Central American transnational youth gangs such as the Mara Salvatrucha and the Eighteenth Street gang promote a hyper-machismo that idealizes violent, risk-prone codes of conduct and lifelong affiliation. Central American evangelical churches promote a strict piety that prohibits drinking and promotes domestic ideals of marriage and fatherhood. Yet several studies suggest that conversion to evangelical Christianity is a common pathway out of the gang. Using semi-structured interviews with sixty-four former gang members in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, this book examines why many ex-gang members consider joining an evangelical or Pentecostal church the safest and most effective means of leaving the gang. Religious conversion provides former gang members with new access to social and symbolic resources crucial for keeping safe, building trust, and finding work after leaving the gang. But more than strategic use of cultural “tools” is involved in religious conversion. In some cases, emotional conversion experiences actually helped to bring about gang exit by occasioning embodied, emotional experiences that violated the macho feeling rules of the gang. Highly public emotional conversion experiences also provided some exiting gang members with opportunities for discharging chronic shame. The author argues that an important factor in the ongoing popularity of Pentecostal-ized evangelical Christianity in Central America is its promotion of ritual contexts for effectively dealing with shame. While progressive Catholicism seeks to attack the social sources of shame, evangelical-Pentecostalism offers powerful interaction rituals for dealing with the emotion itself at the individual level.