’s testimony inserted glimpses of the occult into my own perceptions; they gave me experiential clues to the world they inhabited. Their testimony worked on me in a less cognitive, in a more visceral, somatic way than that described by Susan Harding (2000). Her classic linguistic analysis of witness—the testimony of fundamentalist Christians to the power and reality of their salvation—identified it as a narrative technique that moves listeners from unbelief to the gap between unbelief and belief (Harding 2000). What I observed at Restoration House was not the inculcation of sheer belief but, rather, of experiential proof, through Juan and Octavio’s testimony: the occult perceptions and sensations that listening to testimony generated in naïve listeners stoked a curiosity and desire for more. At the same time, it was a practice that reinforced the single-minded commitment of those giving testimony, allowing them to experience and re-experience their own inhabitation by spirits in the intimate folds of their story.
Through testimony, moments of insight, spirit possession, and Christian passion could be relived again and again in a timeless space of memory and sensation that gave converts a sense of what eternal salvation might be like. As George Saunders (1995) wrote of Pentecostal conversion stories, “The ‘eternalness’ of Pentecostal time horizons . . . also allows them to live in the present moment, as ‘inner-worldly’ activists” (Saunders 1995, 335). In other words, converts use testimony to till and seed their inner terrain with guided imagery and the renaming of sensory experience; to make the self the site of action and change. Testimony allows converts to treat their thoughts and internal signals as clay to be shaped through narrative and bodily practices. In testifying to their choice to follow the Lord, argues Saunders, “They are liberated from their passivity. They have recreated their own histories and, in the process, have regained a presence in history itself” (Saunders 1995, 336).
What this means is that testimony is as important for the faith of the person giving it as for the future faith of the person receiving it. Harding (2000) describes testimony as a tool for evangelism, for creating doubt in non-believers and moving them toward belief. I came to see testimony as an equally critical tool for believers to cultivate their own belief. Testimony shapes the self by narrating it into an archetype of trial, decision, and transformation. It injects everyday life with a sense of significance and forward motion, locating converts in mystical time and space that is both immediate and perpetual.
Ironically, these themes of immediacy and perpetuity, repetition and memory, are echoed by clinical and neuroscience researchers describing addiction itself. Their descriptions highlight the phenomena of “triggers”; memory cues in the environment that lead to cravings, to the compulsion to give one’s full attention to the pursuit of drugs in a way that is as absorbing and anticipatory as it is repetitive and unchanging. As stated in a special issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry that reviewed biological models of addiction, “evidence at the molecular, cellular, systems, behavioral, and computational levels of analysis is converging to suggest the view that addiction represents a pathological usurpation of the neural mechanisms of learning and memory” (Hyman 2005: 1414).
If nothing else, evangelical testimony is a practice of memory creation, a practice that is both relational and internal, one that cues the testifier to re-experience spiritual encounters. Yet, when neuroscientists propose “treating addiction through manipulations of learning and memory” (Torregrossa, Corlett, and Taylor 2011, 609) they refer to pharmaceuticals that disrupt the chemical reactions at neuroreceptors that consolidate memories and facilitate learning of new cues. Their studies are based largely on mice that model human behavior. Missing from their inquiry are the ways that human subjects shape their own external and internal environments to create new cues.
TESTS
One day I pulled up to the gates at Restoration House to find Juan in an upbeat mood. It was mild, not humid; typical of January in Puerto Rico, and the yellow sunlight filtering through the mango trees matched Juan’s energetic walk to meet me at the gates.
I passed a test today, with an “A.” I feel so happy. I realize it’s my decision to do or no. . . . Last night I sang, when I sing I’m flying. When I’m not singing I have to put my feet on the floor again. I felt Jesus very special.
At culto Juan had been called to the altar to receive a healing prayer from the pastor.
I had a vision. I saw big hands. The Holy Spirit said look at this: it’s a fruit. On the outside it was not very clean, but when the hands peeled it, it was beautiful inside. Preacher said come here—he answered all the questions I had for God. He said feel my love, don’t try to understand me because you can’t. You know I need you, gonna use you. You’ll live your life in my hands.
This feeling of forgiveness through God’s grace was one that Juan found habit forming. “I wanna feel like I feel now every time. Bible says watch yourself—think of God all the time. God is going to put a piece of God inside of you.”
Trying out a theory that Juan’s words brought to mind, I asked, “So you were feeling fortified this afternoon when you were tested?” Juan replied,
The Bible says free will: you have to learn to say yes or no. It’s like a fight inside of you. God says “don’t do it, if you wanna feel [good] like that.” I say it’s like that? I laugh I’m so happy. I feel like the first time I met Him. I failed Him, I have to start up again. I’m under construction.
Juan’s explanation reflected the complexity of Pentecostal ideas about agency and free will. Although becoming saved meant giving one’s life over to the will of God, this required actively listening and looking in order to know what God was asking, through prayer, Bible study, meditation, and fasting. That is, converts had to cultivate their communion with God. They had to do so regularly, such that they became a habit, and replaced the old habits that had left them vulnerable to evil spirits in their addiction. In this logic, personal agency and its opposite, addiction, link habit—the product of a series of willful acts—to the forces of spirits, which originate outside of the person; an individual is responsible for cultivating the interior environment for good spirits to dominate. Tests were reminders to be vigilant of one’s inner state, to maximize unity with God.
Juan elaborated on his tests during a life-history interview that he granted me in his “office,” the small stucco building in which he did intake interviews with new clients. He picked up where he left off. His father had died when he was twelve, leaving him, his mother, and eleven siblings to fend for themselves.
I was mostly away from the house, working various jobs. I wasn’t using drugs at work, but Friday and Saturday—wow! I made friends with the dealers at drug-copping spots. One of my hobbies was washing cars. I was meticulous—I used Q-tips to clean the air conditioning filter. The dealers liked that and hired me. I met a woman, 31 years old with three kids, when I was 21. I lived with her 7 years. [When] she met me [I was] smoking marijuana. I met the person selling marijuana, then through him the person selling heroin, then through him the person selling cocaine. . . . I had to leave her because of my problem. She’s a beautiful woman, not a drug user.
Juan bit his lips in regret.
God 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 Christianity argue that such African continuity theses might be oversimplified—African American religious practices that resemble West African oratory or musical practices also resemble Welsh and Irish bard traditions (Pitts 1993, Jacobs and Kaslow 1991, Raboteau 1978)—it is true that Pentecostalism emphasizes bodily enmeshment with spirits. Additionally, though Pentecostal theology is certainly monotheistic, in Puerto Rican street ministries the Holy Spirit is the ruling member of an unseen realm peopled with lesser spirits—both good and bad. This rich pneumatic universe resonates with other religious traditions with which Puerto Rican Pentecostal converts are familiar, including Catholic saints and angels, and the Orishas of Santería. Pentecostals call upon or exorcise lesser spirits with the help of the Holy Spirit.
In Restoration House, a good culto is one where the group really feels the Holy Spirit, where worshipers are moved to tears, to speak in tongues, and to rest in the Spirit, where they are held unconscious on the floor by a supernatural force. It is one where the preacher does not speak but lets the Spirit speak through him, pulling new converts to the altar to accept Christ even against their own volition.
The most devoted converts talk about the Holy Spirit as dominating and obsessing them, as something they crave: once they have felt the Holy Spirit’s presence, they cannot stop thinking of it. They talk about the touch and voice of the Holy Spirit in the way that heroin and cocaine users talk about the rush from an injection or inhalation: as a euphoric sensation spreading throughout their bodies, removing their earthly cares. They talk about looking for the Spirit as a way of life, the way that habitual drug users talk of their constant search for drugs. They talk about wanting to reach a state of constant communion with the Spirit, much in the way that drug users talk about their fantasy of a high that never ends. They are willing to endure hunger, physical pain, and public ridicule to make contact with the Spirit, just as they had endured to score drugs before their conversion.
Alternately, worshippers speak of their relationship with the Holy Spirit in romantic terms. They speak of always wanting to please the Spirit, of wanting to show the Spirit their love and wanting to feel love in return. They speak of their guilt when they betray the Spirit, of their efforts to win the trust of the Spirit again, to prove their devotion, to grow in their relationship with the Spirit over time, and to maintain their relationship with the Spirit in the long haul. As the director of an addiction ministry in Yauco told me, “Knowing Christ is like your first love.” Bomann (1999) points out that this language of love is characteristic of Pentecostals in Latin America and elsewhere. Cox (1994) relates this ecstatic devotion among Pentecostals to ancient and medieval erotic mysticism in Europe, in which saints described their desire for physical union with Christ (see also Burrus 2004). It is notable that, in contemporary times, active drug users also talk about drugs as a romantic love object, describing their first experiences with drugs as falling in love, and joking about their drug of choice as if it were a demanding spouse (Courtwright, Joseph, and Des Jarlais 1989).
In street ministries, however, the Holy Spirit is idealized; it is not seen as the source of temptation, cruelty, and destruction as drugs are. In their view, the Holy Spirit in itself is perfect. It is the object of desire because it is never fully attained by mortals for more than fleeting moments. In fact, as Chapter Three illustrates, Christian historians write that such fleeting moments inspired the Pentecostal movement itself. The emotional pull of Pentecostal worship—its affective concentration on the Holy Spirit as the singular object of ecstatic devotion—resembles the self-conscious monotheism of early Christianity, in its language of saintly passion and desire for Christ.
Pentecostal cosmology holds that power is located not in people, but in spirits. In this cosmos, freedom is not human autonomy, it is liberation from evil spirits, enabling individuals to submit their will to the Holy Spirit. As an observer of Pentecostal treatment for alcoholism in Brazil noted, for Pentecostals,
Being free means being free to reject evil. . . . According to this model, the individual is fragile and the force of his own will is not strong enough to escape evil. . . . For this reason, accounts of conversion do not stress repentance of sins but deliverance from evil (Loret Mariz 1998, 205, 219).
In the eyes of its charismatic Christian leadership, the most successful graduates are those who learn to inhabit the dimension of spirits that discretely directs the events around them. In this dimension, converts weave a new web of relations with spirits that disrupt their over-determined relations with people and with drugs. Holy Spirit possession, for instance, channels supernatural forces through discarded addicts, disrupting not only the intrapersonal, but also the social, order.
Ethnographers of spirit possession in a wide range of contexts have analyzed it as a mode of resistance to hierarchies of power; Alexander’s (1991) study of African American Pentecostal spirit possession identified it as ritualized social protest. In his analysis, the speaking in tongues and unpredictable body movements of possession contradict middle-class European American behavioral norms, simultaneously rejecting dominant definitions of the worshippers’ social status as inferior and affirming their sense of personal worth through union with the Holy Ghost. Janice Boddy (1989), in her study of trance possession among women in a gender-stratified Muslim Sudanese society, found that possession allowed them to speak in the voice of powerful men. Aiwa Ong (1987), in her classic study of young women factory workers in Malaysia, highlighted the ways that their spirit possession disrupted factory routines, and thereby the dehumanizing conditions of neoliberal expansion.
In this vein, conversion dislodges everyday social and conceptual relations, and opens an altered state of consciousness in which “a new and richer dimension of the old reality is envisioned and embraced” (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.
