Jesus and the Bulldozer: Religion, Suburbanization, and Urban Renewal in a New Jersey Camp Meeting Community

The history of suburbanization in New Jersey is a well-established topic in the scholarly literature. Since the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the state’s northeastern and southwestern areas have become dense with suburban communities tied, culturally and economically, to New York City or Philadelphia. By the early twentieth century, these areas were a mix of middle-class white enclaves, Black towns, immigrant and working-class communities, agricultural hamlets, and industrial suburbs. However, in the late nineteenth century, some suburbs emerged as religious retreats. This article explores how suburbanization and, by the 1960s, urban renewal, transformed the Gloucester County borough of Pitman’s landscape. Founded in 1871 as a Methodist camp meeting resort, the history of Pitman demonstrates ways that religion complemented suburbanization, and suburbanization, amid religious decline and secularization, reshaped the religious landscape of one South Jersey community.

Touching a Button

This chapter examines turn-of-the-century electrification as a site of ecstatic possibility and violent materialization, analyzing little-known photographs by William Van der Weyde of the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison to describe how the electric chair mobilized electricity’s spiritual potential for the mass reproduction of death. Exploring how William Dean Howells and other opponents of the chair linked its technological effects to the mass popularity of the push-button photograph, the chapter examines photography’s collusion with the electric chair’s production of stillness as a form of racial terror, while analyzing Van der Weyde’s photographs as realist reenactments of an electrified touch. The chapter reads these photographs alongside James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), a text that mobilizes “electric affects” to theorize the circulations of religious feeling and racial terror at the nadir of American race relations, even as the novel itself becomes an electrifying performance circulating in and through the shock of spectacular violence. Yoking the “electrifying climax” of the camp meeting to the “electric current” of the lynch mob, Johnson channels the language of circuitry to suggest the centrality of both practices in defining and disfiguring the “real” of secular modernity.

Experience in St Michael’s.

The village—its inhabitants—their occupation and low propensities—Captain Thomas Auld—his character—his second wife, Rowena—well matched—sufferings from hunger—obliged to take food—mode of argument in vindication thereof—no moral code of free society can apply to slave society—southern camp meeting—what Master Thomas did there—hopes—suspicions about his conversion—the result—faith and...

The Minstrel Show Gets Religion

After the Civil War, blackface minstrels found in religion a steady stream of subject matter tailor-made for comedic treatment. This chapter examines three songs that nicely illustrate the postwar phenomenon of religious parody in its infancy and its evolution toward slave-themed entertainment: “Carry the News! We Are All Surrounded” (1870), “Rock’a My Soul” (1871), and “Contraband Children” (1872). Performed initially by whites in blackface, these songs replicate the musical style of black folk spirituals in their parody of a camp meeting. The story of “Carry the News” in particular shows how blackface entertainers were already drawing on musical styles and themes loosely related to those of spirituals, and how the public easily confused newly created popular songs with traditional folk songs. When the vogue of jubilee singing began to spread a few years later, minstrelsy was primed for a convergence and eventual merger with jubilee song. As black minstrel entertainers multiplied, white minstrels increasingly found that they had to cede their plantation-themed material to them.

The Folk Spiritual

Spirituals are religious folk songs created by African Americans in the early nineteenth century. This chapter defines folk spirituals as orally transmitted songs with variable texts and melodies, a typically responsorial structure (call and response), textual and melodic repetition, typically gapped scales, and an ambiguous approach to pitch in performance. The texts tend to focus on crossing over into the heavenly afterlife, and performances encourage communal participation. As folk music, the performance of each spiritual is unique and improvisatory. This chapter describes traits of folk spirituals and methods of composition, surveys secondary literature on its origins in the black church and the camp meeting, and recounts the earliest efforts to transcribe spirituals.

Cities of Zion

In the late nineteenth century, camp meeting towns were a common feature of the American landscape. The boards of Methodist ministers and laity overseeing these towns adopted management and planning strategies drawn from movements for romantic suburbs, sanitary reform, and urban parks. The strategies these Methodists adopted represent a practice of vernacular planning crafted decades before the professionalization of the discipline in the United States. Analysis of the planning history of two sites—Ocean Grove, NJ, and Round Lake, NY—reveals factors shaping this development of Methodistic town planning.