This site puts three things side by side: what the Bible says about the last conflict over worship, what governments have already done to liberty of conscience, and what is being written down about it now, in documents anyone may download.
There is an old duty in Scripture that has nothing to do with predicting the future. The watchman on the wall was not asked to know the day of the attack. He was asked to stay awake, and to say what he saw.
“But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand.”
Ezekiel 33:6, KJV
That is the whole of our claim to your attention. We announce no date. We point at something visible: a very old idea, that the civil power may be used to enforce religious observance, is being written down again, in policy reports with page numbers, by serious people, in more than one country.
What has changed is not the idea. It is the argument for it. The case for a common day of rest is no longer made from a pulpit. It is made as family time, as protection for exhausted workers, as a remedy for loneliness, as cleaner air one day in seven. Those are good reasons, and we do not dispute a single one of them. We ask only the question that none of them reaches, which is who holds the authority to name the day.
Because God did not leave the sign of His own authority to be chosen by us. He named a day, gave as His reason the fact that He made the world, and then called that day a sign between Himself and His people.
“Verily my sabbaths ye shall keep: for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations; that ye may know that I am the LORD that doth sanctify you.”
Exodus 31:13, KJV
A sign is how allegiance is shown. So when a government names a day of its own and attaches the force of law to it, it is not merely regulating commerce. It is asking for the thing the sign was given to express. The man who keeps the day the state has named, on the day God named another, has answered a question about allegiance whether he meant to answer it or not. That is why the day is not a side issue in this subject. It is the place where the issue becomes visible.
And because none of this is hypothetical. A Sunday bill was introduced in the United States Senate in 1888. Men were fined and imprisoned in Arkansas and Tennessee for working their own land on the wrong day of the week, having already rested on the seventh. The Supreme Court, examining Sunday laws in 1961, acknowledged that they “evolved from the wholly religious sanctions that originally were enacted,” and upheld them anyway. That holding has never been overruled.
We are ordinary Bible students. We are not an institution, we speak for no church or denomination, and no denomination speaks for us. Nothing here should be read as the position of any organised body. We are not a political movement and we endorse no party. We are not against Christians in public life. We are for them. Vote, serve, argue, persuade, run for office, and let your faith shape every one of those things.
What we oppose is one specific step: the moment persuasion is exchanged for compulsion, and the machinery of the state is asked to do what only the Spirit of God can rightly do. That step has been taken before, by sincere people, for reasons that sounded good at the time.
Where we argue a point of religion we argue it from the Bible, quoted at length and in context, from the Authorized (King James) Version. We ask no one to accept a doctrine on our word, on tradition, or on the strength of a majority.
Bill numbers, case citations, statutes, dates, hearing transcripts. If a claim cannot be traced to a document a hostile reader could retrieve without trusting us, it does not appear here, however useful it might be.
Men have been announcing the year of the crisis since 1888 and have been wrong every time. We describe a principle and a mechanism, both of which are documented and intact. We do not tell you when, and we do not tell you who.
No Sunday bill has been introduced in Congress or in any state legislature. Most American Sunday laws have been repealed, and American law is currently moving further that way. Most European Sunday statutes are labour law and require the worship of no one. We put all of it on the page, because an argument that has to hide the counter-evidence is not an argument worth having.
We identify the power described in Daniel and Revelation as the Reformers identified it, and we quote Rome from Rome’s own documents rather than from anyone’s summary of them. But we name no living man as the beast, no neighbour as a persecutor, and no communion as an enemy. God has faithful people in every church, and many of them will see this more clearly than we do.
Nothing on this site is sold and nothing sits behind a wall. Copy it, print it, translate it, preach it, or take it apart in public. No permission is required and no credit is asked.
For the Sunday-keeping Christian who has never been given a reason to examine where the practice came from, and who will not be insulted here for holding it.
For the constitutionalist who cares about the First Amendment for its own sake, and can see the difference between a nation shaped by Christian conviction and a nation that legislates it.
For the man of another religion, or of none, who understands that a liberty which protects only the majority has already stopped being a liberty.
And for anyone who has read Revelation 13 and 14 carefully enough to notice what is being contested there. It is worship, and the authority to command it, and the two chapters mark out the sides by what each company keeps.
“Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.”
Revelation 14:12, KJV
If we have got something wrong, a date, a citation, a holding, a text, we want to know, and we will correct it in public. Tell us here.