Holy Leisure: Recreation and Religion in God's Square Mile. - book review

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 2002 by Karen A. Bradley

Holy Leisure: Recreation and Religion in God's Square Mile, by T ROY MESSENGER. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000, 171 pp., $17.95 (paper).

When I first saw the title of this book I expected that I was going to read about some kind of Disney-like Bible Land or perhaps a Parting the Red Sea Water Park. I imagined the thrills and chills of contemporary recreation. In contrast, the book I opened read more like a scenic Sunday drive. You coast past Ocean Grove, New Jersey, at the turn of the century -- window down, warm wind blowing through your hair.

Holy leisure is an historical account of Ocean Grove. The book is buoyant with metaphorical language but basically, Ocean Grove, a Methodist derived resort area in New Jersey, was founded in 1869 and persists to this day, albeit in less encompassing form. Coming out of the Holiness camp meeting tradition, it was to be a place where residents could practise the concept of holiness, in particular the doctrine of perfectionism. Messenger grounds the discussion in the historical rise of leisure time in the United States and the theological transitions occurring within the Methodist church and Holiness movements. Specifically, Ocean Grove was to be a place of "holy leisure." To tell this story, the author relies on a wide variety of ethnographic and historical materials including histories, letters, blueprints, songs, legal documents, festival customs, and art. How the author selected the sources or the strategies he utilized to analyze the sources remains unarticulated.

Conceptually, Messenger organizes the book around themes that stem from a "performance" orientation. For example, he looks at Ocean Grove's organization of time and space that allowed for the performance of holiness. It is a story about how expressive frontier camp experiences of frantic holiness became disciplined and re-expressed through order and camp schedules.

At the heart of the book are extended discussions of three interesting, and at first appearance unrelated, themes: gender, bodily health, and scaled models. Women were a fundamental part of the evolution of the concept of perfectionism and the use of the holiness camp format. However, while this innovativeness was encouraged, traditional gendering was simultaneously performed, even down to the use of cross-dressing usher performances. For me, it was spooky how the rhetoric of Ocean Grove mirrors the rhetoric of contemporary neo-fundamentalists.

In addition, Messenger demonstrates how the concept of "muscular Christianity" emerged and was able to make a logical connection between bodily recreation and spirituality. Ocean Grove was to be a place where the sea, its water and its breezes, were to be used as a means to restore grace to the body and help form the perfect community. This stands in interesting contrast to the popular contemporary effort to reincorporate the body into the practice of spirituality. Bodily/spiritual health was indicated in numerous ways, but for women, it was specifically celebrated during the annual baby parade.

Lastly, Messenger demonstrates how spiritual education became facilitated and enacted in relation to the construction and use of "models" of ancient religious places. Scaled models of holy places were used as educational aids for biblical instruction but also were used metaphorically to reference the "New Zion" position of Ocean Grove. However, Messenger does not emphasize the way in which this practice fused scientific fact into the faith experience.

Overall the author does some creative things, largely stemming from his use of a performance orientation to examine how spirituality becomes enacted and practiced. Importantly, the book stays focused on both the motivating theological principles as well as the structural manifestations, such as how the resort was actually constructed physically.

My difficulties with the book were twofold. First, I found the book to move a little slowly (hence the Sunday drive image). There is a lot of historical detail for such a small book, more importantly, I think the author revisits the same detail in multiple places. Secondly, the book's content is divorced from the research process that constructed it. Holy leisure begins with a very nice reflective piece by the author that places him within the contemporary Ocean Grove context. Beyond that, however, there is not a conscious effort to ground the history telling of Ocean Grove within any social location or context. (An obvious example would be Messenger's omission of the details of his research method.) That is, the author disappears as the story teller, and the history reads omnisciently. I found that to be a constant distraction to me as I was reading. Even so, I would recommend this book to those interested in thinking about how time, space and body have been linked historically to theology, religious organiz ation and the practice of spirituality. Messenger quietly succeeds in that capacity.