We’ve been looking forward to the end of the Biden presidency for the last four years. I think the relief that Trump is again moving into the White House coupled with the urgency of the MAGA mission has led people to want to get on with the Trump 47 administration.
Some people are so eager for Trump to get started that they want to dispense with the Inauguration Day festivities. In our PJ Media Slack channel, Charlie Martin said, “There were a lot of people on X saying, ‘screw the ceremony, get on with the signatures,’ but the ceremony is important.”
Indeed it is. Here in the United States, we have a unique blessing that too many nations don’t get to experience: the peaceful transfer of power. The left loves to trumpet that phrase when we’re inaugurating a Democrat after a Republican presidency, but it’s something we shouldn’t ignore no matter the party taking the White House.
Although the general public has only been able to witness the pageantry of the inauguration since the advent of television, the inauguration ceremonies have been an important part of the transition from one presidential administration to another — or from one term to another. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once called Inauguration Day “one of the great rituals of modern politics,” and he likened the pageantry to the renewal of a covenant, not in an explicitly religious way but as something similar to the covenant renewals of the Old Testament.
“There’s a retelling of our past, an acknowledgment of present problems, and a recommitment to live up to our promise in the future,” said John Stonestreet in Monday’s Breakpoint podcast. “Though not a religious replacement for or an equivalency to Christianity or Judaism, the day draws on themes and rituals found in the Bible.”
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Sixteen years ago, the late Chuck Colson pointed out that there’s a religious connection to Inauguration Day. It’s a rare time that public prayer happens in Washington, and the president swears his oath of office on a Bible.
“Religious activities like public prayers have been excluded from public school graduations and football games,” Colson said. “And yet prayer and the Bible are integral components of our most important democratic ritual: the peaceful transfer of power. Every four years, our rulers engage in the very rituals that they deny to the rest of us.”
In his Briefing podcast on Monday morning, Albert Mohler asked, “But why a formal inauguration? Why doesn't a president, just somewhere in private, take the oath of office and then go into the Oval Office and get on with the task?”
Then he answered his question, drawing parallels between the inauguration and a monarch’s coronation ceremony:
Well, it is because nationhood requires a certain formality. It is because an office of this stature requires a certain ceremony, and democracy requires dignity.
Going back to 1789, there was no precedent for someone like a head of government and head of state united in one office, democratically elected by the people. What did exist was the monarchies that, of course, had marked so much of human history, and we continue to for a long time, and the formality and majesty of those monarchies.
And of course, when a new monarch comes to the throne, this is formalized in what is known as a coronation ceremony. Now, just recently, given the death of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and the ascension of King Charles III, Americans, along with others in the world, got to view that coronation, a presidential inauguration is not a coronation.
There is no throne. But given the dignity of the office of President of the United States, it is a massively weighty and important, even majestic ceremony.
Some people may criticize the pomp and circumstance or bemoan some of the decisions surrounding the ceremony, but the inauguration is always worth watching. It connects us to our history. It unites us as Americans, no matter what members of the losing party claim. The peaceful transfer of power is our American legacy, and it’s especially glorious this time.
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