Neo-Confederate ideology is a sort of romantic mythology, an attempt at a certain variety of white people to find something like "roots" or even a true "national identity" that they don't currently have.

The Lost Cause is basically a creation/fall narrative.

Most of the people who do this gloss over all the details and in fact rewrite the history so as to make it a replay of William Wallace and George Washington. They see the South as the real "new birth of liberty," but one which was unable to come to term.

Precisely as mythology, this way of thinking renders one unable to deal wit contemporary problems. It is an escape and perhaps a way to "start afresh" with some other system and, perhaps, in some other place.

There really is nowhere else to go, politically, so people need a catastrophic collapse to happen. Some actually desire a spectacular crash &fall (rise again).

But most of the time, folks are content to turn to alternative mini-worlds, whether it be church or private society

Neo-confederacy is not good history, and it's not a smart or effective Christian political strategy. It was, however, quite trendy for a good part of the 20th cent, going back at least to Weaver. It has both "true successors" and its ideological hobbyists as constituents.

The true successors are the actual scary guys, the folks with a direct link to the literal old systems of oppression. The ideological hobbyists just want to hang up pictures of Stonewall and Lee and read the Vanderbilt poets, and are usually quite powerless in the institutions.

Somewhere along the way this latter group also tried to marry the Old South with Cavalier aesthetics, so you can get some really weird connections and byproducts of this stuff. Neo-Confederates can be either libertarian or monarchist, or some mix of both.

Neo-Confederates were also "anti-Communists" and so were able to claim to be "true Americans," an extremely ironic claim when viewed historically.

This was perhaps the default setting for conservative Southern white people between 1940 and 1995 or so.

This is Dukes of Hazzard/Lynyrd Skynyrd/Charlotte Pro Wrestling Circuit Southern culture. It's sort of what happens when mythology actually does get rooted and embedded into a native culture. It doesn't make much sense, but that's because people don't make much sense.

And what's really curious/interesting is that this last group is what happens when a mythology is more or less internalized and thus a new culture is actually created. People in this group don't even think about the fact that they have such an ideology. It's just what's "normal."

And to be honest, I doubt most members of this culture would use the term "neo-Confederate" and know what it means. They are a creation of it but not necessarily partisans of it.