Gerald Graff works for the U.S. postal service. He is also an evangelical who honors the Christian sabbath. In other words, he won’t deliver the mail on Sundays. His religious convictions cost him his job. The Supreme Court recently heard his religious liberty case.
As historian Rebecca Brenner Graham shows us in a recent Washington Post piece, Graff’s case is part of a long history pitting religious freedom against Sunday mail. Here is a taste:
On April 18, the Supreme Court heard the case of former U.S. Postal Service employee Gerald Groff, an evangelical Christian who was pushed out of his job for refusing to work on Sundays because it conflicted with his Sabbath. Groff contends that the Postal Service did not reasonably accommodate his religious practices as mandated by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and seeks to reverse almost 50 years of legal precedent — further dismantling the perceived “wall” between church and state.
However, the impact would stretch beyond your mailbox. An exception for Sunday religious observers would create an inequity for those who are not religious, who would remain victim to the overwork culture, while religious Christians avoid it. It would also reverse the decision Congress took on the issue in the early republic.
Mail delivery on Sundays is not a new phenomenon — it arrived on Sundays from 1810 to 1912 — nor is the conflict. In 1809, postmaster Hugh Wylie had to leave his Presbyterian Church because mandatory Sunday services conflicted with his postal work responsibilities. Political activists, hungry for an opportunity to iron out the relationship between politics and religion in the new nation, seized on Wylie’s plight as a catalyst to launch a fight to outlaw Sunday mail.
They faced off against Jeffersonian Republicans who supported the separation between church and state, while also having another motive for supporting Sunday mail. They were largely proslavery and pro-expansion into Indigenous territory to spread slavery, and knew they were on the brink of war to secure expanding American borders. Such a war (what eventually would be the War of 1812) would necessitate a functional national communications network that delivered messages as quickly as possible.
The Jeffersonian Republicans won out, and in 1810 Congress officially enacted Sunday mail delivery as U.S. policy. This decision ignited waves of petitions that helped shape early American political culture. The debates over Sunday mail showcased the contradictions between the First Amendment’s two religion clauses, which both prevent the establishment of a religion and permit the free exercise of religion. Anti-Sunday mail petitioners and politicians wanted to freely exercise their right to observe the Sabbath on Sunday without work conflicts. Defenders of Sunday mail, by contrast, wanted to protect Americans from the establishment of Christianity as a national religion.
Read the rest here.