Losing my gang (religion)

Sarah Esther Maslin gives a nice overview of how some gang members have been able to "leave" Salvadoran gangs via religion in Can religion solve El Salvador’s gang problem?

El Salvador is a country of volcanoes dotted with coffee plantations and valleys filled with sugarcane fields. It is also a country of barbed-wire fences, security guards with guns, and neighbourhoods where visitors must roll down the car windows so that the gangs’ teenage postes can see who goes in and out. The Colonia Dina is one such neighbourhood, a jumble of working-class houses decorated with plants and Christmas lights, and sheet-metal shacks surrounded by rubbish and muddy chickens.

At the bottom of a hill under a drooping almond tree stands the Eben-Ezer church, a yellow concrete building barely distinguishable from the houses on either side. A small congregation gathers three times a week in a high-ceilinged sanctuary with rows of plastic chairs, a platform for the rock band that accompanies the Pentecostal service, a podium for the pastors and little else. Down a staircase in the back left corner, in rooms normally used for Bible study, former gang members bake bread by day and sleep on thin mattresses on the floor by night.

At first glance, the church’s leaders make an odd couple. Nelson Moz is Eben-Ezer’s official pastor, a baby-faced man in his 50s with glasses and a thick moustache. Early last year, he opened his doors to Wilfredo Gómez, a 41-year-old gangster-turned-preacher with twinkling eyes and a mystical church named the Last Trumpet. The two pastors acknowledge that they’re trying to do what many consider impossible: spirit away members of El Salvador’s powerful gangs. But they believe this is the country’s only hope.

There's not much new in the story for those who follow El Salvador closely but it's still a good read. Finding religion is one of the few ways that members can calm down from Salvadoran gangs. That doesn't mean, however, that the State or society will accept your new life. And by calming down, that doesn't mean that the gangs won't call you back to active duty or call on you to do small favors for them. I'm all in support of providing opportunities for young people to withdraw from the gangs but that does not seem to be the Salvadoran government's concern.

Although a few years old at this point, you might want to check out Homies and Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central America (2011) and Wresting the Devil: Conversion and Exit from Central American Gangs (2014) by Robert Brenneman. Exit via religion does occur but it does not seem to have been all that successful for anyone involved.