Almost a year after the great earthquake and fire of April 1906, San Francisco clergyman William Rader declared, “We are having a true revival of religion.” Writing in the San Francisco-based Congregationalist weekly Pacific, Rader was not referring to the visit of a mass evangelist; rather, he meant the graft prosecutions officially launched in October 1906 against the Union Labor party administration of the city. He compared Rudolph Spreckels, a reform-minded member of the city's financial elite who was helping to fund the prosecution, and Francis J. Heney, the lead prosecuting attorney, to the late-nineteenth-century revival team of Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey. “God is moving the city,” Rader asserted, “and when a number of our Supervisors and other officials are sent to prison we will be more free…. Thank God the Christ spirit is not dead; it lives.”

Throughout history, human communities have converted the dead into sources of living power by grafting symbolic structures onto them and their places of interment. The impact of these structures on society, however, indicates that the “dead” are understood as more than physical remains. The dead can be imagined also as memories, spirits, or deities, and the physical or spiritual locations where they reside are essential to the vitality of the symbolism. When the dead are symbolized and carefully integrated into cultural and/or religious systems, they can become a potent source of political power for those who control the meaning of the dead and their physical remains. For this reason, the dead—especially their tombs and remains—have historically been a valuable commodity in the religious and cultural marketplace.

So began a 1982 essay by Leonard Sweet on the Revival of 1857-58, an event usually remembered for its widely publicized urban prayer meetings. As Sweet alluded, lack of consensus on what to call this revival reflected only the tip of an iceberg of interpretative confusion. In addition to what they should title it, historians have differed over where the revival began, how long it lasted, which regions of the country were involved, its religious and cultural significance, and even whether anything happened that actually had significance worthy of academic investigation.

Two of the primary images most scholars have of the religion of white southerners in the postbellum period seem inconsistent or even contradictory. One image portrays members of the mainstream Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches as becoming increasingly secure in their positions as leaders of southern society. The churches were losing, or had already lost, their sense as agencies for the plain folk to criticize the complacency, the hierarchical pretensions, and perceived decadence of the upper class. In doing so, they had taken on the characteristics John Lee Eighmy best described as Churches in Cultural Captivity. As on so many topics, C. Vann Woodward states this position most clearly.