Dear faithful readers,
Here is the social media update you've been waiting for: Now you can get updates on new Diocese of New Jersey Racial Justice Review articles, events, and research through our Facebook group! See you there!
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Sunday, November 10, 2024
VIDEO: Anglican and Episcopal Slavery in New Jersey Pilgrimage
This video will be shared at the Diocesan convention on Saturday, November 23, 2024. If you would like more information on the pilgrimage please see the PILGRIMAGE GUIDE.
Wednesday, October 23, 2024
Anglican and Episcopal Slavery in New Jersey Pilgrimage Guide
The Reparations Commission has developed an educational pilgrimage resource for those who would like to learn more about the history of the diocese with respect to slavery.
For those wishing to follow the pilgrimage the full guide can be found HERE.
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
NEWS: Recent Episcopal Research on Racism Covered in ENS
Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Christ the King, Levittown: An example of the “White Flight” mission
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| Christ the King, Willingboro (originally Levittown), courtesy Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey |
During the mid-twentieth century period of firm conviction that the future of the church in the Diocese of New Jersey lay in (White) suburban growth, an opportunity presented itself to the leaders of the diocese that they were very keen to receive. Levitt & Sons, the suburban development firm, tendered a proposal to the diocese with regard to a suburban development they planned to build in the outer suburban region in New Jersey between Trenton and Camden, across the Delaware from a Levittown they had already begun to build. This new Levittown, the Levitts hoped, would have an Episcopal Church from the very outset, in part to attract the kind of home-owners they sought. Like many other suburban developers at the time, Levitt & Sons did not sell to Black people,[1] even though technically, racially restrictive housing covenants were illegal at the time.[2] Their proposal to this unapologetically “conservative” diocese involved a gift of land on the condition that the diocese would agree to raise the funds for the construction of the new church.[3] This overture was interpreted by diocesan leaders, and through them to the rest of the diocese, as the epitome and perfect fruition of their missional dreams and aspirations. Here was an opportunity to do exactly what they had already been hoping to do generally speaking,[4] but instead of playing catch-up to the White flight of their parishioners, here they could be ahead of the curve.
Bishop Banyard made the campaign a central topic of his diocesan convention address in 1958. It is the only significant initiative he spoke of. He wrote:
Levitt and Sons have begun to develop Levittown, New Jersey. It is estimated that this will be a community of 15,000 homes and that there will be about 60,000 people living there. The first houses costing $11,500+. $14,500+, and $17,500+ will be ready for occupancy in October. Approximately 2,500 will be built each year.
On April 18, 1958, the Venerable Samuel Steinmetz, Mr. Albert L. Hancock, Sr. and I met with Mr. Robert Hagen, Vice President of the Levitt Firm. At that time we were informed that Mr. Levitt is prepared to donate 2¾ acres to the Diocese of New Jersey, provided that within one year after the land is deeded, the building of a church will commence. The proposed site on Charleston Road was shown to us. We will be required by June 1st to state whether we will accept this grant for an Episcopal Church, Parish House and Rectory.
After discussing this important challenge offered to our Diocese for which $200,000 will be needed to erect the buildings, at our meeting on April 22nd, the Trustees of the Diocesan Foundation decided to recommend to this Diocesan Convention that a two year fund-raising campaign be approved and sponsored by the Diocese, beginning in 1959 with $100,000 being raised the first year and $100,000 being raised the second year. It was recommended further that each parish and mission be assigned a proportionate share in each phase of the $200,000 goal spread over a two year period.
I trust that this recommendation will be adopted and that all of our people will support it enthusiastically and generously. You will find an informative display in Synod Hall describing this project and we have arranged a special order of the day for a thorough discussion of the proposed campaign. We must not fail to meet this challenging missionary opportunity.[5]
This initiative was huge, dwarfing outlays for other individual missions. The Committee on the Bishop’s Address wrote that “The challenge that Levittown presents will seem insurmountable to those who look only at the price tag.”[6] Indeed, the total net disbursement to missions for the whole diocese in 1957 was $37,292.32.[7]
The following year, the Committee on the Bishop’s Address concluded their report and call for faithful giving with the statement that “the establishment of [the] new Church in Levittown” was a “bold and absolutely essential Missionary enterprise.”[8] Banyard had again mentioned the project in his convention address, this time referring to it as “one of the most important missionary projects ever to be sponsored by our Diocese.”[9] The convention report from the Department of Missions similarly characterized the Levittown project as “the most outstanding example” of “the planning of both missionary expansion and development for the future.”[10] The project was widely promoted by the diocese within the Episcopal Church. An excerpt from The Witness in December of 1959 is illustrative:
The Episcopal Church will have to spend $200-million for new churches in the next twenty years just to keep pace with population growth. One of the most farsighted programs was launched by the diocese of New Jersey under the leadership of Bishop Banyard. Pictured here is the Church of Christ the King under construction in Levittown which will be completed before most of the residents occupy their new homes. It is a diocesan project, voted by the convention last year, with parishes raising $130,000 over a two year period to pay for the church and rectory.[11]
As is clear from formal, public diocesan communications at this time, the leadership of the Diocese of New Jersey viewed itself as being at the forefront of ushering the Church into a new period of success through hand-in-glove cooperation with suburbanization. That advocacy for and cooperation with suburbanization at this time was bound up inextricably with racism in New Jersey is an established fact.[12]
Cooperation by the diocese with Levitt & Sons moved very quickly, with the Department of Missions reporting in 1959 that,
by the time this report is submitted, ground will have been broken, and with the continued efforts of all the parishes and mission of the Diocese in meeting the financial assessment for Levittown, and with God’s help, we will have services on the site by this fall conducted by the Vicar of the Church of Christ the King, Levittown, New Jersey.[13]
Approval of mission status was granted at the 1959 convention, before the building was even completed.[14] Banyard notes, in astonishingly direct terms, that the diocese was so keen on the immediate success of the project that they advanced funds beyond the parish and mission giving to ensure speedy completion:
Many of our churches have fully discharged their obligation, which was a mandate of our Diocesan Convention in 1958 and 1959. Others have partially paid the special assessment assigned by our diocesan formula over a two year period. It is imperative that every parish and mission meet in full its dept of honor in connection with this project by the end of 1960. When the church and vicarage were completed last fall, the Architect and Builder had to be paid. Therefore, a large sum of money was borrowed from the bank, on which interest must be paid regularly until the debt is liquidated.[15]
However, funding of the project did not involve exclusively voluntary contributions. One of the sources from which funds were derived, perhaps through the invocation of the 1958 convention’s approval of “any action which they deem necessary,”[16] was from the liquidation of the property of St. Monica’s Episcopal Church in Trenton, a historically Black parish that had recently fallen on hard times.[17] In 1958 the diocese mandated its closure, ordered parishioners to attend other parishes, sold the property,[18] and subsequently used the proceeds to cover a significant portion of the Levittown building costs.[19]
Any and all means had been deployed, and by the time of the convention of 1960, the Department of Missions could report that the building project was complete,[20] and a vicar was installed. However, as it has often proved, the idyll that racists produce is rarely adequate to their yearning, typically fleeting in its form, and as such, always in danger of abandonment. Following the initial period of White flight settlement in Levittown, the area was then soon after largely abandoned by White residents as predominantly Black inhabitants took up residence in the area, now called Willingboro. This process occurred in the 1970s and ‘80s[21] and produced a difficult transition period at Christ the King, Willingboro, as White parishioners left and were replaced largely by African-American and Afro-Caribbean Episcopalians. Diocesan archival materials[22] suggest that this transition period involved both governance difficulties and financial difficulties and the parish went long periods of time without a full-time priest. Today, the now overwhelmingly Black parish has entered a period of greater stability and is led by the Rev. Vernal Savage, however, persistent racial wealth disparities in New Jersey[23] continue to present an ongoing challenge to the financial security of most predominantly Black Episcopal churches.
This essay has been excerpted and adapted from the paper “‘White Flight’ Missiology and Its Result: Racially Segregated Ecclesiology in the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey” by Jolyon Pruszinski, which will be presented at the Anglican Studies Seminar of the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in November 2024, in San Diego, CA.
Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.
Reparations Commission Research Historian
Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey
[1] See documentation in David Kushner, Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb(New York: Walker & Co., 2009); Kevin Gotham, “Racialization and the State: The Housing Act of 1934 and the Creation of the Federal Housing Administration,” Sociological Perspectives 43.2 (2000): 291-317; Bruce Lambert, “At 50, Levittown Contends With Its Legacy of Bias,” The New York Times (December 28, 1997): https://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/28/nyregion/at-50-levittown-contends-with-its-legacy-of-bias.html; Jeffrey McClurken, ed., “Levittown: Documents of an Ideal American Suburb,” Journal of American History 101.1 (2014): 372-73; Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004).
[2] Such racially restrictive covenants were common in New Jersey until they were struck down by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1948. However the resistance to integration was strong. When the first Black family moved in to the Levittown across the river in Pennsylvania in 1957, the neighbors called in the Ku Klux Klan to organize the protest and local police did not stop it (even as it included cross burning and rock throwing). This was all well reported and the racialized nature of Levitt developments was well known. See Jerry Jonas, “60 Years Later, the Levittown Shame That Still Lingers,” Bucks County Courier Times (August 12, 2017).
[3] See The Journal of the 174th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey Held in the Crypt of Trinity Cathedral, Trenton Tuesday and Wednesday May 6th and 7th, 1958, page 94: “The Venerable Samuel Steinmetz, Jr. spoke of the new work being undertaken at Levittown, New Jersey, and move the following Resolution: ‘Be it Resolved that the establishment of a new work of the Church in New Jersey be undertaken at Levittown, New Jersey in the following manner: 1. That the Bishop of New Jersey be asked to accept the offer of Levitt & Sons of land made to him in behalf of the Diocese of New Jersey. 2. Recognizing the condition placed by Levitt & Sons in the donation of land for religious purposes this Convention authorizes the Bishop, together with the Trustees of the Diocesan Foundation to take any action which they deem necessary in order to realize the $200,000.00 needed for the establishment of a Church, Rectory and Parish Hall at Levittown, New Jersey.’” Emphasis added. The resolution was passed as was a schedule of assessments on parishes and missions to pay the $200,000.00 over a three-year period. This, rather unprecedented levy indicates just how important an opportunity this was thought to be at the time.
[4] That is, cooperate with patterns of White flight.
[5] Alfred L. Banyard, “Bishop Banyard’s Convention Charge and Address to the 174th Annual Convention of the Diocese of New Jersey May 6, 1958,” in The Journal of the 174th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, 99.
[6] The Journal of the 174th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, 190.
[7] The Journal of the 174th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, 206.
[8] The Journal of the 175th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, 195.
[9] The Journal of the 175th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey held in the Crypt of Trinity Cathedral, Trenton Tuesday and Wednesday May 5th and 6th, 1959, 102.
[10] The Journal of the 175th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, 149. However, it is merely an example of the overall interest and orientation of missions planning in the diocese during this period. For instance, in 1960, the new parishes welcomed into the diocese graduating from mission status, and the new missions established through investment which are mentioned specifically in Banyard’s address are all in suburban (and at the time, almost exclusively racially White) locations: St. John’s Church, Maple Shade, St. John’s Church, Little Silver, St. Andrew’s Mission, New Providence, and the Mission at Tuckerton. This address also refers ominously and euphemistically to “the urban problem” that has developed in various parts of the diocese which has prompted the formation of a diocesan “Commission on Urban Work.” See The Journal of the 176th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey Held in the Crypt of Trinity Cathedral, Trenton Tuesday and Wednesday May 3rd and 4th, 1960, 102-106.
[11] The Witness Vol. 46, No. 39 (December 10, 1959): 8.
[12] This is not disputed by any serious scholars in the urban planning literature, the public policy literature, or the literature on the history of race in New Jersey.
[13] The Journal of the 175th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, 149.
[14] The Journal of the 175th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, 178.
[15] The Journal of the 176th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, 102.
[16] The Journal of the 174th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, 94.
[17] Convention Journal financial reporting suggests as much in 1955 through 1957.
[18] See the forthcoming treatment in Pruszinski, Anglican Slavery in New Jersey.
[19] The Journal of the 176th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, 230. A total of $20,000 was applied in this fashion.
[20] The Journal of the 176th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, 151.
[21] As census records indicate. See also Gregory Pardlo, Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America (New York: Knopf, 2018)
[22] Including the 1994 report by Rev. Canon Junius Carter, “Report Concerning Christ the King Episcopal Church Willingboro, New Jersey Observations & Recommendations.” MSS held at the diocesan archives (Trenton, NJ).
[23] See New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, “The Two New Jerseys by the Numbers: Racial Wealth Disparities in the Garden State,” 2: https://njisj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Two_New_Jerseys_By_the_Numbers_Data_Brief_3.23.23-compressed.pdf; This study suggests that as of 2022 White median household wealth in the state was $322,500 while Black median household wealth was $17,700. In other words, the median Black household wealth in New Jersey is only just over 5% of median White household wealth. See also the forthcoming book by Calvin Schermerhorn, The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2025).
Tuesday, October 1, 2024
“White Flight” and Mission in the Diocese of New Jersey
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| Aerial photo of Levittown, PA (LevittownPA, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons) |
The primary mission in the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey, both in terms of effort and funding, has always been the establishment of new churches within the diocese itself.[1] In general the pattern of church-founding in the diocese followed directly from the locations of adequate funding. Where there was burgeoning financial support from would-be parishioners, churches were founded. Where financial support dried up, churches were consolidated or closed. In the twentieth century modest diocesan “missions” budgets worked to shift some funds from parishes with plenty to parishes in need, or to parishes just starting up, but for the most part, the aforementioned pattern predominated.
Episcopal historian and long-serving member of the Diocese of New Jersey Standing Committee, Nelson R. Burr, in his brief history of the Episcopal Church in New Jersey published in 1940,[2] confirmed that the approach of the diocese to its own growth and development, at least during his period of familiarity, was to follow and cooperate with the patterns of growth occurring in the state.[3] In noting the initial stages of suburbanization beginning to take hold in the northeast urban corridor he wrote:
This tendency is not operating in New Jersey to the extent that it is in New York City and Philadelphia. In the two latter metropolises this migration is so serious as to leave the oldest established Protestant Episcopal Churches on the verge of extinction, while the outlying areas such as Westchester County in New York State, and the shore towns in New Jersey have become prosperous, thriving Episcopal centers. The Camden suburban areas are benefiting by the exodus from Philadelphia. Jersey City is the first municipality in New Jersey to experience this movement away from congested areas. Already extinction faces a few of the Protestant Episcopal churches in that city. The movement is inexorable, and the Church must adapt itself to these changing conditions. Again, the improvement in transportation is basically responsible for this transition which the Church must accept. Constant effort is being exerted to foresee future trends and prepare for the exigencies which will arise. There is much study and consideration of the future, especially whenever a congregation makes an application to become a parish. Analysis of localities, and all their environmental factors, has reached the stage that no new parish is created unless such an act conforms to a definite policy of Church strategy.[4]
He echoes this sentiment in his later book The Anglican Church in New Jersey, which, though only treating the post-colonial period in a cursory fashion, still manages to show his perspective on the matter, which should be considered the dominant one in the diocese at the time.[5] In that book he writes:
Under Bishops Gardner and Banyard, the diocese has bravely weathered World War II and the difficult post-war adjustments, and appears now to be on the eve of a great expansion, especially by the establishment of new missions in suburban residential areas and in the mushrooming industrial “developments.” Even though the number of clergymen, parishes, and missions was curtailed by economic depression and war, the Church has continued its steady numerical increase. As of 1951, the diocese had 166 clergymen and 45,000 communicants. The trying future problems will be recruitment and education of clergymen, and building of new churches. But nobody who has read this history can doubt the outcome, knowing how much more terrible conditions the Church in New Jersey has encountered and conquered.[6]
As Burr indicates here, by 1954 the strategy was clear: support church planting and building in the newly burgeoning suburbs while cooperating with (and fostering even) the atrophy, consolidation, and closure of Episcopal churches serving the cities. That this strategy also had significant racial dimensions was not accidental.
Though he did articulate a cooperative, and, in some ways, deferential attitude toward prevailing trends in development, there is evidence to suggest that Burr’s attitude toward prevailing demographic trends at the time could be described as reactionary.[7] To his mind, influxes of non-Anglo “stock,” as he called it, into the state represented an obstacle to the growth and success of the diocese.[8] He was joined in this opinion by fellow prolific historian Walter Herbert Stowe, who served for concurrent decades as a priest in the Diocese of New Jersey and as the editor of the Historical Magazine of the Episcopal Church.[9] The, mostly White diocese’s treatment of Black Americans at the time fit this general perspective as well. It was a publicly self-identified “conservative” diocese[10] which had some historically Black churches, but which viewed ministry of and with Black Episcopalians more often than not as a “problem” to be sent to the Committee on “interracial issues”[11] than a cause for celebration. During the mid-to-late-twentieth century many urban parishes that had been overwhelmingly White, either consolidated or closed due to White flight,[12] even as the areas in which they operated continued to be residential neighborhoods. The difference was that the neighborhoods were becoming predominantly non-White. A handful of these historically White churches have become predominantly Black,[13] but the majority were allowed to become defunct.[14]
At the same time, most of the suburban churches in the diocese flourished. David King’s Bicentennial history of the diocese, published in 1985, is brimming with indications of this.[15] Almost without exception, the suburban White parishes active at the time of writing in 1985 were either founded during the mid-century period of White flight, or experienced a sudden and dramatic period of growth and prosperity at that time.[16] Interestingly, the experience of Christ the King Episcopal Church, Levittown (now Willingboro) is exemplary of both this diocesan interest in supporting White flight, and the deleterious after-effects of such support. See the DNJRJR essay “Christ the King, Levittown: An example of the ‘White Flight’ mission” for more information.
This essay has been excerpted and adapted from the paper “‘White Flight’ Missiology and Its Result: Racially Segregated Ecclesiology in the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey” by Jolyon Pruszinski, which will be presented at the Anglican Studies Seminar of the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in November 2024, in San Diego, CA.
Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.
Reparations Commission Research Historian
Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey
[1] An argument can be made that at times more of the total missionary budget of the diocese has been sent out of the diocese than has been used for internal purposes, but that external giving has always been diffuse and no one particular external (or internal cause) has, over the history of the Diocese, risen to a comparable degree of prominence as that of the support of missions internal to the diocese.
[2] Under the auspices of the Work Projects Administration.
[3] Work Projects Administration, Inventory of the Church Archives of New Jersey: Protestant Episcopal (Newark: The Historical Records Survey, 1940), 61-64. In particular he references the words of Suffragan Bishop Ludlow who suggested that “Whenever new highways are opened we have to reorganize the Diocese,” 62. Burr goes on to refer to the “relentless trend” of “people” (meaning of course, wealthier White people), “to avoid and remove themselves from” so-called “congested areas.”
[4] Work Projects Administration, Inventory of the Church Archives of New Jersey: Protestant Episcopal, 63-64.
[5] This conclusion is merited by the fact that he served in the administration of the Diocese of New Jersey for so long, the book was sponsored, promoted, and sold by the Diocese, and it received all proceeds from it (See e.g. The Journal of the 174th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, 192, 210). See also Nelson R. Burr, The Anglican Church in New Jersey (Philadelphia: The Church Historical Society, 1954), 467-85.
[6] Emphasis added. Burr, The Anglican Church in New Jersey, 476. Regarding his final sentence, Burr’s text repeatedly discounts and ignores the Church’s role in slavery and racism, even though he was familiar with the primary documents evidencing it. His conclusion here is based in his conviction that the Episcopal Church was essentially for White people and that the negative experiences of Africans and African Americans at her hands were, if not irrelevant, not worthy of mention, even in a 768-page book. For more on this failing of The Anglican Church in New Jersey see the Appendix of the forthcoming book by Pruszinski, Anglican Slavery in New Jersey.
[7] He was not the only one in the leadership of the diocese. When the official public documents of your institution specifically deny being reactionary (see The Journal of the 176th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, 152) it means they are addressing the appearance of being reactionary. It is hard to think of Bishop Banyard as anything other than reactionary as well when he is best remembered in the diocesan bicentennial history by David R. King (Forward with Christ: A Bicentennial Historical Book [Trenton, NJ: The Diocesan Bicentennial Committee, 1985], 10) as having railed against what Banyard called “ultra-liberal extremism, the aberrations, the actions, behavior and questionable pronouncements of our Clergy and lay leaders on the National, Diocesan and local levels.” Rev. Dr. William Ridgeway, the long-serving priest of St. Wilfrid’s, Camden was publicly and openly Nazi-sympathetic. See Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, “Rev. Dr. William Ridgeway, Nazi Sympathizer and Priest of St. Wilfrid’s, Camden (1930-1962),” Diocese of New Jersey Racial Justice Review (January 25, 2024): https://dionj-racialjusticereview.blogspot.com/2024/01/rev-dr-william-ridgeway-nazi.html, and Stephanie Fanjul, “St. Wilfrid’s Church: Fragments of the Soul of an Urban Church,” Capstone Project (2019), MSS held at Rubenstein Library, Duke University, and https://hdl.handle.net/10161/18575.
[8] Work Projects Administration, Inventory of the Church Archives of New Jersey: Protestant Episcopal, 63.
[9] He voices a number of concerns of this kind in Walter Herbert Stowe, “Immigration and the Growth of the Episcopal Church,” HMPEC 11 (1942): 330-61.
[10] See the annual “Report of the Department of Missions and Personal Report of the Archdeacon” in The Journal of the 176th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, 152, for a formal affirmation of this identity.
[11] See mentions in The Journal of the 161st Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey Held in the Synod Hall, Trinity Cathedral, Trenton Tuesday, May 8th, A.D. 1945, Including Reports for the Year 1944 (Trenton, NJ: Diocese of New Jersey, 1945).
[12] For instance, in Elizabeth four churches merged into today’s St. Elizabeth’s (three of which were White churches). St. Elizabeth’s is now predominantly African American. Two White Elizabeth churches merged to form today’s St. John’s, Elizabeth. In Atlantic City the only remaining church of four that had been within the city limits in 1945 is St. Augustine’s, Atlantic City, a historically Black parish. Of seven Camden churches operating in 1945 (six of which were White) four remain. Of those remaining four now two are now predominantly Black churches, and both of those (St. Wilfrid’s and St. Augustine’s) are under threat of closure. Neither has a functional building.
[13] Such as St. Luke’s, Ewing (formerly Trenton) and St. Elizabeth’s, Elizabeth.
[14] In Trenton there were ten churches operating in 1945. Of these one was a historically Black church (St. Monica’s) which was forcibly closed by the diocese, as already mentioned. Now only four of the original ten churches (from 1945) remain. One is the cathedral; One is St. Michael’s, which is struggling to stay open; one is Cristo Rey, formerly “Christ Church” which is now a Spanish language congregation. And one is St. Luke’s, which has become predominantly non-White. Six of the Trenton churches from 1945 have been consolidated or closed. Between the four major urban areas in the diocese (Trenton, Elizabeth, Atlantic City, and Camden) between 1945 and 2024, twenty-seven congregations have dwindled to eleven. Of the remaining eleven at least three are contemplating closing. Of the original twenty-seven only four were historically Black churches. Of the remaining eleven churches in this group, seven or more now have a majority of either Black or Hispanic parishioners.
[15] King, Forward with Christ, 18-184.
[16] Even as the total number of churches had decreased from the mid-century. By 1985 there were 166 churches in the diocese. King, Forward with Christ.
Monday, September 23, 2024
NEWS: New Research at the Anglican Studies Seminar of the American Academy of Religion
Research from the Diocese of New Jersey Racial Justice Review will be featured in the upcoming Anglican Studies Seminar at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in San Diego this November. The program will include papers examining “missiological currents within Anglicanism, past and present, that contribute to… Anglican identity formation and the ecclesiologies that arise alongside those identities." The Reparations Commission Research Historian, Dr. Jolyon Pruszinski will present “‘White Flight’ Missiology and Its Result: Racially Segregated Ecclesiology in the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey.” From the introduction to his paper:
Functionally speaking, the most recent burst of missionary effort and funding in the Diocese of New Jersey was the period of church planting and growth that occurred aimed at serving the massive suburban growth in the state in the mid-twentieth century. This period of development in the state has been characterized by urban planners as a period of “White flight” during which White families fled urban areas and settled in newly built, and (either formally or informally) racially restricted suburban developments in order to avoid proximity to Black neighbors.
The Diocese of New Jersey fully cooperated with this pattern of development, often funding and building new churches in functionally racially restricted suburban areas. The construction of Christ the King, Levittown is exemplary: land was donated to the diocese by Levitt & Sons; A diocese-wide fundraising campaign ensued, which included the forced liquidation of the historically Black congregation of St. Monica’s, Trenton in order to use proceeds from the sale of property to fund building Christ the King; parishioners of St. Monica’s were instructed to attend other churches in the name of “integration;” only one of the several Trenton-area Episcopal churches offered a formal invitation to them. And while Christ the King began in the mid-20th century as exclusively White, once race-restrictions were overturned and Black neighbors moved in, most White families left the area and the church, and by the 1990s the diocese formally designated it a Black church.
Many urban Episcopal churches in the diocese during this period, such as in Trenton, Atlantic City, Elizabeth, and Camden, closed after being abandoned by White Episcopalians. Other formerly all-White churches in these areas were handed over to Black residents and have become Black churches (not unlike Christ the King). While the pattern of segregation in churches in the diocese partly dates to the Jim Crow era, during which the formation of a few Black churches was allowed rather than letting overt hostility from White Episcopalians “drive [Black people] to schism by cold neglect” (to quote Bishop Scarborough’s 1890 convention address), this pattern was further buttressed and cemented by the cooperation of diocesan authorities with the systemically racist patterns of development that were occurring throughout the state mid-century.
The result today is a significantly functionally segregated diocese, with Black churches located mostly in areas that have experienced decades of economic difficulty and systemic neglect, and White churches mostly located in areas that have been comparatively prosperous and fully supported with infrastructure and services. One of the results of this geographic pattern has been perennial underfunding of Black churches and ministries. Moreover, the relational and communication structure of the diocese has mirrored the physically segregated structure, with Black congregations siloed off from the rest of the diocese in many ways.
These current patterns of ecclesial organization in the diocese (racial segregation, respective location of thriving White churches and ailing Black churches, underfunded Black churches, siloed communication, etc.) appear to be, in part, the result of a long cooperation (on the part of the diocesan administration) with the prevailing patterns of systemic racism that produced the current, functionally segregated makeup of the state of New Jersey.
For more information on the upcoming Seminar see https://papers.aarweb.org/session/anglican-studies-seminar-session-1.
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