While reading Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life one can’t help but recall Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Written just after WWII, Pieper asked what new world the Allies would build in the ruins of the old. Would it be one of “total work,” where value is measured by productivity? Or would they build a world that takes seriously the power and promise of leisure? At the end of Leisure, Pieper turns to an odd source: French utopian socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s On the Celebration of Sunday. Proudhon rejects the existence of God, yet finds the celebration of the Sabbath remarkable for how it grants dignity to the worker.
To this tradition of thought Charlie Kirk contributes Stop, in the Name of God. Kirk experienced the allure of total work, compounded by modern technology’s increased connectivity. Email, texts, social networks—for the young founder building his empire, technology is a double-edged sword. It increases access and efficiency, yet work does not stay at work. The potential ceaselessness of work carries long-term harms destructive of personal and familial flourishing. Kirk’s experience echoes the broader trajectory of American culture. He writes:
As America has abandoned the Sabbath, we have watched nearly every major marker of health—emotional, spiritual, communal—begin to fail. We are more productive and less peaceful, more connected digitally and more isolated relationally. We are over-stimulated, undernourished, distracted, discontent, and desperately lonely. We are, in many ways, a Sabbathless people: wandering, overworked, and longing—without even knowing for what. … The Sabbath is not the fringe—it is the frame. It holds life together.
After years of building Turning Point USA seven days a week, Kirk found it necessary to develop new habits. He discovered the Sabbath by way of PragerU founder Dennis Prager: “For years I heard him brag about how he honors the Sabbath and how it’s the best part of his week. … Over time, I secretly had ‘Shabbat Envy.’” Practicing Sabbath, Kirk argues, changed everything. Kirk took a literal sundown to sundown, Friday to Saturday, 24-hour period as an intentional step away from his labors. For him, that included all tech. As Kirk describes, this involved a learning curve. It took weeks of sabbathing to get over the digital withdrawal symptoms. He encourages his readers to develop specific rituals to begin and end the Sabbath and promises they will see significant returns on their time of rest.
What prevents Stop, in the Name of God from being just a book of advice (practice Sabbath as a way of increasing productivity) is Kirk’s attention to the meaning of Sabbath. He spends multiple chapters rooting the Sabbath in Genesis 1–2, Exodus 20, and Deuteronomy 5. The Sabbath, in Kirk’s view, is a gift from God built into creational order. It carries with it not permission to be lazy but rather a divinely ordained pattern for organizing work. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work” becomes grounds to rebuke young men who have stepped out of the workplace. “But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God” becomes the legal principle codifying the action first demonstrated by God: And God “rested on the seventh day.” The modern world, in Kirk’s view, tends toward the idolization of labor. Sabbath is a gift that when practiced regularly, for the right reasons, restores freedom from work. “The Sabbath is not merely a day off. It is not simply a lifestyle hack. It is holy architecture for the soul. A cathedral in time, with liturgies of rest and windows for the soul. It is not made with human hands, but it is no less beautiful—and perhaps all the more eternal.”
Because Kirk believes that the Sabbath can only rightly be practiced as a celebration of divine sovereignty, he devotes chapters to defending God’s existence. He also traces the role of the Sabbath in Western history. Kirk argues in favor of blue laws, the older legal codes that required most businesses to close on Sunday, because those laws reflected a civilizational agreement that the Sabbath mattered.
The popularity of blue laws rested on a shared moral ecology: that society needed rhythms rooted in something higher than profit or convenience. Their unraveling mirrored not simply a legal liberalization, but a cultural amnesia. What was once a civic consensus—that the soul needs one day not to strive—gave way to market absolutism. Everything could be open. And so, everything was.
In Kirk’s view, America would be a healthier civilization if a cultural consensus arose that nearly all businesses close on Sunday. His argument echoes Clare Morell’s advice in The Tech Exit: The first step to creating a new cultural norm is to find other families committed to living that way. Being the only family not to give 12-year-olds smartphones is, in Morrell’s view, a recipe for failure. Success requires making significant life-pattern shifts within a community.
Stop, in the Name of God has its flaws. The book lacks unity, moving back and forth between theological and practical themes. In several cases, Kirk overgeneralizes, presenting in summary form thinkers and ideas too complex for his simple compressions. Here is one representative passage:
Hegel’s thought, later amplified by Marx and Nietzsche, taught that man does not simply observe reality—he must shape it. Nature is not something to understand and respect, but something to dominate and remake according to human will. … This poisonous seed grew into a monstrous tree, bearing the bitter fruit of Marxist revolutions, Nazi eugenics, and the bloody utopian experiments of the twentieth century.
Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche merit a more complex discussion than Kirk permits. The movement between theologically rich chapters, like chapter eight with it’s focus on the meaning of melachah and eved in the Ten Commandments, and practical chapters like chapter seven on the importance of sleep, is stark. Moving from one mode of thought to the other creates a sense of intellectual whiplash in the reader.
Perhaps the most significant point of disunity is Kirk’s reliance on Jewish theological arguments for the Sabbath. He writes that “rest is not a luxury for the privileged, but a birthright of the liberated. It turns the simple act of stopping into a testimony, a sermon, and song of deliverance.” He further argues that human equality is grounded not first in Genesis 1:27–28 but rather in the Sabbath commandment: “No matter our job, our title, or our background, we stand equal before the Lord of the Sabbath. That is the seed of equality. That is the foundation of the West. And that is why the Ten Commandments are not simply ancient law—they are the charter of human liberty.”
Kirk was himself an evangelical Christian, yet readers must wait until chapters nine and 10 for a clearly Christian discussion of the Sabbath. This book would have been enhanced by addressing the standard evangelical argument much earlier: Christ is the ultimate Sabbath. For Christians, Sabbath practice is optional (and diminished) in the Christian life because modern theologians present the Sabbath as an Old Testament type fulfilled in Christ and that now points to the eschaton rather than remaining a pattern built into the creational order. Jewish and Christian theologians interact with the Sabbath differently, and his book would have benefitted from a stronger recognition of those differences.
Nevertheless, Charlie Kirk’s final book remains ideal for two types of readers. First, the budding intellectual. Kirk gave his life sparking conversations with exactly this type of college student. The early years of adulthood establish patterns that lead to flourishing or to anguish; those in the midst of those years will benefit from Kirk’s arguments, evidence, and ideas. The second category of reader is the educated, non-academic adult. This is a book for small groups, book clubs, and that-friend-who-is-always-reading-a-book. Pastors, academics, and theologians will no doubt fixate on the flaws and in so doing miss the sound arguments Kirk makes. But the reading layman will find much to contemplate in Kirk’s view of the Sabbath:
A true Sabbath—a day set apart, a day of ceasing, a day of reorienting our lives toward God—stands as a bold rebuke to the worship of stuff. It interrupts the machine. It says no to the unrelenting demands of the marketplace. It reminds us that man does not live by bread alone, or smartphones alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
Since the Industrial Revolution, technological progress and material wealth have followed the “hockey stick” model of exponential growth. Technology enables more profit with ever increasing efficiency. And yet the question remains: Do the tools available today result in rest? Or does work encroach on the very nature of human life? “The coming age will promise ‘freedom’ through technology, but what it will actually deliver is exhaustion and enslavement. Everything will be on demand. Everything will be customizable.” In Stop, in the Name of God, Charlie Kirk offers an invitation to pause, to consider the Sabbath not as a command requiring legalistic obedience but as a gift given for our good. He makes a cogent, articulate case that idolizing work threatens human happiness and that the Sabbath provides a pattern for recovering the goods of rest and worship each week.
May he rest in peace. And may we, too, find Sabbath rest.
