Sacred Order

Sacred order is Philip Rieff's term for the comprehensive system of binding demands through which a culture forms its members into specific kinds of people. The sacred order is not reducible to religion, though religion is its most powerful historical carrier. It is the structure of authority that tells the community what is permitted and what is forbidden, what is sacred and what is profane, what must be honored and what must be prohibited — and does so with a force that transcends individual consent. The Ten Commandments are a sacred order. The guild's apprenticeship requirements are a sacred order. The university's comprehensive examination is a sacred order. Each makes demands that the individual experiences as legitimate not because the individual agrees with them but because the authority behind them is recognized as real, as binding, as deriving from something that precedes and exceeds individual preference.