Inauguration = consecration

Inauguration is the consecration of a president-elect as high priest of the the American civil religion, argued sociologist Robert Bellah .

The Floriday Time-Union explained:

Obama will be just another American citizen Tuesday morning. Tuesday night he will be the leader of one of the most powerful nations on earth. In between, he will undergo a status transformation through a rite of initiation.

“There has to be a ritual way of placing the mantle [of authority] on the person” becoming president, [religion scholar Julie] Ingersoll said. “This is how we legitimize them.”

Rites of initiation are rituals that initiate a person or community into a new reality, Ingersoll said. Such ceremonies establish and celebrate the shedding of an older life in favor of a new life and identity.

Usually invisible to us, as Mollie of Get Religion explained recently, our civil religion has fundamental beliefs, values, holidays, and rituals that said parallel or are independent of our chosen, spiritual religions.

Obama's consecration is remarkable for the intense interweaving of both civil religion and spiritual religions, symbolizing a broader transition of allegiance and power that occurred during the election and is being steadily consolidated.

Julian E. Zelize, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, wrote recently about how during the presidential election formerly rock-solid Republican religionists changed allegiance:

Polls show that many religious Americans did not automatically move toward the right. Although most evangelicals refused to budge, younger evangelicals turned out for Obama. Catholics moved back to the Democrats and Jews and mainline Protestants voted for Obama in very high numbers.

Although the prayers and other religious ritual are a brief part of the inauguration, the underlying meaning of the breadth of clergy Obama has chosen to involve is lost on no one.

A waning alliance of the religious and political right led this country to catastrophe, and a new and it is to be greatly hoped reviving set of alliances is being forged and anointed.