Sunday Is No Longer The Day Of Rest

Dear Byron,

A couple days ago, I heard from your daddy that he, your mommy and you will soon be moving to the city where GGMa and I live, because your daddy has a new job here. Needless to say, we're excited. We'll get to see you a lot more than we have during this past year. As I've noted earlier, things are always changing. Today I'd like to tell you how weekends have changed since I was your age.

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 and shopping was impossible. Instead of working on Sunday afternoons we'd go visit some of our relatives and friends. 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 for the entire family.

Laws enforcing the use of Sunday or the Sabbath were called "blue laws." The first occurrence of the phrase blue law was found in the New-York Mercury of March 3, 1755, where the writer imagines a future newspaper praising the revival of "our Connecticut's old 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 made laws with 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 has 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 back in my youth—12-packs of Bud, the NFL on TV, catching up with the week's accumulated errands, kids' soccer games, shopping for Apple's latest iPad at the mall and moving through a 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 like every other day. As a result, commercial culture really took hold of it, as it had on the other six.

Today, 37 states permit Sunday sales of liquor, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. The Council boasts, "Reforming outdated Sunday sales restrictions on distilled spirits has been one of the Distilled Spirits Council’s most successful legislative initiatives at the state level. Since 2002, 15 states have joined the list of states allowing Sunday sales: Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington." Notice that the list includes Massachusetts, where some of the earliest moral-conduct laws were passed. My own growing-up state, Minnesota, is still working on the idea. All four surrounding states allow it.

We have erased the older distinctions between workdays and the day of rest. The Bible gives us a long history of how the original Israelites were forbidden to work on the Sabbath or Saturday, the seventh day. I've published a study of that topic. I've titled it Day of Rest. In my short book I suggest that we all have a lot to learn from the Third Commandment and the laws that grew out of it. Of course, we Christians are not bound by those laws since they are but a shadow of all the true rest and peace that is ours in the Lord Jesus (Col. 2:16-17).

A while back I read that People's United Bank in Bridgeport, Conn.—a bank—focused an entire promotional campaign on Super Bowl Sunday. Well Byron, you'll soon learn about the importance of Super Bowl Sunday. I'm hoping and praying that you and your family will be able to join us on the next Super Bowl Sunday at church. And then, after a relaxing Sunday dinner, we can all watch the big football game on the TV together. I pray that the importance of family worship and being together never goes away regardless of how Sundays and weekends change.

All our love,

GGPa