Not religious laws – I mean actual laws, enforced by government/police. I was surprised to see that in 1905 you could be arrested in NY for doing construction work on Sunday. Maybe such laws were common once, in the Bible Belt? Are they still on the books?
How about the rest of the world? The Israeli government doesn’t prohibit work on the Sabbath, does it? Do any governments?
Think it was Georgia where railroads weren’t allowed to run trains of non-perishable freight on Sunday. No idea how long that lasted.
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but some areas still have “blue laws” prohibiting some commercial activities on Sunday. Bergen County, NJ is one rather well known one - a huge mall there is basically shuttered on Sunday.
There are exceptions. Grocery stores. News stands / places that sell newspapers and magazines. My husband likes to quip that you can’t buy a Bible on Sunday but you CAN buy Playboy.
I lived in a city in Germany where all the stores were closed on the Sabbath. So if you wanted a carton of milk, you had to go to the train station or gas station or something. It was annoying bullshit; there have been some reforms since.
These days the blue law in Bergen County has more to do with traffic than religion. The residents prefer it that way.
" Some have argued that the reason Bergen County has kept the blue laws for so long is because the area has long been one of the biggest shopping meccas in the U.S., with five major malls, not including American Dream. Residents have said, among other reasons, they need a reprieve from so much traffic on the roads on the weekend. Numerous votes have been put to the ballot to remove the laws, as other counties across the country have done, but all have failed."
It’s also partly a relic of the labor movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sundays were not special when the country was founded. At least not nationally. Federal mail service ran 7 days a week.
But labor movements, who wanted to put more bounds on hours worked, combined forces with religious groups who naturally wanted to encourage churchgoing. And that represented a large voting bloc.
Illinois is among the U.S. states which has a law prohibiting auto dealers from operating/opening on Sundays. This apparently had its genesis in blue laws, but it’s a relatively recent law in Illinois (only created in 1984), and it’s mostly because the auto dealers lobbied for it as a way to give employees a day off, while ensuring that their competitors would not be able to steal business by opening on the same day.
I was going to mention this, too, though it appears that it’s not a state law, but rather some municipalities which have laws about it, typically banning retail sales of alcohol until noon or thereabouts on Sundays.
Likewise in Texas. Liquor stores can’t open on Sundays and grocery store sales of alcoholic beverages was restricted until after noon on Sundays until a recent change put it in line with the rest of the week.
There was also a push to change things so liquor stores could open on Sundays as well but those stores actually lobbied against it, as they did not want to deal with the operating expenses of another working day and liked having the day off. This is in line with the above on the labor movement origins of some of these laws.
I used to go to Malaysia a lot in the 90s and I can’t imagine that things have changed. Muslims were required to take Friday afternoons off and also required to go to a mosque for prayers at that time. The rest of us were permitted to work.
Not sure about laws, but I was in Jerusalem on the Sabbath and the transit was not running. Fortunately there were plenty of Arab taxi drivers. There was also, IIRC, some controversy about whether restaurants should be mandated to obey kosher kitchen laws - separate meat and dairy, for example. I’m not sure if the bars were closed during Sabbath, but apparently bar business picks up like crazy after sundown on the Sabbath.
Yes, there is no public transport in Israel on the Sabbath, but AFAIK there are no laws forbidding people from working or shopping. Many businesses do close, though; one of my favorite vacation pics is of a shop selling sex toys with a sign saying they would open after Shabbat.
My hometown (Morgantown, West Virginia) had blue laws on the books as of 1977. One Sunday, a preacher walked into a department store with the sheriff and had the manager arrested.
As of 2006 or so, Morgantown also banned alcohol sales until 1:00 PM on Sundays, in restaurants, bars. and stores.
Kind of. Everyone had a national ID card and Muslims were mandated to have a Muslim name. So if your name was Muhammad Abdulla they would know. There were three primary ethnicities: Malay, Indian and Chinese. It was illegal to convert from Islam to something else and all Malays were Muslim without exception. If you looked Malay, you were going to be checked if you were out on a Friday afternoon, eating in the daytime during Ramadan or in a bar or an opposite gender unmarried/unrelated couple out alone. The sin police were everywhere. Of course exceptions were made for family of sultans.
I just read an article about a tourist who was arrested in Bali for going about on the one day a year when no one in Bali is allowed to go out. Everyone is required to stay home and reflect. It’s called Nyepi - the Bali Day of Silence.
Blue laws were in effect in the Cleveland, Ohio are until the 1970s, Yes, the police would raid the store and arrest the managers. Uncle Bills, a discount store, was the major “offender”. In the area shopping malls the only stores open were the drug store, restaurant and movie theater. Our sports car club used to hold races in the empty parking lots.