The Battle for Sunday

A few years ago the various clergy in the surrounding towns banded together to write a letter to the local youth athletic associations. In it, they asked that sports teams not schedule practices or games on Sunday before 12 noon, just to give families a chance to attend worship should they be so inclined.

Given a choice between kicking around Scripture and kicking around a soccer ball, the lure was just too great for most families.

A Gallup Poll in 2005 showed about 35% of Americans attending church on a weekly basis. (On any given October Sunday, that could be two forwards and your goalkeeper.)

Note that another concurrent poll said that 80% of Americans believed in heaven while 71% believed in hell. That would suggest that there’s some sizeable percentage who believe in hell but do not believe in going to church, undoubtedly the same folks who vacation in Vegas.

It also suggests that 9%--that is, those who believe in heaven but not hell--are on Easy Street. That might explain some of the big, stupid grins I see out there. (It also shows the big, stupid misuse of statistics.)

It wasn’t that long ago that retail clerks’ jobs were in jeopardy if they refused to work Sundays during the Christmas season. That seems to have resolved itself definitively in the favor of economics and against leisure time.

When a celebrity presses the issue, it’s big news. The immortal Sandy Koufax regularly pitched on the Jewish Sabbath, but declined in 1965 to pitch in Game One of the World Series because it was Yom Kippur. Instead, Don Drysdale pitched for the Los Angeles Dodgers, giving up seven runs in just under three innings. When he was pulled from the game, Drysdale told his manager, "I bet right now you wish I was Jewish, too." (Koufax, who attended synagogue in Minneapolis during Game One, pitched Game Two and then threw complete-game shutouts in Games Five and Seven. If you’re going to press a delicate issue, it helps to be the only one in the world who can do what you do.)

Most recently, the Wall Street Journal published an article highlighting one of the last great holdouts for Sunday’s off, America’s beleaguered auto dealers.

You can go to a strip club on Sunday in Las Vegas. On a Sunday in Minnesota, you can buy a cigar. In Maine, you can buy a gun. Until July, in Colorado, you couldn't buy a bottle of gin on Sunday. Now you can buy gin and the vermouth to go with it.
What can't you do on Sunday in these places?

You can't buy a new car. In Maine, Minnesota and Colorado, plus 11 other states and assorted counties, at least 80 million Americans can kick tires on Sundays but can't sign on the dotted line. Even in Detroit, you can't buy a car on Sunday. It's against the law.

The logic is simple and secular. “Car laws simply impose an official timeout from competition. That way, everybody can relax and take a day of rest.”

The times they are a-changing, of course, with slumping sales and bailouts sought. In Rhode Island in 2007 the state's 51-year prohibition of Sunday auto sales was finally repealed.

Jim Botvin owns a Toyota dealership and Paul Masse a Chevrolet dealership in that state. They represent two sides of the same coin.

Botvin says: "You can't buy a car on Sunday? Because other dealers don't want me to sell you one? How can you tell somebody they can't open their business? Isn't it my right?"

Masse replies: "When I was a kid, on Sunday you were in church. I don't make it every Sunday now, but I'll tell you what: Even if you're not a Catholic, Sunday might be the only day you can go visit your mother."

(I loved my mom, believe me, but this seems like yet another striking reason not to support a Detroit bailout, no?)

In fact, of all the cultural conflicts in America since its founding, the preservation of the Sabbath may be the longest-running.

The big business in America in the first half of the nineteenth century, before the telegraph, and before railroads introduced national operations, watches and time zones, was the Post Office. In fact, the Post Office was so essential to the movement of information in the new nation that the federal government mandated that it open every day.

This overrode any local or state laws and was an extraordinary move for a nation wound so tightly around states’ rights.

But it wasn’t just states’ rights that irked our foremothers. The picture of a nineteenth-century post office was this: a male gathering place in the very worst sense. Women were not especially welcome and entered at their own risk. Many postmasters happily kept a nearby store and were delighted to provide drink by the glass.

Today: soccer or church? Yesterday: post office or church?

You see the problem.

Christian reformers like Lyman Beecher argued that the government’s rules were preventing good Christians from working for the Post Office.

Those who wanted to preserve the Sabbath, the so-called sabbatarians, took matters into their own hands, mounting a nationwide contest over public opinion aided and abetted by the only institution that could make such a thing possible in 1820s America, the Post Office. Both the sabbatarians and antisabbatarians flooded the mails with literature, a kind of dress rehearsal for emerging grassroots political campaigns and the contest over slavery. Presbyterians and Congregationalists strongly supported the sabbatarians; the folks on the frontier, desperate for news and community, tended to oppose.

Before the advent of the telegraph, the antisabbatarians prevailed, pressing their case for seven days of postal activity on behalf of merchants and the military. Once the telegraph appeared, the need to have mail shipped seven-days-a-week lessened considerably.

Still, it wasn’t until 1912, after a century of agitation, that sabbatarians (with a huge boost from organized postal workers) finally succeed in closing U.S. post offices on Sunday.

As for our church, there are still kids who come dressed in soccer uniforms from time to time. But the athletic coaches seem to have yielded, putting the needs of 35%, the church-goers, ahead of the desires of 65%. It was, ironically, a very Christian thing to do.

One assumes it may have been brokered by the 9% of those who believe in heaven but not hell. For them, the reward of another few hour’s sleep, followed by a fresh omelet and side of whole-wheat toast at the local eatery, may be why they're so sure heaven exists in the first place.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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