4 - 1999

Shopping on Sunday

It Is Not All The Devil’s Work

The church should orient itself along the changed buying and leisure behavior of people

by Lutz Mohaupt

There are voices in the German churches that demand the church to accept the reality of modern life. The Church should not try to work against the development in the direction of a modern service-oriented society. The author of this contribution is pastor of a large church in the center of Hamburg.

Now there’s a pastor in favor of it - the church should orient itself along the changed buying and leisure behavior of people. A possible opening of stores on Sunday is up to now for many representatives of the church like a red rag to a bull and the topic is taboo. The rejection of every loosening counts, it appears, as the bounden duty of every Christian. Most do not even notice that they conserve with this attitude a picture of society from yesterday, which reality has long since left behind.

The well-known sociologist Ulrich Beck presented the basic lines of an analysis of society in 1995 under the heading "own life": "The daily struggle for one’s own life has become the collective experience of the western world... Nothing societal, nothing external, it is the people themselves who are the reason - their will, the inflation of their demands, their thirst for experiences, the decreasing readiness to carry something out, to fit in, to abstain - that’s what’s behind it."

Binding traditions have been replaced by the guideline of organizing one’s own life. To put it another way, through the undoing of traditions all essential work of definition in regard to one’s own biography and style of life is placed upon the individual.

Should these theories be even somewhat accurate, it is bordering on absurdity to trust for the protection of Sunday as a cultural value in a law on store opening hours whose core comes from 1956. Seen internationally it has long been a curiosity. Its validity here will be inexorably undermined further. This will be caused not only by the laws for resort and holiday towns or by the extremely broad opening hours from whole shopping centers such as the train station in Leipzig, but by those who buy rolls on Sunday morning or take along from the gas station whatever they forgot when shopping for the weekend.

Admittedly the arguments against a liberalization of the Sunday opening usually go differently. They start at a high level, at the Third Commandment and Article 40 of the constitution, as in the case of the seven articles that the Nordelbian Church and the union for commerce, banking and insurance (HBV) published on May 1, 1999.

To be sure, such arguments are burdened with some problems. For example, there is the problem of the considerable distance between the biblical commandment of Sabbath rest and individualized forms of passing the holy day today. The identification of Sabbath and Sunday rest in favor of Sunday would surely look quite different when looked at from the viewpoint of Jews or of the several hundred thousand Moslems who are in Germany. These aforementioned theories have even, fortunately, determined who are the villains responsible for the dilemma: "The creeping" abolition of Sunday comes about "by the authorities that compliantly give in to the wishes of the merchants for store opening hours and so-called family celebrations."

One might possibly be allowed to argue this way, or perhaps must, in the power struggle of the interest groups and in the wrestling of wage partners, but not in the area of the church. Have the authorities and merchants truly deserved to be blamed when they have only given in to the pressure for modernization which is put on them, too, by the search for their "own life"? The clever merchant, in the end, orients himself by his customers and authorities acting in a considered way understand themselves today as being at the service services of the citizen and not as their teachers. In short, the demand for liberalization of store opening hours generally and of Sunday opening specifically was not invented by the devil in order to murder Sunday and harm the church.

It rather stems from profound transformations of the basic orientations of society. I doubt whether these mean only a deterioration of culture. The contention that due to these changes and due to too much indulgence in them the humane weekly rhythm of work and rest threatens to completely desintegrate could be revealed as a culturally pessimistic horror vision of the "find-seek" type. Instead of this, it is important today that the church does not continually respond to the challenges of the age in narrow anti-modern style, but rather flexibly, openly and constructively.

Lutz Mohaupt is Head Pastor in Hamburg, in: "Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt", 23 July 1999. Translated for publication in this issue.