Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries

229 Pages·2018·3.899 MB·English

by  Helena Hansen

Addicted to Christ
Remaking Men in Puerto Rican
Pentecostal Drug Ministries
Helena Hansen
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Addicted to Christ
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Addicted to Christ
Remaking Men in Puerto Rican
Pentecostal Drug Ministries
Helena Hansen
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university
presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing
scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its
activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic
contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information,
visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2018 by Th e 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. |
Identifi ers: 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.
Classifi cation: 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
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contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
1. Th e Cosmology of Conversion 25
2. On Discipline and Becoming a Disciple 46
3. Visitations and Gift s 73
4. Th e New Masculinity 92
5. Spiritual Mothers 112
6. Family Values 134
7. Bringing It Home 149
Notes 167
Bibliography 181
Index 203
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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 aft er street of
public tenements and condemned buildings that sheltered people who were inject-
ing 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 Pen-
tecostal 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 traffi c. Th rough Leila I met her pastor and his wife, ex-
addicted migrants from Puerto Rico who had converted to Pentecostalism at Vic-
tory Outreach Ministries and then opened a drug program of their own.
Th e 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.
Aft er 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
ix