The Jersey Shore community of Ocean Grove is the last of its kind, a camp meeting ground founded in the 19th century by Methodists as a summer retreat. Another, Pittman Grove, is now owned by the borough of Pitman in Gloucester County and a U.S. historic district. A third, Ocean City, has grown into America’s Greatest Family Resort — a wealthy, bustling and heavily developed summer destination.
All three were founded as quiet places for healthy recreation and spiritual growth, where some simple religious customs would be observed. Public sale and consumption of alcohol was prohibited. Some businesses and activities were restricted on Sundays to preserve the Sabbath as a day of rest.
Only Ocean Grove — which sits oceanfront just south of Asbury Park — still has its functioning camp meeting association with historic wooden Tabernacle for gatherings, and some of its inducements to a quieter, more contemplative life.
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Some of the most important customs have been forcibly ended by outside opponents and courts. Perhaps the most distinctive was the prohibition of driving motor vehicles on Sundays. The only legal exception was for emergency vehicles. That made Ocean Grove a refuge for one day each week from the state’s overbearing car culture. Ordering the mile-square community to always allow driving opened the door to many other efforts to end its distinct character.
Lately some outside agitators and the state of New Jersey are targeting another core custom, Sunday beach closures. Until the 1980s, the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association had kept beaches closed Sundays, then relaxed the policy and opened them at noon from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
Religious tolerance in America these days too often includes requiring that religious practices not differ in any meaningful way from secular ones. After some busybodies complained to the state about the hours of the Ocean Grove beach, the Murphy administration told the borough it was violating beach access law. Within a few weeks, the Department of Environmental Protection was threatening the camp meeting association with fines of up to $25,000 a day.
That’s a lot of enforcement zeal for a possible minor violation that seems to hurt no one.
Ocean Grove is only a mile wide. That leaves about 129 other miles of the Jersey Shore available for beach use before noon on Sundays.
Over the entire summer, the Sunday closing only amounts to 45 hours. Neighboring Asbury Park closed its twice-as-large beach for two days last summer — including all access to the ocean — for a music festival. There’s no religious custom in that, though, so apparently it was just fine.
There is a certain poetic justice when power shifts and people who used to impose behaviors now find different behaviors are imposed on them. There is some humor when people freed from being judged then enthusiastically get to work judging others. We encourage them to at least stop short of actually harming each other.
New Jersey, within the memory of those still living, had Blue Laws statewide prohibiting the Sunday sale of clothing, building supplies, furniture, appliances and more. They still apply in reduced form in Bergen County, which didn’t opt out of them like the rest of the counties and now is almost unique in ultra-commercial America.
Ocean Grove will inevitably be dragged into modern life, for good and bad. There is too much money to be made doing so, and too little protection left in the charter New Jersey granted to the camp meeting association more than a century ago, granting it authority over Ocean Grove and its beach.
The borough is charming to visit, with a quaint little district of restaurants and businesses. The shore will be poorer for the passing of this former way of life. Maybe its character will carry into its future in a helpful way, as camp-meeting benevolence kept Ocean City family friendly as it grew into a major tourism destination.