From the WSJ Opinion Archives
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
Out of the Blue
New Yorkers can now buy liquor on Sundays--and that's a shame.
Last Sunday New Yorkers were able to buy liquor thanks to a legislative change that shreds a final civil defense of the Christian Sabbath. Restrictions began in 1641, when the Dutch colonial governor Willem Kieft banned sales during church services and after 10 p.m. in New Amsterdam. Ever since, these restrictions have tightened and eased--a barometer of the public role given to religion.
Many celebrate the demise of another restriction on personal liberty. The bill was opposed, almost solely, by small retailers who do not want expand staffing or hours. Religious leaders were curiously silent on a topic that so animated the Puritans in New England and Dutch in New York. It was their failure to establish a God-fearing and Sabbath-keeping society in Europe that drove the Puritans to try again here. On Sundays, they succeeded.
By 1840, Sunday was the nation's respite. On that day, Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "the trading and working life of the nation seems suspended; all noises cease; a deep tranquillity, say, rather the solemn calm of meditation, succeeds the turmoil of the week, and the soul resumes possession and contemplation of itself."
It came at a cost, as always with the Sabbath. At Sinai, the Lord decreed death for those who desecrate it. Among Christians, who switched to Sunday in memory of Easter, observance became lax by the 16th century. Drinking, sport and other pastimes filled the day instead of church, or after it. In the 1580s, English Protestants began preaching a renewed version of the fourth commandment. Sabbatarianism spread among the believers but was refuted by King James I, whose "Book of Sports" oriented the day toward recreation.
The Puritans set sail for America. Thomas Shepard expressed the common belief that "religion is just as the Sabbath is, and decayes and growes as the Sabbath is esteemed." The Puritans and other settlers levied fines on Sabbath-breakers. Later offenses could draw a whipping or even death, though rarely imposed. While the modern mind imagines coerced observance to be the only kind, many colonists found rest and renewal on Sunday. Eventually, New Englanders congratulated themselves for keeping the best Sabbath in all Christendom.
Drinking was a particular target, even in the less religious, and more profit-minded, Dutch colonies along the Hudson River. Kieft first prohibited immorality and immoderate drinking on all days and then restricted Sunday liquor sales, which provoked unrest and led to his recall. His successor, Peter Stuyvesant, further limited sales to between mid-afternoon and 9 p.m. But Dutch colonial authorities, and later English ones, found their zeal tempered by New Yorkers' resistance to moralizing. Religious ideals and popular appetites seesawed for centuries.
In 1857, high-minded Republicans in the New York Legislature banned all liquor sales on Sunday. In the 1890s, Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt raided saloons keeping Sunday hours and enforced other dormant blue laws. But his crackdown alienated German voters, who treasured Sunday afternoons in the beer garden, and Jews who wanted to work on Sunday after keeping their own Sabbath on Saturday.
These seeming excesses, however, were signs of a covenant that Christians and Jews believed was established long ago with God. In America, Sabbatarianism bolstered the day of rest as a legal right for workers. Eighty years ago, New York's Gov. Al Smith invoked the commandment as he thundered against the factory owners who favored seven days of labor. More recently, Eliot Spitzer, its current attorney general, resecured the right of employees to a day of religious observance.
We are not entirely free of religion's mindset: The new law allows Sunday sales during virtually the same hours as did the Dutch. You still can't sneak out and buy a bottle during a too-long morning homily. It also requires retailers to close at least one day a week, echoing the one-day-in-seven teaching of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Still, most of the blue laws are long gone. But at what cost? Religion should be observed or ignored freely, but a social consensus often protects society's least powerful members. My German immigrant grandfather reveled in Sunday's socially mandated respite. He wore his best suit on family picnics to Central Park and proclaimed: "Today no one knows I work in a brewery."
Many a person today must look back wistfully at our ancestors who found in their peaceful Sunday a fulfillment of the rest God took after Creation and a promise of the eternal Sabbath yet to come.
Mr. Ringwald is the author of "The Soul of Recovery: Uncovering the Spiritual Dimension in the Treatment of Addictions."
