No. 43  January 2005
The authoritative source on early churches in New Jersey

ISSN 1543-3250

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Feature of the month

The social significance of the miner’s churches

Between 1846 and 1870 almost a dozen churches in Morris county were built with the financial assistance of local mining companies and for that they have come be known as miner’s churches. The earliest recorded one is the First Presbyterian church in Boonton, which organized in 1832 and built their first church the following year on land donated by the New Jersey Iron Company. The Mt. Carmel Catholic church in Boonton was erected on land given by the same firm in 1846. In 1853, the owner of the Boonton Ironworks gave a plot of land for a church to the Methodists of that town. In 1869, the Andover Iron Works, the Glendon Iron Mining Company and three local merchants provided money to build the Hibernia Methodist church. The following year the New Jersey Iron Company gave land to the Teabo Methodist congregation, and in the same year, the Mt. Hope Iron Mine Company erected a wooden-frame church just north of Dover for the benefit of its employees. Although officially designated as non-denominational, the superintendent of the Mt. Hope mining company was also the Methodist Sunday School superintendent and apparently most of its employees were, or were expected to be Methodists.
     The corporate involvement was a remarkable transformation in Dover—one account tells of initial attempts to hold Methodist services where the preacher was literally chased out of town by a mob; in 1870 we learn of welcome and sponsorship by the town's dominant employer.
     These were not the only miner’s churches in the county; some I have not located and others occupy newer buildings. The corporate practice of sponsoring a church was not without precedent in the state—there is the Allaire Episcopal church (Monmouth), built by a substantial manufacturing operation, the Batsto [nondenominational] church (Atlantic), the Estelle Manor Methodist church (Atlantic) erected by a glassworks, and the Andover Presbyterian church (Sussex)— all built by or with substantial assistance from industrial firms. Nowhere else in the state do we have such a concentration of corporate philanthropy. Not in Newark, Trenton or Jersey City. Moreover, in at least several of those situations, executives of the corporations had significant leadership roles in church governance or Sunday School, or both. Apparently the superintendency of a Sunday School carried with it a social and civic eminence unknown today. It would be natural enough, I suppose, to appoint a plant manager as Sunday School superintendent, but why would so many such individuals want that position? Unless this was an anomaly, what is curious is that most of the church histories, and even the social histories of the period fail to mention the role of corporate philanthropy and leadership in church support and leadership during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Henry Adams tells us that the dynamo was even then snuffing out the impulses that made Chartres possible. [Adams used the virgin and the dynamo as metaphors for the dominant tensions of the age, arguing that industrialization was displacing the spirituality of an earlier period.] Perhaps this article will stimulate readers to bring to my attention some analysis of the matter, or at least additional examples that may help us to understand it better.

Religious enthusiasm or even social status may not have been the motive. John Faesch, the most important mine owner in Morris county, was said to believe religion was “a very good thing—to keep the lower classes in proper subordination.” Historian Paul Johnson describes Charles Grandison Finney's revivalism in Rochester, New York as "order-inducing, repressive, and quintessentially bourgeois." In Johnson's interpretation, religion was "a middle-class solution to the problem of order in a manufacturing economy, a means by which entrepreneurs imposed discipline upon themselves and their workers." There are no hints of that motivation in any of the sources I have examined, but it is an interesting hypothesis, and not one we should dismiss too readily. Faesch might have spoken for his class, and their actions represented the attempt of industrial establishments to neutralize the impact of social movements that threatened the industrial order. By the 1850s, many of these workers were recent European immigrants—Welsh, English, Irish, German—most from lands where labor and social upheaval were increasingly common.
      We do not have to be Marxist historians to recognize that religion was often perceived to function as a means of social control. In Elizabeth & Wayland Young's book on Old London Churches [Faber and Faber, 1956], it is noted that "by about 1800 it was found that not enough churches had been built to keep the lower orders in order. " [Following the French revolution when the dangerous potentialities of the crowd were fully understood], "the question how to tame the Crowd was answered in many minds by the thought: More Churches. . . in 1818, a million pounds was set aside by Parliament for building as many churches as possible in the big cities of England."
     In this country, the Second Great Awakening has been characterized in many often contradictory ways, but one striking description saw it as "an attempt by traditional religious elites to impose social order upon a disordered and secularized society. In this view, revivalism reflects the attempt of fearful church leaders to salvage Protestant solidarity." Whereas the early revivals and the rise of new sects in the opening decades of the century demonstrated that farmers could become theologians, offbeat village youths bishops, and odd girls prophets, by the 1860s the dominant hierarchies had reasserted themselves. Church historians have portrayed the post Civil War period as one in which church movements brought cultural enrichment, institutional cohesion, and intellectual respectability to the uncouth, unrestrained frontier. To maintain their position in an increasingly bourgeois society when many congregations, especially Methodist, were leaders in social and even radical reform movements of the period—anti-slavery, women's rights, temperance, and even child labor reform— corporate members may have felt a needed to co opt such tendencies. It might be that the corporate philanthropy and involvement was an attempt to preclude such radicalism by supporting and directing congregations where they could exercise some measure of control.

Of course that involvement may have merely been the means of solidifying the social and civic leadership through both philanthropy and direction of the Sunday School and Bible study groups that at times attracted larger attendance than Sunday services. But that does not address the question of why it was so prevalent in a section of Morris County and relatively rare elsewhere in the state.

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