Americans United has been sounding the alarm about Project 2025, a radical Christian Nationalist blueprint to remake American society along theocratic lines.
Project 2025 is exactly what you would expect from Christian Nationalists. It calls for restricting reproductive freedom and rolling back LGBTQ+ rights, and it seeks to install an extreme vision of religious freedom that would enable people to use their faith to ignore many civil rights and other secular laws.
But there’s another section that could affect every American that should not be overlooked: The architects of Project 2025 want to control how you spend your weekend.
A section on employment policy, written by Jonathan Berry, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, would, if implemented, subject Americans’ leisure time to government oversight by limiting what you can do on Sundays.
“God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest, and until very recently the Judeo-Christian tradition sought to honor that mandate by moral and legal regulation of work on that day,” Berry writes. Elsewhere, he adds, “Unfortunately, that communal day of rest has eroded under the pressures of consumerism and secularism.”
Let’s be clear about what is being proposed here: This proposal would restrict your ability to decide what you want to do on Sunday. That’s the sabbath Berry and his allies are talking about. Never mind that Jews, Muslims, the nonreligious and some Christians (Seventh-day Adventists, Seventh Day Baptists and others) don’t keep Sunday as the sabbath – which means it’s hardly “communal.”
And note Berry’s use of the term “day of rest.” At first glance, that might sound nice to some stressed-out workers. But what’s really being called for here is a restriction on how you choose to spend your free time. Perhaps you’d like to spend Sunday meeting a friend for lunch, visiting a museum, taking in a sporting event or doing some shopping. Religious extremists want to stop you from doing those things on a day some people consider sacred, a day some people say their religion mandates that you stay at home (after attending church services, of course).
Sunday-closing laws, sometimes called “blue laws,” have a checkered history in America (and pre-America). The Puritans’ blue laws were so strict that they even banned people from working in their yards on Sunday. In more recent times, many states had a weird patchwork of laws that closed some retail establishments but allowed others to open depending on what was being sold. In some stores, certain items could be sold – Sunday newspapers, food, drugs – while others – toys, office supplies – could not. In Anne Arundel County, Md., a store owner was busted because he allowed a customer to buy floor wax, a stapler and a toy submarine on Sunday. (The mind boggles at the planning that must have gone into this undercover sting.)
A system this unworkable could not stand, and it didn’t. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Sunday-closing laws in 1961 in one of its more poorly reasoned decisions, the laws soon died a natural death, mainly because people wanted to do things, including shop, on Sunday. States were happy to get the tax revenue.
Yes, Americans probably work too much, and everyone deserves time off. But a state-mandated day of rest that just happens to coincide with some Christians’ sabbath isn’t the answer. That’s just more humbuggery from the Christian Nationalists at Project 2025 who are certain they know what’s best for you.
As usual, they don’t.