Memory, Race, and Civil Religion at a Neo-Confederate Shrine

“Memory, Race, and Civil Religion at a Neo-Confederate Shrine” examines white nationalist civil religion at Beauvoir, the Shrine to Jefferson Davis in Biloxi, Mississippi, focusing on the production of white nationalist sentiment through material memory practices, including commemorative rituals, reenactments, and immersive historical experiences. These practices, including memorial ceremonies, pilgrimage, living history performances, and even paranormal investigation, collapse temporal distance and allow participants to experience the Confederacy as a living presence. In doing so, they generate a sense of transhistorical connection that fuels neo-Confederate identity and activism.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2024, as well as archival research on Beauvoir’s history, this project approaches white nationalism not simply as ideology, but as a sacred, affective, material formation enacted through ritual and embodied engagement with the past. I argue that these practices function as technologies of memory that transform grief and nostalgia into moral obligation, producing a sense of white victimhood, sacred ancestry, and a ritualized defense of whiteness. In this context, white nationalism is sacralized through history, myth, and collective practice.

Bringing civil religion into conversation with theories of memory culture and historical experience, this dissertation shows how material environments and ritual performances structure encounters with the past, shaping what is felt, remembered, and made politically meaningful in the present. By foregrounding these embodied and phenomenological dimensions, this project demonstrates how white nationalist identities are sustained through immersive practices that make the Confederacy feel immediate, personal, and sacred.