On January 8, the Heritage Foundation—the same organization that authored the notorious Project 2025—released “Saving America by Saving the Family,” a far-reaching policy agenda that calls for the restoration of “blue laws” in order to establish a “uniform day of rest” on Sundays, with the purpose of saving the nation before its 250th anniversary on July 4, 2026. The basis of its genesis, or inspiration, comes on the heels of Project 2025, which the current President’s administration largely implemented last year.
MAIN ARGUMENT AND PURPOSE
The Heritage Foundation’s policy agenda proposal puts forward one central theme—a “uniform day of rest” so that families can grow, have more babies, be more prosperous, and be healthier in the effort to heal the so-called social ills of the nation. The enumerated stated purposes and accompanying proposals include the following:
• To reverse declining birth rates in the U.S. and promote traditional family structures, viewing low fertility as a national crisis.
• This specifically includes significant tax credits for parents, bonuses for larger
families, new tax-advantaged savings accounts for newborns and married couples, and making childcare benefits available for parental care instead of paid childcare.
• This new initiative by the Heritage Foundation is part of the larger “Project 2025,” a conservative agenda to reshape government.
The purpose sounds good, right?
But then comes the legal and historical rationale. And here’s the rub: while European countries have a ton of local and provincial Sunday business closing laws—to shut down the sale of liquor to limit crime, etc. the central motivation and rationale has been mostly secular, with statements about churchgoing never being taken seriously.
But there’s the difference with the Heritage Foundation proposal. It is not just a political advocacy organization. It is also the right hand of the Christian Right in America. Its genesis and inspiration is Christian Nationalism, and it seeks to promote Christian Nationalism through legal and constitutional means—at least as far as they are able to get legislators and courts at all levels to subtly reinterpret the Constitution, and state and local statutes to reflect their revisionist history of our country’s founding. This has been well documented through books and articles over many years, especially in recent years.
The unspoken motive for a “uniform day of rest” is to encourage people to go back to church and make people more religious. But the United States has a long history of being a churched people. And yet, their warfare against secularism persists. The beast is the
underbelly of these so-called angelic motives. But that is for another article.
The legal framework used by the Heritage Foundation is based on a Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of “blue laws,” which are state laws that prohibit certain commercial activities on Sundays. The Court ruled in McGowan v. Maryland (1961) that while these laws originated from religious tradition, they served a legitimate secular purpose of providing a uniform day of rest and recreation, thus not violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The case established that laws with religious origins can be constitutional if they have a modern, secular justification.
Employees of a Maryland department store were convicted for selling items like a stapler and a toy on a Sunday, which was prohibited by state law. The employees argued the law violated the Establishment Clause by promoting Christianity. The Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision, upheld the law. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that the laws’ purpose had evolved from religious observance to a secular goal of a common day of rest for the
community’s well-being. The Court found the laws did not violate the Free Exercise Clause because the employees claimed only economic injury, not a burden on their own religious practices. The decision affirmed that states can enforce Sunday closing laws as long as they serve a secular purpose, even if they have religious roots.
Sunday blue laws are in nearly every state and in many counties but are mostly dormant.
(See “The Obsolescence of Blue Laws in the 21st Century” by Ira P. Robbins, Stanford Law & Policy Review, 2022, Vol. 33:289-334.)
SO WHAT?
There are several predictable reactions to this, especially for communities of faith who may observe or worship on a day other than Sunday, such as Jews, or Seventh-day Adventists.
One reaction: “Sunday Laws? Sunday Laws! Run to the hills and mountains! Stock up, and prepare for persecution.”
Another reaction emanates from what I call the doctrine of prophetic inevitability: “Yawn. Nothing to worry about. We knew this was coming, and we can’t do anything about it.”
The one reaction among even Sabbath-keepers that hasn’t been expected until recent years—in the wake of rising social, constitutional, and political upheaval in our beloved country—is that “a ‘uniform day of rest’ might do some good.” This is an alarming and compromised position. Combined with the doctrine of prophetic inevitability, this response represents complicity.
Finally, there is one more reaction that has real merit, even though it unnecessarily minimizes this formal threat. Project 2025—not to be confused with this new document put forward by the Heritage Foundation—has created the framework for authoritarianism, and has virtually turned our country into a police state, brutally rounding up and arresting both illegal and legal immigrants, and sending them to gulag-like torture prisons overseas and in the U.S. Thus, the rapidly growing concern and reaction to the news regarding Sunday Blue Laws is that the threat of blue laws should not be our overriding concern—that we should rather sound the alarm and cry out in anguish when an innocent woman is shot in the face three times for protesting injustice, or for the immigrants who are daily mistreated and tortured. This is not to mention the many other acts of injustice that seriously deserve our attention. As Christian author Charles Mills recently put it: “Concentrate on what’s happening instead of what might happen.”
I don’t think concern regarding Sunday Laws negates our responsibility and advocacy on these very critical issues.
So, why should calls for a “uniform day of rest” be taken very seriously right now? Because Sunday closing laws (i.e., business closing laws) have been historically connected to Sunday worship laws—during the Colonial Puritan era, and in the Southern States in the Post-Reconstruction era.
Sunday Laws are a means of getting a foot-in-the-door toward influencing states to legislatively enact restrictive worship laws in violation of the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment. And when you add to this the successful influence Project 2025 has had at the Executive level of the federal government so far, and its disastrous effects, one must not be too dismissive of this formal-documented call specifically
addressed to federal and state lawmakers.
Don’t be a scoffer. We are living in serious times.
