And keep it holy
Sunday is a tragedy of the commons
In my day job, I work as an administrator for a small college. We recently had a graduation ceremony, and it was lovely. Everyone attending the ceremony seemed to be really appreciative. There were lots of people in attendance, including many who weren’t required to be there. This is an important caveat because some people—graduates and faculty members—are required to attend.
It wasn’t always that way. For years, attendance at the graduation ceremony was optional. The reason for that is because that is what graduates asked for: While they were sure that a graduation ceremony was valuable, no one should be forced to attend. Every graduate should be allowed to make their own individual decisions about whether they want to attend graduation or not. And so the graduation ceremony almost died.
It took a couple of years of requiring attendance of graduates and faculty to resurrect the ceremony. During that time, there was grumbling about why anyone should be mandated to attend something that was so lame: if it was valuable, wouldn’t people just choose to attend on their own? Why impose a rule?
I was thinking about this in the afterglow of our most recent ceremony, while graduates gave each other hugs and snapped photos and cried bittersweet tears.
On our island, stores are closed on Sundays. The only businesses that are open on Sunday are a few restaurants that cater to tourists. This is one of the things1 tourists find most annoying about our island: “It’s so inconvenient! Someone could do a great business by being open on Sundays,” I have often heard visitors complain.
I understand their perspective, though: as an immigrant from the United States I also complained bitterly about the inconvenience of closed shops on Sunday when I first moved here, even though the expectation that businesses are open seven days a week is a relatively recent phenomenon, even in America. As late as the 1980s in the United States, most stores were closed on Sunday. One of my first paid jobs was working at a mall, and it was only after I started working there as a teenager that the mall first started having a few, very limited, opening hours on Sundays. To this day, most American states maintain laws restricting alcohol sales on Sunday, a vestige of those earlier Sunday-closure “blue laws.” In general, United States courts have upheld the constitutionality of Sunday closure laws. It’s just that American states are less and less likely to have such laws to begin with.
And why should they? Shouldn’t businesses be able to make their own decisions about their opening hours? Shouldn’t consumers be able to decide for themselves when they want to go shopping?
I recently went on vacation and traveled on a cruise ship. On the Sunday of our cruise, we were docked at the capital of the Faroe Islands. The greater Torshavn area has a population of about 23,000 people, and our cruise ship added about 1000 more.
Virtually everything was closed, because it was Sunday. Passengers wanting souvenirs grumbled: “You’d think they’d see the benefit in being open for business when so many customers are in town!”
I smiled. Good for Torshavn, seeing the benefit in not being open merely because it would be good for business.
“How was your holiday?” friends asked when I returned home. It’s more common to use the word “holiday” here than “vacation” when referring to time spent away. It’s also more common for people to celebrate holidays here than it was when I lived in the United States. In the United States, on holidays, everything is still open. Someone is always working.
This week, it was Labor Day in the United States. (Here, Labor Day is May 1, as it is in most countries that celebrate a Labor Day.) “If I had a dollar for every time a customer mentioned the fact that we were open and working on Labor Day...like, we are here because you refuse to just stay home,” a friend of mine who works in retail complained on Facebook.
The word “holiday” literally means “holy day.” A day that should be kept sacred.
Ostensibly, the reason why shops are open on Sunday and holidays in the United States is because it’s a pluralistic society. There is no state religion, as there is in Torshavn,2 rather there is separation of church and state, as codified in the first amendment to the United States Constitution. With neutrality toward all religions, how could the state enshrine a particular religion’s holidays as days everyone has off of work?
Of course, Labor Day is a secular holiday, and so is Thanksgiving. It was just a few years before I moved here that American stores started advertising being open on Thanksgiving Day. As long as I can remember retail and service workers have worked on Labor Day in America.
The only holiday that Americans almost always have off is a religious one, Christmas. And even that is starting to fall. Last year, Starbucks locations in the United States were proud to announce that they would be open on Christmas Day.
“She has made an enchantment over the whole country so that it is always winter here and never Christmas,” Lucy tells her siblings of the despotic queen ruling over Narnia in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. The White Witch demands the obeisance of her Narnian subjects. It’s easy to see her as a villain, and imagine oneself, like the Pevensie siblings, bravely fighting against her depredations.
But of course that’s just a story. In real life, there is no White Witch enforcing her will for you to fight; you just submit and sacrifice your holidays on your own. Individuals should be free to choose whether to work on Sundays or holidays for themselves, and I as a consumer should be able to have the convenience of shopping no matter what day it is, right? But individuals cannot set up society for themselves alone. In the absence of codified days off, there are no days off. The work schedule you will for a retail worker for your own convenience is the work schedule you will for yourself. Is it a product of your individual free will that you find yourself responding to an “important” email on a Sunday, instead of going for a walk, or taking a nap?
Six of the Ten Commandments have to do with our obligations to other people—do honor your parents, and don’t kill, steal, cheat, lie, covet what others have—while the remaining four are about honoring God. The last of the four about honoring God is this one:
Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.
And in a secular, pluralistic society, we can’t assume that everyone, or anyone, worships the God of the Hebrews. We can’t enforce a religious rule about a weekly day for rest as an honor to God.
So who do you give your day of rest to instead, as a burnt offering? What do you get in return for your leisure you sacrificed to an insatiable, secular deity?
It’s nice to be able to travel on vacation, but it’s nice to be home now. It’s even nice to be back at work.
Tomorrow, we will have a ceremony to help celebrate the beginning of a new semester. Attendance is required for a lot of us, myself included. But more people will go who aren’t required to attend. They will appreciate the effort we put into it. It will be nice.
On Sunday, I’ll go to church. Maybe after that I’ll take a long walk with our dog. Maybe I’ll talk with my parents. Maybe I’ll read a book, or take a nap. I could do a lot of things. I’m free to do as I wish.
I won’t go shopping. I won’t go to work. I won’t squander my leisure on efficiency, or convenience. And I will be grateful to live in a society where I am not allowed to make that self-defeating choice.
Another being the fact that many restaurants only accept cash, not credit cards. Of course, accepting credit cards means that businesses make less money off of any purchase, since the credit card company skims a percentage, and it’s not like they can charge more for someone using a card. The only reason to assent to the financial hit that accepting credit cards imposes is to be competitive in a market where other businesses accept credit cards. But as long as a critical mass of businesses refuse to take credit cards, no business needs to say yes to them to remain competitive.
The Church of the Faroes, and evangelical Lutheran church and formerly a diocese of the Church of Denmark, now one of the smallest state churches in the world.
Back home, during Sundays, everything stops as well. Or more accurately, takes a breather. After moving to a bigger city, where Sundays don't exist, I realized that people will see these kinds of days as holly still when they see their time on this earth as something that is one of a kind to enjoy, and not as consumption and production duty. Thank you for this beautiful essay!
Some people love their work so much that time they are required to be away is considered onerous. Some detest their work and any time away is a relief.
A diminishing number of people consider some days off as holy in nature. A very few people strive to see every day as holy.
All people resent mandatory days on or off the job, as bridles on their free will.