Work, Rest and the Common Good
In the history of Britain’s labour movement there is a curious paradox. The early trade unionist, the chapel deacon, and the Catholic social reformer all found themselves united, though often unwittingly, around a single conviction: that time is not the property of capital. The working man, whether in a Lancashire mill or a Durham colliery or Cornish mine, was not merely a beast of burden to be driven until collapse. He was a creature made for worship, leisure, and fellowship.
And so the struggle for Sunday rest was in fact one of the profoundest battles over the nature of man and society ever waged on these shores.
The fight to preserve Sunday was not, as progressives caricature it, an attempt to chain workers to pews and chapels. It was the recognition that life cannot be reduced to commerce. In an age when capital demanded every waking hour, when the factories lit up the night as if to deny God’s ordering of day and evening, the insistence on a common day of rest was both a rebellion and a confession. A rebellion against the dehumanising reduction of life to labour-power. And a confession that man’s final end lies not in the wage packet, nor even in the family table, but in the altar of the living God.
I. Tawney and the Question of Time
R.H. Tawney, that great Christian socialist, understood this well. His writings were never simply about wages and class, but about moral order. For Tawney, inequality was not wrong merely because it bred resentment or suffering, but because it violated a Christian conception of justice. In Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, he saw how the logic of acquisitiveness had severed economics from ethics, and thus profaned the rhythm of human life.
Tawney’s defence of Sunday rest was not a piece of fussy moralism, but an assertion that society must order its time toward higher things. He was in his own way repeating the scholastic axiom that the temporal must be subordinated to the spiritual. Aquinas had taught that all secondary goods: wealth, health, even knowledge, must be ordered to the final good, the vision of God. Tawney intuited this: the working man who had no time to rest, to worship, to contemplate, was a man prevented from fulfilling his nature. He was being robbed not only of his leisure, but of his soul.
II. The Old Left and the Defence of the Sacred
This is why the “Old Left,” before it surrendered itself to technocracy and progressivism, often sounded more like parish preachers than like social engineers. Keir Hardie spoke in biblical cadences. The dockers who struck for shorter hours carried banners of Christ the Worker. Even the Labour Party’s 1918 Constitution, with its famous Clause IV, was suffused with an almost religious reverence for fellowship and shared life.
The working-class movement was never purely materialist. It was moral, spiritual, and communal. The pub, the chapel, the union branch, and the football ground were not just “leisure outlets”, they were rituals of fellowship. The demand for Sunday was the demand for a common sacred rhythm that bound the community together.
Compare this to the contemporary Left, which has so thoroughly abandoned the notion of the sacred that it cannot understand the very foundations of its own tradition. Today’s progressives champion a “right to work whenever one pleases” or “24/7 consumer choice” as though this were liberation. They fail to see that what has been lost is not the freedom to consume but the freedom to be.
III. The Politics of Time
It is no accident that the most serious attempts to revive Labour’s moral voice, Blue Labour, Maurice Glasman, Jon Cruddas, have returned to the language of Tawney. For Blue Labour, politics must not be reduced to redistribution or technocracy; it must be about meaning, belonging, and covenant. The worker needs a living culture.
Here Sunday emerges again as a political question. For what does it mean if the great common day of rest is dissolved? It means that the common life is dissolved. It means the polis itself loses its rhythm, its pulse. The theologian Josef Pieper once argued that leisure is the basis of culture. In Britain, Sunday was the basis of fellowship. To abolish it is to abolish one of the last institutions in which man was not defined by his role as producer or consumer.
The tragedy is that both Left and Right have conspired in this abolition. Thatcherite deregulation and Blairite modernisation alike pursued a 24/7 economy. Shopping became the new civic ritual, the mall the new cathedral. Instead of man resting in God, man was restlessly circling the aisles.
IV. Ordered Time Against
this stands the Catholic conception of political economy. The Church has always taught that time is not man’s property but God’s gift. The liturgical year, with its seasons of fasting and feasting, embodies this truth. Man is called to sanctify time by ordering it to God. Hence the commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”
Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae, argued that the Sabbath precept is part of the natural law. Not in its specifically Jewish ceremonial form, but in its universal requirement that man set aside time for the contemplation of God. To work without rest is to sin against health, and against charity. For the love of God requires time given to Him.
The state, in Catholic teaching, has a duty to protect this ordering of time. Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum, demanded that the working classes be given rest sufficient for worship. Pius XI, in Quadragesimo Anno, warned against “the unrestrained freedom of labour” that dissolves all common bonds.
V. Donoso Cortés, De Maistre, and the Crisis of Time
Here Donoso Cortés and de Maistre sharpen the diagnosis. Both saw that liberal modernity was not merely a political error but a theological heresy: the denial that man and society must be ordered to God. For Donoso, once Christ the King’s authority was cast off, society would oscillate between liberal paralysis and revolutionary dictatorship because men cannot live without order, and if divine order is denied, only naked power remains.
What is the abolition of Sunday if not precisely this? Liberalism abolishes it in the name of freedom, but this merely delivers the worker into the hands of capital. The “freedom” to shop or to work on Sunday is no freedom at all when one is compelled by economic necessity. Thus liberalism hands man over to the tyranny of money, and when this fails, he will beg for tyranny of another kind.
De Maistre, too, would recognise the spiritual meaning of the loss of Sunday. The desacralisation of time is blasphemy, a tearing down of one of the last visible vestiges of Christian civilisation. A nation that abolishes Sunday is a nation that has declared itself sovereign over God’s law. Such a nation will not remain free; it will be enslaved by its own idols.
VI. The Tyranny of Capital Over Time
Modern capitalism hates nothing so much as wasted time. Every hour must be monetised, every moment commodified. We are urged to be “productive” in work, “efficient” in leisure, “available” to the market at all hours. Even sleep is treated as an obstacle to be minimised.
In this tyranny of time, Sunday rest is a scandal. It is wasted time, not producing, not consuming, not answering emails. Which is to say, it is free time. Time for family, prayer, stillness. Time not for the market, but for God. And therefore Sunday is, in the truest sense, revolutionary.
VII. Toward a Christian Democratic Renewal
Here lies the task for Christian Democracy in Britain. To defend Sunday is prophetic. It is to recover the moral core of the labour tradition and root it in the deeper soil of classical Christianity.
Christian Democracy must reject both liberal individualism (“work whenever you want”) and neoliberal consumerism (“shop whenever you want”). It must insist that society has a right and duty to order time toward higher goods. This means re-establishing Sunday as common rest for the health of the nation.
To speak of a “right to rest” is inadequate. What is required is the reconstitution of time itself as common, sacred, and social. A national rhythm that binds us together not as atomised consumers as a people ordered toward God.
VIII. Beyond Sunday: Time as Political Economy
But we must go further. For the question of Sunday opens into the larger question of time. Who owns our time? The employer? The market? The state? Or God?
Christian Democracy must declare: time belongs to God. And therefore all economic structures must be judged by whether they allow man the leisure to contemplate, worship, and love. This has immense consequences:
● Working hours must be shortened for health and for culture.
● Family life must be protected by ensuring common rhythms of rest.
● Education must be ordered not merely to skills but also to wisdom, which requires time for contemplation.
● Law must enshrine the sacred order of time, not submit to the false neutrality of the market.
In this vision, the economy is not an independent sphere, separated from the beatific vision, man’s supreme end. It is subordinated to this vision. This is the true meaning of political economy as understood by Aquinas, by Tawney, and by the best of the Old Left.
IX. The Sacred Order of Time
The battle for Sunday is the battle for man’s soul. To restore it is to proclaim that Britain is a people, not an economic zone.. That man is a producer or consumer and a worshipper. That time is not a commodity. Here the Catholic, the Christian socialist, the Blue Labour traditionalist, the Christian Democrat, and the tired worker can unite. For each in his own way knows that without rest, there is no culture; without worship, there is no community; without God, there is no common good.
Tawney was right: “What is morally wrong cannot be politically right.” To abolish the order of time is morally wrong. To restore it is necessary.
And so, with Donoso Cortés, we must say: liberalism will never suffice, for it reduces freedom to slavery under capital. With de Maistre, we must say: the desacralisation of time is rebellion against God. With Aquinas, we must say: man is made for contemplation. And with Christ, Lord of the Sabbath, we must say: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”
Let us then fight not merely for wages, but for worship; not merely for labour, but for leisure; not merely for Saturday night, but for Sunday morning. For in the end, the polis itself depends on it.
