The Bridge - Road scholar

For her senior project, history major Kathryn Kaslow is researching blue laws of the 1800s and the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. Her paper is titled “Anti-Sabbatarianism in Antebellum America: The Christian Quarrel Over the Sanctity of Sunday.” What does that mean, exactly?

 

“As far as a non-academic title,” she explained, “I’d probably call it something like ‘Why Some Christians Hated Other Christians Nagging Them to be Holy on Sundays.”

Her project focuses on a series of debates in the early 1800s about whether there should be laws—which are often referred to as blue laws or Sunday laws—restricting travel, mail delivery and recreation on Sundays. The Sabbatarians, the pro-legislation Christians, wanted U.S. society to become more explicitly Christian.

Growing up, Kaslow didn’t even know the term “blue law” existed. “I lived in Bergen County, New Jersey, for several years during elementary school,” she explained, “where malls and other stores are closed on Sundays. Since I grew up with it, I didn’t think it was out of the ordinary.

It wasn’t until her research for this project that she encountered how controversial these laws had been historically.

“In my thesis,” she said, “I am arguing that their opponents, the anti-Sabbatarians, were just as deeply rooted in certain Christian values…and that their reasons for not wanting to explicitly Christianize the nation stemmed, perhaps surprisingly, from these strong religious beliefs.”

So, what were the anti-Sabbatarians’ reasons? While their theological arguments varied, the biggest theme throughout their writings is the importance of individual conscience—the idea that all people should be free to worship God as they please and when they please.

“Some Christians at this time, like the Seventh-Day Baptists, still observed the Sabbath on Saturday, like Jews did, rather than on Sunday.”

Working on the project since September of 2015, Kaslow received a Friends of Murray Library annual library research grant of $500 to study at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to further her research. These grants are awarded to Messiah students whose research projects require resources at off-campus libraries and whose proposals are selected for funding by a panel of campus judges.

“The sources I accessed in Boston have helped me the most so far,” she said, “which is not surprising since Boston was one of the primary centers of religious activity and controversy during the Second Great Awakening.”

At the end of the spring semester, she will culminate the project with a public presentation of her research.

— Anna Seip