Religious movements

Early Christian Colonists
Early English settlers in New Jersey were Puritains. When New Haven and Connecticut were separate settlements, the New Haven traditionalists felt threatened by the non-Orthodoxy of Connecticut. So they spread out and colonized Newark, their church running the town as its own settlement from 1665 until secularization.

The Old First Presbyterian Church in Newark, and much of the Presbyterian establishment around the state, is its legacy today. Though not originally Presbyterian, the Puritain church gradually integrated with Dutch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who shared a similar orthodoxy, and so there was little tension between the two.

Shakers, Utopians, and Angel Dancers
Like the Moravians and Shakers, a group of revivalists who were pacifist and abstinent created a settlement called Lord's Farm near Park Ridge, New Jersey in the 1880s. They took in children through adoption rather than having any of their own. Feuds within biological families eventually lead to the group's breakup.

This era was marked by many such religious experiments in communal living. One that brought the most attention to the area was the Oneida Community in near-upstate New York. But, unlike the Shakers, the Oneida settlers practiced a variety of "open marriages" - but one in which a kind of "passive eugenics" discouraged people from actually having children unless they were in a pair that the group's leaders approved of. They also believed that the second coming of Christ had already occurred.

Though this kind of arrangement drew attacks from the outside world, the abstinent devotees of Lord's Farm - known as Angel Dancers to everyone else - were faced with similar anger. Townspeople accused them of having orgies, as well as bizarre but seemingly-harmless acts like "breaking crockery and stepping on cakes."

The founder of Lord's Farm, George "Mnason of Cyprus," got in a feud with a man who had not really wanted to join, but whose wife had converted. This couple, the Howells, became the subject of a legal battle that ended with Mnason being sentenced to a year in prison. Mr. Howell accused Mnason of the above-mentioned property destruction and orgies.

Attempted "rescues" of women and children from these kinds of communities was common. There are a handful of documented examples, in Ohio and New York, of people storming the religious groups but finding women unwilling to leave.

The Angel Dancers were also distinguished by a strong mind-body dualism. A psychologist, Dr. Schroeder, studied the sect in depth. After interviews with Mnason, he said that the religious leader's convictions stemmed from a strong belief that physical attachments - to sex or to childbearing - were mere imitations of a 'true' communion of spirit. In a sense, this is similar to Gnostic interpretations of Platonism.

The Moorish Science Temple
Founded by Noble Drew Ali in 1913, the Moorish Science Temple began its mission in Newark of reviving a lost Muslim past among African-Americans. Mainline Muslims would say the Temple's teachings had little in common with historical Islam, and incorporated newly-invented stories never present in the Qur'an or other texts. The Temple, also, made very sweeping claims of Moorish heritage for all African-descended people. Taoist and Gnostic influences were heavilly invoked in their religion. In 1925, Ali and his followers moved to Chicago, which Ali said was "closer to Islam." The Temple maintained a presence in the northeast, and branches spread to the Flint and River Rouge neighborhoods near Detroit. The FBI kept a close watch on the MST, and the microfilms of the FBI files proved to be one of the most valuable sources for finding early writings from the group.

The Moorish Science Temple taught that Jesus came "to save the Israelites from the iron-handed oppression of the pale-skinned nations of Europe, who were governing a part of Palestine at that time." Their histories marked the year 1453 as the time when "the Head of Satan was taken off," this being the year the Byzantine empire fell to the Ottomans.

In Newark, a temple at 230 Court St. held services and doubled as a restaurant, seating about 150 people for dinner daily. Meanwhile, in Chicago, a schism developed within the group. A leader of a break-away faction murdered Drew Ali in 1929.

But around Detroit, the Moorish Science Temple's influence still grew. As World War II escalated, its leaders predicted that the United States would lose, and the Japanese would take over but show favoritism to the Moorish followers who marked themselves with robes and medallions. This view may be more understandable, in light of the fact that the Detroit branches were in communication with Japanese national Satakata Takahashi, who lead the Black Dragon society which was building alliances with African-Americans in Michigan. Takahashi was then arrested for his immigration status and charged with being an agent of the Japanese government. Raids followed, weakening the Temple when many of its leaders were arrested. By that time, Wallace Fard Muhammad, who had left the Moorish Science Temple during the Chicago schism, had founded the Nation of Islam in Detroit. This grew in influence, having a similar theology, while the Temple weakened. But despite the violent feuds in Chicago, the Moors and the Nation were coexisting peacefully there in the 40s, according to FBI records - which presumably would have sought out any exploitable conflict between them.

In 1957, FBI records register the Temple's Detroit 1st Officer, Abdul Mohammad, as "deceased, having died in an insane asylum." Many of his compatriots had disbanded or been jailed for sedition. But it was from Detroit that the Nation of Islam grew to echo back across America, becoming an important force in Newark where the Temple had first established itself.

Jewish Agricultural Colonies and the New Deal
To establish economic self-sufficiency, and build model communities that would help them gain more social acceptance, Jewish immigrants to New Jersey established agricultural colonies in the southern part of the state. The Am-Olam movement emerged to support this in the 1880s, and became a source of inspiration to people looking for new ways to live during the Great Depression.

One of the projects of the New Deal was to sponsor new cooperative housing and working setups, with cooperatively-managed agriculture and small scale industry to put people back to work. These were set up away from congested city centers, to give residents better living standards.

Ninety-nine such new communities were build around the country, with one, Jersey Homesteads, being built in southern Jersey in 1933. Jewish farmer and merchant Benjamin Brown applied for a grant from the WPA, and was accepted. He used it to buy up land outside of Hightstown, establishing Homesteads, where a good deal of unemployed Jewish textile workers moved. They established a farm and a needlework factory.

In 1939, the factory there closed down, and the cooperative farm collapsed the next year. People stayed on the land, but had to find work elsewhere. The settlement became the small town of Roosevelt.