Definition
Ordination is the formal act of conferring holy orders upon an individual, admitting them to an ordained office within a religious body — typically the ministry, priesthood, diaconate, or equivalent clerical rank recognized by that body. In its legal dimension, ordination matters less as an internal religious ceremony and more as the threshold status that triggers a range of legal consequences: tax exemptions, evidentiary privileges, employment classifications, and constitutional protections under the First Amendment's Religion Clauses.
Legally, ordination is treated not as a purely spiritual event but as a recognized status-conferring act whose existence courts may acknowledge without evaluating its theological validity. Whether a person has been ordained becomes a factual question with legal consequences; whether the ordination was spiritually valid is a question courts will not reach.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The ceremony in which a priest is consecrated, considered a sacrament in the Catholic and Orthodox churches; more broadly, any ceremony in which a religious leader is formally installed into an ordained role.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of setting apart to an office in the Christian ministry; the conferring of holy orders. Also used more generally to mean any appointment, disposition, or arrangement — including by divine decree.
The legal gap here is specific: Webster's 1913 captures the general sense of "setting apart" for any purpose, and common usage centers on the sacramental ceremony itself. Legal usage is narrower and more functional — courts focus on the status produced by ordination, not the ceremony or its theological meaning. Whether ordination occurred is litigated; what it signifies spiritually is not.
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Common Confusion
ORDINATION vs. LICENSURE vs. COMMISSIONING: Many Protestant denominations distinguish between licensed ministers (authorized to preach), commissioned ministers (authorized for specific tasks), and ordained ministers (fully set apart with permanent ministerial status). These distinctions matter legally — ordination typically carries more durable legal recognition than licensure or commissioning, and the differences affect whether clergy-penitent privilege applies, whether a person may legally solemnize marriages, and how employment law treats the individual under the ministerial exception doctrine.
ORDINATION vs. INSTALLATION: Ordination confers the office; installation places the ordained person into a specific post. A person ordained may not yet be installed anywhere, but ordination alone is sufficient to establish legal status in most jurisdictions.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter ordination as a legal threshold in at least three distinct bodies of law, and conflating them produces errors.
First, in clergy-penitent privilege cases, courts ask whether the communicant reasonably believed they were speaking to an ordained minister in their ministerial capacity. Historical sources rarely address non-Christian ordinations, and modern litigation has expanded the question considerably — ordination by online religious organizations, mail-order ministries, and non-hierarchical denominations has generated significant case law not reflected in any of the historical dictionaries in this corpus.
Second, in tax-exemption and housing-allowance contexts, the IRS applies its own functional definition of ordination that does not map neatly onto any denominational standard. Researchers using Bouvier's or Anderson's for guidance on "ordained minister" status in tax disputes will find the historical sources nearly useless — the statutory and regulatory framework is entirely post-nineteenth century.
Third, in employment law, the ministerial exception doctrine (which bars civil courts from adjudicating employment disputes with ministerial employees) turns in part on whether an employee has been ordained. Courts have moved away from treating ordination as the sole or determinative marker of ministerial status, looking instead at the employee's function. Ordination is now one factor among several, not a bright-line test — a significant departure from the historical conception.
Historical sources in this corpus treat ordination as exclusively a matter of Christian ecclesiastical law. Researchers working with Buddhist, Jewish, Islamic, or other non-Christian traditions will find no guidance there and should not assume historical definitions extend to those contexts.
Note the cross-reference potential: zoning and land-use law occasionally turns on whether a structure is used for religious worship, and ordination status of the officiant can bear on that classification in narrow circumstances.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines ordination simply as "the act of conferring the orders of the church upon an individual" and refers the reader to its entry on ORDAIN. Anderson's likewise redirects to ORDAIN. Both sources treat ordination as self-evidently a matter of ecclesiastical internal governance, offering no analysis of its civil legal consequences — an approach that was defensible in the nineteenth century when courts rarely engaged with religious employment disputes or clergy privilege in the forms that dominate modern litigation.
The historical sources agree on the core meaning: ordination is a formal, institutional act, not merely personal religious conviction. This point remains legally sound. But both sources implicitly assume a hierarchical, Christian, institutional structure — the kind of denomination with recognized orders, bishops, or equivalent bodies to perform the conferral. That assumption increasingly fails in modern legal contexts.
Neither source addresses what happens when ordination is contested within a denomination, or when a religious body itself is disputed. Courts developed the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine to handle exactly these gaps, but researchers will find no hint of it in either historical dictionary.
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Jurisdictional Note
Marriage solemnization law varies significantly: some states require that an officiant be ordained by a recognized religious body and may impose registration requirements; others ask only that the officiant hold a position of authority within a religious organization. Researchers should not assume that ordination alone qualifies an individual to legally solemnize marriages in every jurisdiction.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Preemption of Local Ordinances by State and Federal Law — The Law Mind Administrative Law & Government Encyclopedia (relevant to questions of religious exemptions from local regulatory requirements, where ordained status may affect applicability)
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