Americans have forgotten what true leisure is. Leisure is not merely the absence of labor or the recuperation of health and vitality, so that labor can be resumed. Nor should it be compared to escapism, which by its very definition, preoccupies and prevents one from contemplating and ordering one’s mind to reality. Instead, true leisure involves being as present and attentive to reality as possible, thereby enabling oneself to receive divine insights, epiphanies, and “God’s intuitions.” Thus, true leisure transcends relaxation; it forms “the basis of culture” and it enables the human soul to find fulfillment beyond the fleeting satisfaction offered by mundane work-life-related achievement.
More so than any other feature of the American legal apparatus, so-called “blue laws” have induced American citizens to reconcile with and even embrace true leisure, entrenching it into our cultural fabric. Also known as “Sunday laws” or “Sabbath laws,” blue laws refer to the vast corpus of regulations that impose restrictions on “worldly labor or business or work of [one’s] ordinary calling” on Sundays. These predominantly local ordinances are derived from the Old Testament’s Fourth Commandment. They were originally enacted to help families—and by extension, communities—preserve time for worship, which is the highest form of leisure.
Dating all the way back to colonial times and pervading every jurisdiction in our country at one point or another, blue laws are integral to the American legal landscape. Particularly during the Early Republic, blue laws perpetuated the colonial tradition of prohibiting almost all Sunday labor, business, and worldly distractions (with an emphasis on alcohol sales). While the stated justifications for these laws as well as the extent of their enforcement vary by state and locality— blue laws deserve recognition for their “candid willingness to legislate morality” for the sake of the common good.
Consider, for instance, when newly-elected president George Washington traveled from Connecticut to a town in New York to attend worship service one Sunday in 1789, and was detained by a ‘tithingman’ for violating a Connecticut law that prohibited unnecessary travel on Sunday. Washington was only permitted to continue on his journey after he promised to go no farther than his destination town. In the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, these types of local ordinances were so ubiquitous that a federal statute in 1810 exempting post offices from any such restrictions was met with uproar. The law rendered the U.S. Postal Service the only public institution immune from local blue laws on Sundays. Accordingly, it was denounced by the New Hampshire clergy for “unavoidably divert[ing]” public attention away from the “sacred design and employments of [the] holy Day.” Modeled after a biblical jeremiad, the Presbyterian general assembly warned Congress that, should it fail to repent for passing such statute, it risked drawing down upon “our nation” the “divine displeasure.” After more than a century of controversy and sustained efforts to repeal this law, Congress finally yielded to a steadfast alliance of ministers and postal clerks in 1912 and closed down all the postal offices still operating on the Sabbath.
The federal judiciary, for its part, also reinforced the legality of blue laws when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Georgia statute in Hennington v. Georgia (1896) that prohibited trains from operating on Sundays on the grounds that this ban constituted an entirely valid exercise of police power ordered toward “the health, the morals, and the general welfare of [Georgia’s] people.” The Court’s majority in this case even went so far as to explicitly endorse Chief Justice Bleckley of the Supreme Court of Georgia’s common good justification for blue laws:
If a law which, in essential respects, betters for all the people… even against his own will [emphasis added], his minimum allowance of leisure, cannot be rightfully classed as a police regulation, it would be difficult to imagine any law that could.
Notice above how Chief Justice Bleckley qualified “the cessation of ordinary labor and business” in community-oriented general public terms. Bleckley soon expounds more explicitly—even outright philosophically—on why blue laws are indeed valid exercises of public authority:
Leisure is no less essential than labor to the well-being of man… [People] learn how to be, and come to realize that being is quite as important as doing. Without frequent leisure, the process of forming character could only be begun. It could never advance or be completed [emphasis added]. People would be mere machines of labor or business,—nothing more.
Readers may also be familiar with the Court’s more recent decision in McGowan v. Maryland (1961) in which the Court upheld blue laws against the argument that they constituted an impermissible “establishment” of religion. The Court explained that the Maryland statutes were not religious in purpose but advanced the secular goal of setting aside Sunday as a day of rest:
Throughout this century and longer, both the federal and state governments have oriented their activities very largely toward improvement of the health, safety, recreation and general wellbeing of our citizens. Numerous laws affecting…cultural activities of various kinds, now point the way toward the good life for all. Sunday Closing Laws…have become part and parcel of this great governmental concern wholly apart from their original purposes or connotations [emphasis added].
In January 2022, however, Reason Magazine published an online article by Steven Greenhut titled “Imposing Virtue by Government Edict Is Impossible.” Arguing against what he characterized as paternalism, the article quotes former president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s declaration that: “We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.” Greenhut further contends that blue laws, rather than promoting virtue, become a means for special interests—such as small businesses and beer distributors—to exploit the legislative process to limit competition. He even provides an example where alcohol distributors and unions opposed California legislation that allows distillers and breweries to ship their products directly to consumers. Greenhut concluded that this was “a cynical—not moral—effort” and uses this example to support his view that broadly-speaking “the goal of using government to achieve socially conservative ends is, as conservative writer Thomas Fitzgerald argued, ‘another bit of modernist utopianism, sure to be as brutal, yet brittle, when confronted with political reality.’”
And yet, most ironically, it is Greenhut who appears cynical and out of touch with political reality. While he concludes his article by stating that “[he] doesn’t want the government to make us virtuous… just to leave us alone,” what he is really suggesting is that a virtuous government is one that refrains from promoting virtue among its citizens. This implies that there is something inherently virtuous about a ‘hands-off’ government—a substantive moral claim just as morally-charged as the allegedly paternalistic viewpoint he seeks to discredit. Greenhut’s libertarian perspective on the role of government, despite his insinuation otherwise, is far from ‘morally neutral.’ Moreover, his characterization of blue laws as “cynical” inadvertently reveals his acknowledgment of a moral dimension in legislative efforts. By labeling these laws as “cynical,” Greenhut unknowingly admitted that all laws, including those he opposes, legislate morality in some capacity. This unintentional confession underscores the political reality that governance and morality are inextricably linked. Thus, Greenhut’s argument collapses under the weight of its own contradictions, exposing the flawed foundation of libertarian opposition to paternalism.
Another popular concern about blue laws was raised, also in January 2022, in National Review when Tal Fortgang argued that imposing top-down rules on a population that neither desires them nor is prepared to change their habits to comply with them is at worst tyrannical, and, at best, a “recip[e] for disaster.” He asserted that if conservatism’s highest aims for the state are order, virtue, and shared prosperity—key elements of the common good—then there is no “surer way to undermine” these goals than through paternalism. Fortgang contended that minoritarian impositions, justified on the grounds of cultivating public virtue, are more likely to cause disorder, with large numbers of citizens protesting that their will is not represented by the authorities who introduced these seemingly “foreign” rules. He further argued that before policy can make people moral or engage in “soulcraft,” the culture must be receptive to its authority. Without a pre-existing sense that a policy is “concordant” with the habits of the people and institutions expected to follow it, Fortgang asserted that “the very theory that conceives of the past as the proper source of wisdom for contemporary issues begins to fail or, worse, backfire.”
And yet, Fortgang’s popular view that such laws are likely to backfire by imposing unwanted rules on a resistant population underestimates the obvious capacity of laws to gradually inculcate virtuous habits among citizens over time. Consider the very essence of governance: it is not merely a reflection of current public sentiment, but it is also a “parental…wise teacher” capable of influencing citizens’ habits, even initially against citizens’ wills and perceptions of what is best for them. Historical precedents abound with instances in which initially unpopular laws eventually garnered widespread acceptance and furthered the end of justice. Civil rights legislation, for example, faced substantial resistance, but ultimately furthered the common good by legislating equality between races. Far from imposing capricious and tyrannical rules from above, blue laws function with great foresight and prudence by gently closing off certain options and activities, thereby nudging citizens towards more enriching ways to spend their time.
Moreover, the claim that minoritarian impositions induce disorder overlooks the fact that all laws, at their enactment, face some opposition. Resistance does not inevitably induce chaos, but often leads to dialogue about values and priorities. Again, such assertion that policy must always be concordant with existing habits to be effective is an oddly static view of culture. In reality, culture influences but is also always influenced by the laws that govern it; a two-way street.
Blue laws, properly understood then, are not in the least bit tyrannical. To the contrary, they liberate us. They teach, habituate, re-form, and encourage citizens to develop loftier desires, to cultivate better habits, and to act on beliefs that align with the promotion of communal well-being—which paradoxically, “is also best for individuals.”
In light of the foregoing facts, can there be any doubt that our Polity was better-ordered, healthier, and saner when these local ordinances were more ubiquitously enforced?
Despite its centrality to our legal system, 21st-century mass consumerism continues to gnaw away at this soon-to-be forgotten heritage, threatening to—and largely succeeding at—dissolving any remaining reverence for sacred time. By repealing blue laws and thus treating the Sabbath like any other day; our hyperactive, productivity-obsessed, mass media–addicted citizenry has largely lost its appreciation for, let alone its ability to partake in, true leisure. Is it any wonder then, in such an overstimulated yet banal modern culture, in which citizens scarcely can carve out any significant space or time to reflect on reality, that mental health crises are rising precipitously? As physicist Blaise Pascal famously concluded, “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” And yet instead of targeting what is surely the root cause of so many of society’s modern ills, and despite post-liberal thinkers like Sohrab Ahmari imploring the Right to pursue Sabbatarianism as a concrete campaign, the conservative legal movement’s attention remains scattered elsewhere, mainly treating mere symptoms of this deep-seated problem.
Without condescending the significance of recent landmark legal victories such as those which protected the right to public prayer and the right to life, what does it say about today’s conservatives that so few elected representatives are willing to stick their necks out in the public square for the most conservative thing fathomable: one’s connection with Truth and Beauty itself via true leisure? At an even higher level, what does such pervasive lack of political courage say about the importance of reengaging in local politics to unseat those who refuse to acknowledge, much less prioritize, the pressing need for modern blue law revival amid our emergent culture of “total labor”?
Our increasingly modern world, dominated by ceaseless labor and consumption, raises a poignant alarm: unless we reclaim the virtues of silence and non-activity—replacing frantic amusements with meaningful repose—we will inevitably lose touch with the Good, and with it, anything worth laboring for.
