For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication,
and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. Revelation 18:3
On January 16, 2023, MarketWatch joined the growing
chorus of support for the increasingly popular message that repealing
blue laws has been detrimental to our society.
MarketWatch published an article written by Steve Goldstein titled
“Deaths of Despair may be Driven by Loss of Religion, New Research Paper
Argues” and expressed the following:
Theories are being created and circulated to prove that the repeal of Sunday laws in the United States is killing people. So-called experts are saying that society is destroying itself ever since the Blue Laws were repealed." AdventMessenger“So-called deaths of despair such as from suicide or alcohol abuse have been skyrocketing for middle-aged white Americans. It’s been blamed on various phenomenon, including opioid abuse. But a new research paper finds a different culprit — declining religious practice.”“The working paper, from Tyler Giles of Wellesley College, Daniel Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame, and Tamar Oostrom of The Ohio State University, looked at the relationship between religiosity and mortality from deaths of despair. The paper was circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research.”“The authors noted that many measures of religious adherence began to decline in the late 1980s … States that experienced larger declines in religious participation in the last 15 years of the 20th century saw larger increases in deaths of despair.”“The researchers looked at the repeal of blue laws in particular. Blue laws limited commerce, typically on Sunday mornings. ‘These laws have been shown to be strongly related to religious practice, creating discrete changes in incentives to attend religious services that are plausibly unrelated to other drivers of religiosity,’ they said.”“The repeal of blue laws had a 5- to 10-percentage-point impact on weekly attendance of religious services, and increased the rate of deaths of despair by 2 deaths per 100,000 people, they found — accounting for a reasonably large share of the initial rise in the deaths of despair.”
