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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.
