Sacralize

sacralize
verb, transitive. To imbue with or treat as having a sacred character or quality.

They were never able to understand him, not even after living with him for a year and a half. He made it his life's mission to topple one icon of American culture after another, but sacralized the gathering of the household around the dinner table every evening. Anna privately surmised that it was another of his power grabs. He could direct and monopolize the conversation more easily when everyone was together, eating and sharing events of the day. He had done so over and over, choosing a statement made by another adult as a launch pad for one of his diatribes. She had lost count of the times she had sat at the table hungry and eager for conversation, only to have it hijacked and turned into another harangue on her own shortcomings. When her stomach began to clench and protest the tension, she sometimes asked to be excused, no longer able to choke down the food, only to be shouted back into her chair. She resented this so much, she sometimes fantasized about vomiting onto the table in protest.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.