Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of articles about the details of Project 2025.

Hidden in an obscure corner of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page agenda for a potential second Trump administration is a concerning proposal for the Department of Labor.

The idea, found on page 589 of the “Mandate for Leadership,” is to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to encourage a nationwide “communal day of rest.” Corporations that schedule employees to work on that day will be required to provide overtime pay.

The document gives historical precedent for the proposal by declaring that “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest” and that, until recent years, “the Judeo-Christian tradition sought to honor that mandate by moral and legal regulation of work on that day.”

If the proposal is implemented, the default “communal day of rest” will be Sundays. 

Employers who are required to operate around the clock, such as hospitals and other emergency service providers, would be exempt from this overtime requirement.

The proposal also allows communal days of rest to be sometime other than Sunday “for employers with a sincere religious observance of the Sabbath at a different time.” It includes a parenthetical example of this exception, stating, “e.g., Friday sundown to Saturday sundown.”

Before analyzing this proposal, it would be fair to note that the partnering organizations contributing to the creation of Project 2025 don’t fully agree with all of its proposals. Where this is the case, as with the Sabbath amendment to the FLSA, an alternate view is presented.

The alternate view presented to the Sabbath proposal is that some conservatives believe “the proper role of government in helping enable individuals to practice their religion is to reduce barriers to work options and to fruitful employer and employee relations.” It also appeals to the concern that “overtime rules on the Sabbath would lead to higher cost and limited access to goods and services…”

The writers of the alternate view believe the Sabbath proposal erects a barrier to the First Amendment’s free exercise clause rather than removing it.

Regardless, both in the proposal and the alternate view, the danger lies less in implementing a “communal day of rest” and more in the assumption that the day should default to Sunday– the day most Christians set aside for worship and rest. The one example they presented of an exception was sundown Friday to sundown Saturday– the Jewish day of worship and rest. Nothing was mentioned of Fridays, when many Muslims attend mosque.

And then there’s this: The accommodation suggestion says nothing about an employee’s “sincere religious obedience to the Sabbath at a different time,” just the employer’s.

So, the proposal doesn’t just assume that the country’s default sabbath will be the Christian one, but also that the default understanding of an employer is “Christian employer.”

Obviously, there are clear First Amendment issues with this proposal.

Legally sanctioning a “communal day of rest” based on a particular religious tradition violates the First Amendment’s free exercise and establishment clauses. It prevents those who practice faiths other than Christianity from determining when their Sabbath will be (unless it aligns with their employer). It preferences one faith over others in determining the “default” Sabbath.

Beyond First Amendment concerns, the Sabbath proposal feels sinister for another reason. It couches establishing a particular religion’s practices in benevolent and charitable language.

Appealing to a Norman Rockwell-esque view of American life, the proposal states that a “shared day off makes it possible for families and communities to enjoy time off together, rather than as atomized individuals, and provides a healthier cadence of life for everyone.”

Who is against that? I’m not. Most people I know believe in establishing work-life balance and nurturing healthier families and communities.

But I can’t help but wonder what Project 2025’s plan is to require employers to pay workers a living wage. What are their proposals for ensuring an unexpected illness doesn’t doom a worker to decades of toiling away at multiple jobs to pay off medical debt? How do they suggest we address the childcare crisis, which is exhausting families and deterring young people from having children?

Religious extremists love to extol the perceived ways of life of bygone eras. But they ignore the reality that those ways of life were only available to a few, almost always at the expense of the many. Even more, they refuse to enact structural changes that would actually bring about their stated desired outcomes of healthier work-life balance.

The problem, though, isn’t their stated desired outcomes but their implied desired outcomes. If they wanted a world that “provided a healthier cadence of life for everyone,” then there are ways to make that happen with a secular government that allows all religious adherents and non-adherents to flourish.

Instead, they aim for a Christian-centric society that “allows” exceptions to their hierarchical order. This order stands in direct opposition to democracy and the self-emptying way of Jesus.