From Religion to Rat Race

"When I was a kid growing up in Minnesota in the 1930s and 40s, Sunday was a 24-hour stretch of family time when liquor was unavailable, church was the rule, shopping was impossible and in the towns around us, today's weekend staples like tending the lawn and playing in the park met with hearty disapproval. Of course, being farmers, we still had to care for the animals and milk the cows, but generally speaking, Sunday was a day of rest.

Laws enforcing the use of Sunday or the Sabbath were called "blue laws." The term "blue laws" originally applied to laws enacted by the Puritans in seventeenth-century Connecticut to regulate moral behavior (especially what people must or must not do on the Sabbath), laws which often called for rather harsh punishments to be applied to offenders. Blue laws typically specified penalties for moral offenses such as failure to attend church on the Sabbath; lying, swearing, and drunkenness; and the playing of games (such as cards, dice, and shuffleboard) in public. They also mandated more severe punishments for crimes committed on the Sabbath and regulated the sale and consumption of alcohol. Violators of blue laws might be assessed monetary fines, be whipped, be forced to spend time in the stocks, have body parts burned or cut off, or even receive the death penalty.

But America changed, and it dragged Sunday and the blue laws along with it. Although Sunday still means worship and family time for millions of Americans, today it also means things it once didn't: 12-packs of Bud, the NFL on TV, catching up with the week's accumulated errands, picking up some gaming DVDs at Best Buy, moving through our 24/7 culture.

"Today, for a lot of Americans, Sunday's just another day you have to go to work at Wal-Mart," said John Hinshaw, a labor historian at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa.

The Protestant notion of Sunday as a day of rest began to change in the 1800s with immigrant laborers, many Roman Catholic, who saw things differently. Many were devoted to "a Sunday that took a very different shape: church in the morning and leisure in the afternoon," said Alexis McCrossen, author of "Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday," published in 2002 by Cornell U. Press.

The 20th century brought pushes toward a shorter workweek, and a major work-reform law passed in the 1930s created more down time. This made Sunday less pivotal at the same time commercial culture really took hold.

Today, 35 states permit Sunday sales of liquor, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. In the past two years, nine states initiated Sunday sales including Massachusetts, where some of the earliest moral-conduct laws were passed. New Jersey-based Commerce Bank —a bank—once focused an entire promotional campaign around doing business on Sundays.

We have erased the older distinctions between workdays and the day of rest. I am currently exploring the Biblical history of the Sabbath and searching for ways to help twenty-first century Christians to reclaim the benefits of those Old Covenant rules that forbad work of any kind on the seventh day and invited people to come together to worship and to renew family relationships. The title of my next e-book will be "The Day of Rest." The book explores the Biblical background and the importance of a weekly day of rest for spiritual, emotional and familial renewal.

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