The page number
Most warnings about a Sunday law ask you to trust the person giving the warning.
This one does not.
There is a book. It was published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023 under the title Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it runs to more than nine hundred pages, and its Department of Labor chapter was written by a lawyer named Jonathan Berry. On page 589 there is a subsection. The subsection has a heading, and the heading is two words.
Sabbath Rest.
Here is how it opens.
“God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest, and until very recently the Judeo-Christian tradition sought to honor that mandate by moral and legal regulation of work on that day.”
Mandate for Leadership, p. 589
Read that sentence slowly, because two claims are packed into it and only one of them is about theology. The first is that God ordained the day. The second is that the tradition honoured it by legal regulation, and that the loss of legal regulation is the thing to be repaired.
The paragraph goes on to give the reasons. A shared day off lets families and communities enjoy time together, in its own phrase, rather than as atomized individuals. It provides a healthier cadence of life for everyone. That common day has eroded under the pressures of consumerism and secularism, especially for low-income workers.
Then comes the mechanism, and the mechanism is what matters.
Congress is asked to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act so that workers must be paid time and a half for hours worked on the Sabbath. The day defaults to Sunday. An employer with a sincere religious observance at another time, Friday sundown to Saturday sundown for instance, shifts the obligation to that period instead. Houses of worship are exempt. So are employers legally required to operate around the clock, hospitals and first responders among them, and so is anyone already exempt from overtime.
Notice where the accommodation sits. It is keyed to the religion of the employer, not of the employee.
It is not a ban, and nobody is arrested. It is a price, laid on the employer, for opening on a day the statute names.
That is the whole proposal, and you can read it yourself. The publisher’s own download link has since been retired, but the full text is preserved and searchable at the Internet Archive.
- Mandate for Leadership, full text, Internet Archive
- Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, citing page 589
The dissent Heritage printed against itself
We could stop there, and you would think worse of us for it.
Immediately after the proposal, on the same page, the book prints a box headed Alternative View. It is Heritage arguing with Heritage, in public, in its own volume.
“While some conservatives believe that the government should encourage certain religious observance by making it more expensive for employers and consumers to not partake in those observances, other conservatives believe that the government’s role is to protect the free exercise of religion by eliminating barriers as opposed to erecting them.”
Mandate for Leadership, p. 589, Alternative View
The dissent’s argument is that a Sabbath overtime rule raises costs, limits access to goods and services, and perversely tempts some workers to want the Sabbath shift because it pays more. The proper role of government, it says, is to reduce barriers so that a man can negotiate his own schedule with his own employer.
Notice what this box proves and what it does not.
It does not prove the proposal is harmless. It proves that the people who published it knew exactly how contested it was, and printed the objection anyway. Anyone who tells you that Heritage wants a Sunday law, without mentioning that Heritage also printed the case against it, is telling you a simpler story than the document supports.
We would rather you heard that from us.
The same idea, restated without God
The 2023 proposal named God in its first sentence. That is a difficult sentence to defend in a hearing room, and the objection to it came from every direction at once.
So watch what happened next.
On 8 January 2026 the Heritage Foundation published a special report titled Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years. On pages 38 and 39 there is a section, and the section is headed Support for a Uniform Day of Rest.
“A uniform day of rest that limits commercial activity can provide temporal boundaries that help communities to set aside time for religious observance, family gatherings, outdoor activities, and rest.”
Heritage Special Report 323, p. 38
God is not in that sentence. Religious observance appears, but it appears fourth in a list, between family gatherings and outdoor activities. The section observes that the Postal Service does not deliver on Sundays, that most banks are closed, that most organised youth sports avoid Sunday fixtures, and that a well-known restaurant chain closes for the benefit of its workers and their families. It notes that on-demand delivery makes shopping easy to shift to another day. It quotes a Massachusetts statute guaranteeing twenty-four consecutive hours of rest in every seven.
Its concrete ask is modest. Communities being planned or redeveloped should consider building rest days into their master plans.
And its legal argument is a Supreme Court case from 1961.
The door that is already open
The case is McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420, decided in 1961.
Maryland had a Sunday closing law. Employees of a discount store were convicted of selling a loose-leaf binder, a can of floor wax, a stapler and a toy on a Sunday. They argued that the statute established religion. The Supreme Court agreed that these laws had begun as wholly religious sanctions and had been enforced as such for centuries, and upheld them anyway, on the ground that a state may now pursue the secular goal of a common day of rest even where the day it chooses is the majority’s day of worship.
That holding has never been overruled.
It is the reason the January 2026 report cites McGowan by name on the page where it makes its case. The constitutional question that most Americans assume was settled against Sunday laws was in fact settled in their favour, sixty-five years ago, and nothing since has disturbed it.
There is a second case you should know, and it cuts against the comfortable reading, which is exactly why we are giving it to you.
In Estate of Thornton v. Caldor, 472 U.S. 703, decided in 1985, the Court struck down a Connecticut statute that gave every employee an absolute right not to work on his chosen Sabbath. That law, the Court held, took no account of the burden on employers or on other workers, and so advanced religion impermissibly.
Set the two side by side and the shape is uncomfortable.
A law that closes commerce on the majority’s day stands. A law that guarantees the individual dissenter his own day falls. That is not a prophecy. It is two citations, and you can pull both this afternoon.
Who is now in the office
On 7 October 2025 the Senate confirmed Jonathan Berry as Solicitor of Labor.
The Solicitor is the Department of Labor’s chief legal officer. He directs the department’s litigation and its legal policy across more than a hundred and eighty statutes, and the Fair Labor Standards Act is one of them. It is the statute the Sabbath Rest proposal would amend.
Now the honest part.
We have looked, and we find no Sabbath rulemaking, no guidance, no legislative proposal and no public statement on the subject from him since he took office. His opening statement to the Senate committee does not mention it. No senator appears to have asked him about it at his hearing. We cannot tell you that he is working on this, because we do not know it, and we will not pretend otherwise.
What we can tell you is narrower, and still worth knowing. The man who wrote the paragraph now holds the legal post that would administer the statute the paragraph names. That is a fact about who sits in a chair. Draw from it exactly as much as it will bear, and not one inch more.
The reasons that travel
Here is the part most people miss, and it is the reason this study exists at all.
The strongest present-day movement for a common Sunday is not, in the main, a Christian movement. In Europe it is run by trade unions.
The European Sunday Alliance was founded in Brussels in 2011. It describes itself as a network of more than one hundred national alliances, trade unions, employers’ organisations, civil-society organisations, churches and religious communities. Its steering committee holds the European Confederation of Independent Trade Unions and UNI Europa, the services workers’ union, alongside Catholic and Protestant church bodies. Every 3 March it marks a European Day for a Work-Free Sunday.
Read what it actually argues.
Its 2023 statement asks for a synchronised social resting time each week so that workers may preserve their mental health, and calls a shared day an effective tool to counter loneliness. Its statement of March 2026 says that a shared work-free Sunday enables families and friends to spend quality time together, supports mental and physical well-being, and strengthens community ties, and that a guaranteed common rest period is essential for recovery from the demands of work, reducing stress and preventing burnout. The reason given for urgency is that work is being fragmented by digitalisation, teleworking and extended hours.
Mental health first, family second, faith activities last and optional.
UNI Europa has asked European leaders to establish a weekly common day of rest for workers, by tradition on Sunday. That phrase is not decoration. The European Social Charter, already signed by every member state, requires a weekly rest period which shall, as far as possible, coincide with the day recognised by tradition. It is a way of arriving at Sunday without ever naming a religion.
The legal architecture already exists in places.
In Germany, Article 140 of the Basic Law carries forward Article 139 of the Weimar Constitution, which protects Sunday and the recognised holidays as days of rest from work and of spiritual elevation. Two limbs, and the labour limb stands on its own. That is precisely why the clause survives in a secular constitutional order.
In Poland, Sunday retail trading has been prohibited since 2018, with limited exceptions and a handful of designated trading Sundays. It was won by the Solidarity trade union, not by a church. A 2024 bill from within the governing coalition to reopen two Sundays a month has sat frozen in committee ever since, opposed by Solidarity and by parties of both left and right, and defended by a left-wing labour minister on the ground that the traditional day to rest and be with one’s family is Sunday. Polling suggests a majority of Poles would prefer the extra shopping day. The restriction holds regardless, because the labour coalition holds.
- European Sunday Alliance
- European Sunday Alliance, statement of 3 March 2026
- Article 140 of the German Basic Law
The reasons that are not about labour
Two further framings deserve naming, because you will meet them.
The first is ecological. In the encyclical Laudato Si’, published in 2015, paragraph 237 sets Sunday alongside the Jewish Sabbath as a day meant to heal our relationships with God, with ourselves, with others and with the world. It quotes the command that the ox and the donkey and the servant should rest, and closes by saying that the day of rest sheds its light on the whole week and moves us to greater concern for nature and for the poor. It is a religious argument that arrives at an ecological conclusion, and it proposes no legislation whatever.
Beside it, from an entirely secular direction, sits the research on car-free days. A 2022 report by the Clean Cities Campaign found that one weekly car-free day across major European cities would cut urban transport oil consumption by roughly three to five per cent, that nitrogen dioxide fell by 86 per cent in one district of Brussels on its car-free day, and that 62 per cent of residents in major European cities support such a day. Brussels holds its car-free day on a Sunday. The report’s own comparison point is a normal Sunday. Nobody in it argues from religion, and the argument arrives at Sunday all the same.
The second framing is about time itself. The writer Judith Shulevitz has argued, in a book and in a widely heard conversation with Ezra Klein, that rest of this kind cannot be achieved privately, because a day off that your neighbours do not share is not a day off. She calls a Sabbath a giant mutual non-compete clause, a solution to a problem of collective action. If everyone closes, all may rest. If a competitor stays open, closing alone ruins you.
That is a serious argument, and we think it is largely correct.
It is also, precisely, an argument for compulsion. A collective action problem is not solved by persuasion. It is solved by a rule that binds everyone, including the man who disagrees.
Now the case against us
If we gave you only the material above, you would finish this page more certain than the evidence permits. So here is everything we found that cuts the other way, and some of it cuts deep.
No bill exists
We searched, and so have others. There is no Sunday-closing bill, no blue-law bill and no Sabbath bill introduced in Congress or in any state legislature between 2024 and the present. Not one. No elected official is on record endorsing the January 2026 recommendation. Outside a handful of religious-liberty publications, the national press did not cover it at all.
American law is moving the other way
Pennsylvania repealed its ban on Sunday hunting in July 2025, one of the last blue laws of its kind, and Connecticut let its own lapse in the same year. Sunday alcohol restrictions have been falling state by state for a decade. The one secular day-of-rest law in America that is actually being strengthened, the Illinois One Day Rest in Seven Act, deliberately names no day at all. That is exactly what makes it constitutionally safe, and exactly what makes it not a common day.
Mandates get declined
Texas passed a law in 2025 permitting school boards to adopt a daily period of prayer and Bible reading. Every district had to take a recorded vote by March 2026. Out of roughly twelve hundred districts and charter schools, fifteen opted in. Oklahoma’s mandate that public schools teach from the Bible was rescinded by the next superintendent, and the lawsuit against it was dismissed as moot in November 2025. A Texas law permitting school chaplains was similarly declined by most districts that voted on it.
Sunday bans imposed from above collapse
Hungary introduced one in 2015 and repealed it in 2016, ahead of a referendum the government expected to lose. It survived barely a year, because no labour movement owned it.
One popular claim is simply false
Closing shops one day a week does not reduce emissions. The best recent study, using location data from North Dakota’s 2019 repeal of its Sunday morning trading ban, found that the ban had cost consumers the equivalent of an extra 1.4 miles per shopping trip and had pushed shoppers across the state line. If you meet the claim that Sunday closing is green, it is not supported. The car-free day evidence concerns cars, not shops.
The current Pope has not taken up the theme
Leo XIV’s fullest teaching on Sunday, given at a general audience on 12 August 2026, is liturgical and sacramental. He calls Sunday the foundation and kernel of the whole liturgical year, and urges that the Eucharist be celebrated rather than watched at a distance. Where he touches work at all, he asks that those who cannot take Sunday off be helped to attend Mass. That is a markedly weaker social demand than the encyclical of 2015, and anyone citing him in support of a legislative campaign is misreading him.
Hold all of that in your hand at once.
It is the honest picture, and we would rather you had it from us than from someone trying to discredit us.
Then why watch at all
Because none of the counter-evidence touches the two things that actually matter.
The first is that the constitutional door stands open and nobody is trying to close it. McGowan holds. A state may close commerce on Sunday tomorrow and the courts will not stop it. What is missing is not permission. What is missing is a reason the public will accept, and the reason is being drafted, revised and tested in public, one report at a time, moving from God ordained the Sabbath in 2023 to temporal boundaries for family gatherings and outdoor activities in 2026.
The second is that the ground is shifting, and this part is measurable rather than felt.
Pew Research found in April 2026 that 17 per cent of Americans want the federal government to declare Christianity the official religion of the United States, up from 13 per cent two years earlier. Among Republicans the figure is 27 per cent. Just over half say the Bible should have at least some influence on American law, and where the Bible and the will of the people conflict, more respondents choose the Bible than choose the will of the people. A fifty-state survey by PRRI, fielded across 2025 with more than twenty-two thousand respondents, classes 11 per cent of Americans as adherents of Christian nationalism and a further 21 per cent as sympathisers, and finds 56 per cent of Republicans in one of those two groups.
The courts have moved with it. A Louisiana law requiring the Ten Commandments in every public classroom was struck down twice and then revived in February 2026, when the full Fifth Circuit vacated the injunction against it. A Texas version was upheld by the same court sitting en banc in April 2026, by nine votes to eight. An Arkansas version was permanently blocked and is on appeal to the Eighth Circuit. A petition asking the Supreme Court to resolve the split was filed in August 2026.
And the intellectual case is being made openly, by men who are not hiding it. The pastor Douglas Wilson, whose publishing house issued the most cited book of the movement, told National Public Radio in July 2026 that in a Christian nation the public space would belong to Christ, that officeholders of other faiths would have to vow to uphold a Christian constitution, and that in the last five years his position has received a far more significant hearing than it ever had before. He puts the timescale at something like two hundred and fifty years, and the method at preaching, planting churches and founding schools.
That is the shape of it. A door already open, a reason being refined, a public warming to it, courts loosening, and men stating plainly what they intend over a horizon longer than any election.
Which is why the absence of a bill is not the comfort it appears to be.
It is the window.
- Pew Research Center, 14 May 2026
- PRRI, fifty-state survey, February 2026
- National Public Radio, interview with Douglas Wilson, 7 July 2026
What Scripture actually asks of you
We set no date. We publish no timetable. We have just spent several thousand words showing you the limits of the evidence, and we are not going to spend the last few hundred pretending those limits away.
But there is a question that does not depend on the timetable at all.
It is the question of what a man will obey when two authorities require different things of him.
“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God.”
Exodus 20:8-10, KJV
The commandment does not name a legislature. It names a day, and it names the One who claims it.
Every generation that has faced this question has faced it in the same form, and it has never once arrived as a demand for idolatry. It arrives as a reasonable request, from a lawful authority, supported by good reasons, for the sake of the common good. That is what makes it hard. A demand to renounce God would be easy to refuse. A request to close your shop on a Sunday, for the sake of tired families and quieter streets, is not.
Three men in Babylon met it in that form.
“If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods.”
Daniel 3:17-18, KJV
Read the second half again.
But if not.
They settled the question before they knew the outcome. That is the whole of the matter. A man who will obey God only when obedience is safe has not settled anything at all; he has merely not yet been asked.
The apostles met it in a courtroom.
“Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men.”
Acts 5:29, KJV
They were not answering a tyrant. They were answering the lawful religious authority of their own nation, which had given them a clear and enforceable instruction for the sake of public order.
And the Lord Himself named the danger, which is not wickedness but sincerity.
“But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.”
Matthew 15:9, KJV
That is the line this whole subject turns on. Not a battle between religion and irreligion. A question of whose commandment is being taught, and by whose authority.
What to do about it
Four things, and not one of them requires you to believe anything we have said.
Read the documents
Page 589 of the Mandate for Leadership. Pages 38 and 39 of Heritage Special Report 323. McGowan, and then Caldor. Every one is linked on this page and every one is free. Form your own judgement of what they say, and of what they do not.
Do not overstate it, ever
If you tell someone that a Sunday law is about to pass, he will check, he will find nothing, and he will stop listening to you about everything else as well. The truthful version is stronger, and it costs you nothing to tell.
Search the Scriptures for the day itself
Not because we say so. The question of where the seventh day was changed to the first is answerable from the Bible alone, and it is answerable this week.
Settle the question of authority now
Not the question of the day. The question underneath it, which is who holds the right to command your worship. Settle it while it is still an argument in a report and costs you nothing, rather than at the hour when it has become a demand and costs you a great deal.
“Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.”
Revelation 2:10, KJV
If we have got any fact on this page wrong, write and tell us. We will check it, and where you are right we will publish the correction, with your name on it if you want it there.