After reading Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything and his subsequent call for a counter revolution, it occurs to me that the “broken widows policy” of such a counter movement might be (could be)… restoring Sunday Blue Laws?
Stick with me.
We want abortion abolished. We want Obergefell overturned. We want Christian culture restored.
But what if we focused simply on getting liquor stores to close again on Sunday, and sports, gambling, fishing, and all youth activity to be disallowed until at least 1 PM?
This would include online activity too: i.e., your Xbox won’t work from 6 AM to 1 PM on Sunday morning, and you won’t be able to search Google, check email, receive or send a text either.
Am I tracking with anyone?
My idea is along the lines of the broken windows policy. You enforce the laws against petty crimes and the larger crimes will diminish.
Want to end abortion? Enforce the sabbath. See what I’m getting at?
My logic is this: we can try to tackle the big problems (like abortion), but we haven’t had much success. Or we can start with the (seemingly) smaller problems (sabbath breaking) and see what happens.
As it turns out, keeping the sabbath is higher on Jehovah’s Top 10 than murder, so maybe He is telling us something about how to organize society?
Blue laws typically were enacted at the county and state levels. They were patchwork and often hyper local.
We’ve seen that post Dobson a generation is upset because they think they’ve lost their civil right to deprive another human being of his life without due process.
Mistakenly, they thought they had a “constitutional right” to murder an unprotected class of human beings.
But their ire frankly underscores a fundamental use of the law: to shape the public perception of right and wrong.
This use of the law and legality is precisely what I’m getting at with regard to blue laws.
Once a generation lives under such laws again — and understands that Sunday is set aside (even if they never go to church) — they and society benefit from the good that is sabbath keeping.
(For the health benefits of Blue Laws see: “Blue Laws, Religious Observance, and Health Outcomes.” NBER. Accessed March 11, 2024.)
This is what I was getting at in my sermon two Sundays ago.
There is no neutrality in the public square. There never was.
Christians must re-politicize both for their own protection and to go on the cultural offensive.
Fake Neutrality: stores open, do whatever you want on Sunday.
Real Christian Polity: we won’t force you to go to church Sunday morning, but there won’t be much else for you to do either.
For this to work we will need to tout the benefits (health and otherwise) of an “enforced” day of rest + digital detox.
When I worked in a secular marketing job, Sundays were just days you (usually) didn’t go in to the office, but by Sunday afternoon, you were certainly “working” just to have a fighting chance of staying on top of your week.
The few exceptions each year were Christmas week and late August.
Then you knew, finally, that you didn’t have to check your email, or that the dreaded red light on your Blackberry wouldn’t be blinking as much.
It was bliss. God wants that for all of us — even the heathens and the livestock — no less than once a week!
Blue Laws and sabbath-keeping aren’t so far removed from us, even in 2024.
There are buildings in New York City where the elevators go into sabbath mode on Friday at sundown.
Blue laws prohibiting alcohol sales on Sunday survived in Connecticut until 2012.
I bet the majority of us would still take a Sunday off, if we could, even if it were enforced.
Even today, even in godless New York, Sunday is noticeably more restful.
The Jews have long since carved out concessions for their sabbath, and they are mostly concentrated in a few areas. Muslims, the same. So, we’re really targeting a majority of Americans for whom the idea of Sunday still has some concept of rest built into it.
Several states have dramatically reduced porn consumption simply by requiring age verification. Again, broken windows.
Want your country back?
Start with the small things.