Addiction Treatment (AT) is an ethnography that compares two residential drug-free treatment programs: a religious, faith-based program and a science-based, secular program. Although these programs originate from significantly different ideological bases, in examining the day-to-day operations of each, AT demonstrates that they are far more alike than they are different.
Through extensive participatory observations, intimate life history interviews, and informal conversations with residents and staff, AT shows how both programs use equivalent techniques of ideological persuasion (mutual witnessing in therapy groups and prayer groups), impose the same method of social control (discourse deprivation), and propose parallel lifestyles of abstinence and zero tolerance (Christian living or Right living) as they endeavor to transform clients from addicts to citizens or from sinners to disciples.