Race, Class, and Religion in a Northern New Jersey Town

I had no idea ‘born-again Christians’ were living in my midst

Last year I started writing a memoir. Due to other demands, I only managed to write one chapter. For my next several Current features I will be sharing excerpts from that chapter. Read the first installment here and the second installment here and third installment here and the fourth installment here.—JF

Dutch Reformed Christians settled my hometown in the eighteenth century, but despite its Calvinist history, Montville, at least in my view, had two religions: Catholicism and Judaism. The Catholics were mostly kids from working class families like mine. The Jewish kids were the children of white-collar professionals who tended to populate the growing number of housing developments with names like “Brittany Estates” and “Lake Valhalla.” I am sure there were class divisions in town, but I don’t recall any resentment among the Catholic working class and the upper-middle class Jews. In fact, some of my best friends in elementary school were Jewish and I attended several Bar Mitzvahs over the years. 

I graduated from high school with two Black classmates. They were both popular students at Montville Township High School and ran with a clique of athletes that held far more social capital in the school hallways than my group of friends. I don’t remember any racial problems in school or the larger town, but I am sure that the experience of these students and their families was quite different from what my white ethnic working-class family experienced. I hope one day I might track them down so I can hear their stories. Perhaps they will find this piece and we will reconnect.

My parents taught us to respect the dignity of all people. I remember the first time I naively used the “N” word in front of my father. Let’s just say I have never said it again. My dad was sensitive to the racial climate of the 1960s and 1970s. During his Marine boot camp days at Parris Island (SC) he found adjusting to the late Jim Crow South difficult. The injustice of segregated facilities triggered his conscience. One evening, after coming out of a bar while on a weekend leave, he noticed some of his fellow Marines physically assaulting a local Black man. My father intervened to stop the race-driven altercation. The Black man ran away, but the Marines turned on my father and beat him up badly. When they all returned to Parris Island word got out about the fight and my father’s Southern drill sergeant made his life miserable for the next six weeks.

I never heard my family—nuclear or extended—say anything negative about a Black man or woman. They knew several, including the Stafford family at the end of the road. Mr. Stafford was a teacher and eventually became vice-principal of my high school. No, my family’s racism usually manifested itself less in relation to specific individuals and more in sweeping claims about “the Blacks,” welfare, and the potential for violence. They all supported the reforms of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s and were distressed by scenes of white violence toward Blacks in places like Birmingham and Selma. But they became disillusioned as they watched the 1967 Newark race riots unfold roughly twenty miles away. I don’t know if my mother and father ever got over that. I am certain my grandparents did not.

I know now that there were evangelicals in Montville. There was a fast-growing non-denominational church at the edge of town. But if born-again Christians roamed the halls of Montville Township High School I did not know them. (Later I learned that I did know some of them—including a classmate who went to Wheaton College. Why didn’t he try to evangelize me?) I had never even heard the term “born-again Christian” or “evangelical.” The fact that these strange believers were living in my midst and I was completely unaware of it serves as a testimony to the insularity and provincialism of the Catholic working-class culture in which I was raised. This was the air I breathed and the water in which I swam.

In 1980, Bishop Frank Rodimer of the Diocese of Patterson touched my head and blessed me on the day of my confirmation. This was the moment the Catholic Church taught that I was “sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit.” But I still had doubts. At the time, I didn’t realize that the Catholic Church was right all along: Faith is indeed a mystery. All I knew was that the Church was not providing answers to what, in my small world, were life’s biggest questions. “Mystery” was not cutting it and, frankly, there were just more interesting things to think about. My family did not have religious discussions and I was not the kind of kid to make an appointment with a priest or some other religious figure to talk about my issues. There were no youth groups with hip youth pastors in the Catholic Church. So I just ignored my questions, hoping that my worst enemy—fear, and the anxiety that came with it—would not visit me again in the night.

What I didn’t know was that my parents, and especially my father, were going through a similar crisis of faith. As circumstances would have it, we would all face our crises together. And we would never be the same again.

John Fea is Executive Editor of Current

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