As a European, I always notice when visiting the US that Sunday is pretty much like any other day when it comes to retail opening hours. At the same time, American society is far more openly Christian than Europe, with way more active believers, regular churchgoers, and with Christianity playing a far more prominent role in society and politics than anywhere in Europe.
In much of Europe, all shops and businesses are closed on Sundays, except for tourist attractions and some essential services. The explicit reason for this is Christian tradition and doctrine that Sunday is a day of rest.
So I’m curious why this well-known tenet of Christianity does not seem to apply to business life in America?
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Capitalism and the almighty dollar.
Because the US is also that-much-more capitalist than Europe.
And in US poltiics the Christians and capitalists have historically been on the same political team….
Also because the whole ‘freedom’ thing says ‘I can refuse to work on Sunday (or Saturday, or Friday) without getting fired, and you can voluntarily close your business on Sunday because you believe God requires it, but government can’t make you close your business in service of a God you don’t worship’….
Jesus doesn’t pay the bills
US has a more consumer focused economy than Europe.
The US is only more Christian than most of europe on a very, very surface level. Christian identity is more common. Christian practice is pretty similar
We might be more Christian, but we are far and away more capitalist. Can’t sell anything if you’re closed.
Consumers want to shop on Sunday. There are more people willing to work on Sunday. Ergo, more businesses are open on Sunday.
We’re so much more capitalist than Europe too.
Because not everybody works the same schedule
Your failure to grasp just how much more important capitalism and making money is than… well, almost anything else… for americans is also the reason why you’re asking the question in the first place.
Also, American Christians are ***very*** good at cognitive dissonance that allows them to support and do the things they do and still call and think of themselves as “Christians.”
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In America, these are known as Blue Laws and they used to be more prevalent. A wikipedia article describes the rather interesting history of these as follows:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_laws_in_the_United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_laws_in_the_United_States)
The idea is rooted in the idea of our First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. We can be as Christian as we want to be, but we generally cannot force a business not to conduct free trade on the basis of a Judeo-Christian idea. How we arrived at that conclusion took a while and is worth reading about.
Just because our culture is more religious, doesn’t mean we let religion dictate our business practices. The idea of businesses being closed because it’s Sunday is pretty much restricted to businesses that are well-known to be tied to religious fundamentalists, such as Chic-fil-a and Hobby Lobby.
In Europe government and religion were the same thing for most of history. Not so in America.
I would say it’s a few things:
First – separation of church and state, and the diverse “melting pot” that is the US. So even though Christianity is very prevalent it cannot determine all things.
Second – even the most devout Christians still prefer convenience and will shop whenever church isn’t in session.
Third – we tend to have a stricter week, long office hours, and little PTO compared to European countries. We really have to maximize what time we get on the weekends for all of our shopping and errands.
Because Europeans value leisure time more and people would be pissed if they suddenly had to work a day that their culture has had off for literally centuries.
There are definitely a lot of businesses closed on Sundays, particularly small businesses, and those that are open have reduced hours. The major, Walmart-class retailers don’t reduce their hours at all, because American capitalism/consumerism demands it.
Despite the US being more actively Christian than Europe, Europe has thousands of more years of history formed by Christian tradition, including recognizing the sabbath. I would guess that weekly structure was ingrained deeply into European culture and would be difficult (and unnecessary) to undo.
It depends on where you are in the USA, the size of the area, and the size and type of business.
You will find that when you look at areas where there are large populations of very religious cultures, Sunday business is less common. Where I am from (central PA), you have a 60/40 shot that a place is closed on Sunday, and many of the places that are open have reduced hours. There also happens to be a large Amish and Mennonite population in that area.
Texas, for example, used to restrict what could be sold on Sundays. But at this point, i think it’s just that liquor stores must be closed on Sundays.
“In much of Europe, all shops and businesses are closed on Sundays”
Really? I’m European, and shops are pretty much open here on Sundays except for maybe some smaller ones.
Interesting thing happened in Bergen County NJ, which is right outside NYC. They continued on with keeping ‘Blue Laws‘ when most everywhere else removed them. Even though they originated for religious reasons, modern day citizens found a reason to keep them: quality of life.
[https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/2025/01/29/why-does-bergen-county-nj-cling-blue-laws-1704/77999332007/](https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/2025/01/29/why-does-bergen-county-nj-cling-blue-laws-1704/77999332007/)
We’re also religiously diverse. Even among Christians, not everybody wants to spend Sunday at church or home. Some of us were busy on Saturday and need to run errands on Sunday. Also, some religions take Saturday off. Business owners realize this and stay open. Closing on Sunday is something that only shops/franchises with very conservative and (performatively) religious Christian owners do, like Hobby Lobby and Chik-fil-a.
They have this in [Bergen County, NJ! It’s called the blue law](https://www.wyckoffnj.gov/municipal-clerk/faq/why-sunday-shopping-prohibited-wyckoff-and-throughout-bergen-county), most businesses are closed on Sundays. The result is decreased traffic and more people forced into recreational activities. It’s pretty nice, and the only thing I miss about living in that area. But a lot of the locals hate it and would rather shop at the mall. America lol
Christianity in the US has adopted a particular understanding of the trinity which is defined as “The Father, The Son, and The Holy Bottom Line.”
It’s a combo of not being as religious as people think and the lack of institutional Christianity. Less than half of Americans belong to a church (and it’s still declining from there), and we don’t have a state church, prayer in schools, or any of the other ways Christianity is often institutionalized in Europe and elsewhere.
I’ve heard from people from England whose closest state-funded school was a “faith character” school where they sang Christian hymns in a weekly assembly. That would be absolutely bizarre here. A German exchange student in my high school asked whether we have a Catholic or Protestant priest come to the school for our religion class (we don’t have religion class).
Separation of church and state is weaker in Europe than in the US
>American society is far more openly Christian than Europe
This is extremely debatable depending on what exactly you’re talking about. Much of Europe, even the famously secular French Republic I live in, sure have a lot of culturally Christian stuff going on that I certainly never saw growing up back in the States. There’s a whole ton of public holidays for Christian things I’d never heard of before coming here. I see literal processions of people in the streets of people wearing robes and shit and carrying little banners and similar things. It’s absolutely alien to me.
Obviously that’s all Catholic stuff and where I grew up is almost exclusively Protestant but that’s part of the thing. Even European Catholics are different from American Catholics. European Protestants are different from American Protestants. European Muslims are different from American Muslims. That leads me into the real issue.
I get that from a European media consumer perspective the US must seem like Protestant Saudi Arabia but it’s really, really not. Religion in any society is extremely complicated but European media presents an absolutely cartoonishly nonsense image of the country in that particular regard. I think a lot of it comes from a mistake I see Europeans make constantly when talking about the US. A majority (soon to be plurality) of us look like Europeans, we generally speak European languages so you guys think we’re basically just BBQ flavored Europeans. We’re not, and neither of our neighboring countries are all that European either.
I have met a tremendous number of Europeans who think we’re basically Europeans, view us through that lens and then get confused when the image they get is muddled and nonsensical. Especially as what’s being seen through that lens is American pop culture. Our films, music and so on. TV and films in the US are even more dramatized than in Europe. You can’t actually consume US pop culture and develop an accurate understanding of the culture from it. My wife, who is originally from Russia but learned English very young and grew up on US pop culture, thought she understood it until we moved to the States. She found out that she did not. You don’t either, not without living there for many years. There’s not even a single American with a complete understanding of American culture. There are over 340M of us covering a goddamned continent’s worth of land and we’re not what you see on TV. People from the rest of the Anglosphere are usually worse about this than continental Europeans but that’s damning with faint praise if I’ve ever heard it.
As Christian as we are, there’s still a HUGE non-Christian population thanks to the First Amendment right to freedom of religion. Besides, people like to do fun activities on Friday and Saturday due to the weekend being young, then Sunday is usually for grocery shopping and cleaning before getting back into the grind.