That sense of the Sabbath’s profound importance is part of what brought the Puritans to America. Their strict Sabbatarian beliefs put them in conflict with the English authorities, especially after King James published “The Book of Sports,” in 1617, in which he encouraged his subjects to follow Sunday-morning worship with dancing, games, and recreation in the afternoon. For the Puritans, such encroachments clearly undermined the fourth commandment, and when they could, they passed Sabbatarian laws to protect the Lord’s Day—in Virginia, as early as 1610, it was decreed that “no man or woman shall dare to violate or break the Sabbath by any gaming, public or private abroad, or at home.”
Such prohibitions became known as “blue laws,” although no one now remembers why; perhaps because of the color of the paper on which they were printed or bound, or because of the pejorative meaning of the color in the colonial era, as in bluestockings or later variations like bluenoses—those who were prudish or proper. Laws like that proliferated and persisted for the next three centuries, regulating commerce, labor, and recreation on the Lord’s Day throughout the United States. The occasional exception, sparing certain industries or carving out certain activities, made its way through state legislatures here and there, but only during the Cold War, when school prayer and civic displays of religious iconography were challenged in the federal courts, did blue laws become a serious target, too.
Case after case argued that Sunday-closing laws violated the equal-protection clause and the establishment clause of the First Amendment. In 1961, the Supreme Court put the matter to rest, so to speak, when it found, in McGowan v. Maryland, that blue laws are not unconstitutional if they serve a secular purpose, and that choosing Sunday for a common day of rest is a practical choice, not preferential treatment of Christianity. “People of all religions and people with no religion regard Sunday as a time for family activity, for visiting friends and relatives, for late sleeping, for passive and active entertainments, for dining out, and the like,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, in a decision representative of several others on the issue. “Sunday is a day apart from all others. The cause is irrelevant; the fact exists. It would seem unrealistic for enforcement purposes and perhaps detrimental to the general welfare to require a State to choose a common day of rest other than that which most persons would select of their own accord.”