Project 2025 wants to make your ‘Sabbath’ dull, dreary and dolorous

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”

Exodus 20:8–11

Sunday used to be the dreariest day of the week. Ask me.

I was a child in the 1960s when “blue laws” made everyone blue. I remember, especially in the coldest days of winter, feeling like I was under house arrest on Sundays. Now the creators of scary Project 2025 want to close down Sundays again, and America should be forewarned and refuse.

Blue laws started to be repealed by the 1970s, and life opened up. Sunday went from a day where the only thing we children could look forward to was the “Wonderful World of Disney” on TV that night to a second day of the “weekend.” More importantly, working folk didn’t have to do all their grocery shopping, errands, prescription-filling or couch-hunting over one very busy Saturday — also the only day they could take school-aged children out for ice cream, amusement rides or to buy new shoes. Americans could now run errands, pick up prescriptions, fill fridges and even go to the movies on Sundays.

I was rudely reminded of how awful Sundays could be on a cold summer day in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1975, where it was my misfortune to end up on “the Sabbath” when traveling with my cousin. Blue laws still prevailed in that rigid then-Protestant stronghold. The youth hostel kicked everyone out almost as soon as we were woken up very early, and we couldn’t get back in until dinnertime. We wandered along the cobblestones past closed tea shops along the Royal Mile, growing hungrier, colder and thirstier. Finally in the late afternoon, we realized the train station was open, where we got some of that stewed tea Scotland excels in. We gratefully filed back into the youth hostel 12 hours after we left it, happy to say goodbye to Sunday in Scotland.

Today, we take for granted that you can do many of the things on Sunday that you can do on other days, perhaps reduced hours notwithstanding. Will this still be the case if Project 2025 becomes a reality? Not if the Heritage Foundation gets its way. Let’s turn to page 589 of Project 2025, to a subsection titled “Sabbath Rest.”

“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,” states the document. “Moreover, a shared day off makes it possible for families and communities to enjoy time off together, rather than as atomized individuals, and provides a healthier cadence of life for everyone. Unfortunately, the communal day of rest has eroded under the pressures of consumerism and secularism, especially for low-income workers.”

The document continues: “That day would default to Sunday, except for employers with a sincere religious observance of a Sabbath at a different time (e.g., Friday sundown to Saturday sundown); the obligation would transfer to that period instead.”

The project calls for Congress to encourage “communal rest” (sounds kinky!), by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act to require time-and-a half pay for working on “the Sabbath” regardless of whether someone is truly working overtime. It concedes this would “lead to higher costs and limited access to goods and services and reduce work available on the Sabbath,” but after all, “the proper role of government in helping to enable individuals to practice their religion is to reduce barriers to work options and to fruitful employer and employee relations.”

Project 2025 assures us that churches, naturally, would, in most instances, be exempt from this rule! It pretends to care about workers, but clearly the real goal is to get more bodies back into churches because of less competition.

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The freethought movement has played a historic role in fighting blue laws. In researching “Women Without Superstition: The Collected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” I came across “Shall the World’s Fair Be Closed on Sunday?” by pioneering 19th-century feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Congress had voted to withhold appropriations to the 1893 Fair in Chicago if it opened on Sundays, after being petitioned by 100,000 Americans, mostly — to Stanton’s chagrin — “concerned women.”

Stanton felt so passionately about this state/church problem that she undertook a personal crusade to circulate her pamphlet objecting to the Sunday closing of the fair, which was reprinted in various newspapers. She ably mustered quotes and opinions from the New Testament and church leaders such as Calvin and Luther, as well as from contemporaries, to disprove the claims of the Sabbatarians. Neither Jesus nor Paul advocated keeping the Sabbath, Calvin deferred a sermon to attend a Sunday play and Martin Luther favored dancing on Sunday rather than observing a Jewish code. The Sunday closing laws, she averred, were antithetical to family happiness and morality. She launched her broadside at a time when the vote was being reconsidered – and her efforts paid off. Although many exhibits were closed, the World Fair as a whole stayed open on Sundays.

As Stanton wrote, “It is in very bad taste as well as grossly unjust, for Christians, comprising as they do, so very small a portion of the human family, to force their religious observances on representatives of all the nations on the Earth.”

“It has been our boast that we have no state religion, that here all sects occupy a common ground, that all faiths are equally respected,” Stanton added. “Then why should the Sunday of the Christian be more binding than that of the Jew, the Quaker, the Seventh-day Baptist, or of that increasingly large class of educated, liberal-minded people who do not believe in any penal Sundays, or imposed religious test, but who do believe in a change of employment one day in seven, when those who do the hard work of the world shall have free access to all the libraries, the galleries of art, the museums, the concerts and the public parks, there to enjoy whatever innocent amusements they may desire.”

She concluded: “This act of Congress is a fatal blow at one of the vital principles of our Government and should be resisted by all who know the danger of recognizing any union in State and Church.”

Sabbath laws of course have their origins in the bible. The version of the Fourth Commandment, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy,” quoted at the start of this essay goes on to say: “Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work . . . . For in six days the Lord made heaven and Earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.” Yes, the biblical deity has an uneasy vanity and narcissistically needs to be worshiped and obeyed by compliance with his Sabbath requirements. But that’s not all.

As most freethinkers familiar with the bible know, there are several versions of the Ten Commandments. The version of the Fourth Commandment laid out in Exodus 34 is followed by more detailed instructions in the following chapter, to wit: “Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day there shall be to you an holy day, a Sabbath of rest to the Lord: Whosoever doeth work therein shall be put to death.” (Exodus 35:2)

And that’s precisely what happens to an unlucky man found gathering sticks on the Sabbath, according to Numbers 15:23–36. The Lord says to Moses, “The man must surely be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones.” The passage duly reports that the congregation stoned him, “and he died.”

When Dan was researching his book “GOD: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction,” he discovered that next to idolatry, the second most common “evil” referred to in the Old Testament is breaking the Sabbath. (The third was interreligious marriage; none of these is immoral, much less evil.)

I suppose we should feel fortunate that Project 2025 doesn’t command the death penalty . . . yet, for working on “the Sabbath.” It’s fine if fanatics take “the Sabbath” seriously, but they can’t legislate it in a secular democracy.

Who has the time to plow through 900-plus pages of the bureaucratic authoritarianism that is Project 2025? Not many of us — and that’s what its creators are banking on. The dire political consequences of Project 2025, such as eliminating checks and balances and amassing all regulatory power in the White House, may seem like remote threats. But the threat to our Sundays is personal. Please help the Freedom From Religion Foundation get out the word about what will happen to our weekends if we fail to stop Project 2025.