Separation of Church and State
History of Sabbath Laws
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Today there are a variety efforts from different quarters in the religious community to enforce their (traditional Christian) sabbath as a legally mandated day of rest for everyone, This is quite regrettable, since priests have no business calling upon our government to give them and their religious sects any sort of favoritism. Religion can be respected, but neither religion in general nor specific religious groups deserve such special treatment.
Sundays, like every other day of the week, belong to everybody - not just the church It would be an undeniable violation of church-state separation for laws to be written which would effectively give Sundays to those churches which look upon it as special.
Origins
It has often been said that if you want to know where a law is going, then you should take a look at where it has come from. In America the earliest Sunday-closing laws date back to 1610 in the colony of Virginia. They included not simply the mandatory closing of businesses on Sundays, but also mandatory church service participation. Considering the comments made by some religious leaders, I have to wonder if they wouldn't approve of such steps again.
In the New Haven colony the list of activities prohibited on Sundays were supposedly written on blue paper, thus giving us the notorious phrase "blue laws." The process of the American Revolution and the crafting of our Constitution tended over time to disestablish churches throughout the new states, thus also eliminating "blue laws" (this will come as a shock to those who advocate the myth that America was founded as a "Christian Nation"). However, such laws did linger on in various forms in a number of areas.
Opposition to these restrictive laws has always come from a variety of places - with religious groups often standing at the forefront of dissent. Jews were among the earliest protestors of the mandatory Sunday-closing ordinances. Being forced to close on Sundays caused them obvious economic hardships since they normally closed on Saturdays for their own sabbath. Of course, there is also the serious issue of their being forced to observe, even if in limited fashion, the sabbath of someone else's religion. Jews have long suffered from such problems when living in societies which assume Christianity is the "norm" and legislate appropriately
Although Catholics and most Protestants claim to follow the "true" sabbath on Sundays, some minority Christian groups take their doctrines from very early Christian practices: prior to 200 C.E., Saturday was the primary weekly sabbath. Even into the fourth century different churches might observe either or even both days as the sabbath. For this reason, some Christian groups in America have also opposed Sunday-closing laws - notably Seventh-day Adventists and Seventh-day Baptists. They, too, observed their sabbath on Saturdays and SDA congregations were sometimes arrested en masse since they generally engaged in the proscribed activities on Sundays.
Thus, Christian claims of adhering to a holy day mandated by their god stands on rather shaky ground. Fundamentalist Protestants who commonly advocate breaches in church/state separation such as represented by blue laws conveniently ignore the fact that their proposals not only trample upon the rights of other theists (like Jews), but also other Christians.
Legal Challenges
With such opposition, it isn't unsurprising that blue laws were challenged in the courts. Although the first Supreme Court challenge was not brought by either a Jew or a Christian minority sect, it did involve what was to be the ultimate downfall of a legally enforced sabbath: commerce. By 1961, when the Supreme Court decided its first modern sabbatarian case, most states had already started easing restrictions and granting a variety of exemptions. Although this improved freedom, it created a patch-work of laws and regulations which were all but impossible to follow.
Consolidating two different complaints - one from Maryland and one from Pennsylvania - the Court ruled 8-1 that laws mandating that businesses be closed on Sundays do not violate the Constitution. This was one of the lowest moments in the area of church-state separation for our highest Court because the justices completely set aside the First Amendment and lamely held that the blue laws had become "secularized" over the years, even though the purpose had been religious. This sounds suspiciously like the reasoning behind rulings which allow the "secularized" display of religious icons during Christmas.
It was poor logic and even worse legal interpretation, but it couldn't save the blue laws in the face of rampant secularization across society. Over time, they had to fade away as the public came to want to shop on Sundays and retailers, ever anxious to increase sales and profits, urged local and state governments to change or eliminate the restrictive ordinances. There was natural opposition to these changes on the part of religious leaders, but their best efforts were of little effect against the will of the people - a lesson priests and religious demagogues keep having to relearn.
The stores opened up on Sundays and a willing public came to shop - not because of the dictates of an evil, atheist Supreme Court, but instead because it was what the people wanted to do. Leaders on the Religious Right even to this day seem to have a great deal of difficulty in understanding this concept. In his 1991 tirade The New World Order, evangelist Pat Robertson falsely accused the Supreme Court of having eliminated blue laws in the very 1961 case in which they upheld them.
Read More: Sabbath Questions Today
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