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The Lost Cause has inspired many prominent Southern memorials and even religious attitudes. The Lost Cause theme has been a major element in defining gender roles in the white South, in terms of honor, tradition, and family roles. In recent decades Lost Cause themes have been widely promoted by the Neo-Confederate movement in books and op-eds, and especially in one of the movement's leading magazines, the Southern Partisan. Proponents of the Lost Cause movement also condemned the Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, claiming that it had been a deliberate attempt by Northern politicians and speculators to destroy the traditional Southern way of life. Lost Cause narratives typically portray the Confederacy's cause as noble and its leadership as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry and honor, defeated by the Union armies through numerical and industrial force that overwhelmed the South's superior military skill and courage. At the peak of troop strength in 1863, Union soldiers outnumbered Confederate soldiers by over two to one, and financially the Union had three times the bank deposits of the Confederacy. In explaining Confederate defeat, the Lost Cause says that the main factor was not qualitative inferiority in leadership or fighting ability but the massive quantitative superiority of the Yankee industrial machine. Many times they also portrayed slave owners being kind to their slaves. These stories would be used to explain slavery to Northerners.

It portrayed slavery as more benevolent than cruel, alleging that it taught Christianity and 'civilization.' Stories of happy slaves were often used as propaganda in an effort to defend slavery the United Daughters of the Confederacy had a 'Faithful Slave Memorial Committee,' and erected the Heyward Shepherd monument in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. The Lost Cause portrayed the South as more adherent to Christian values than the allegedly greedy North. They believe that any state had the right to secede, a point strongly denied by the North.

(See Cornerstone Speech.) Supporters often stress the idea of secession as a defense against a Northern threat to their way of life and say that the threat violated the states' rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

They also deny or minimize the wartime writings and speeches of Confederate leaders in favor of postwar views. In order to reach this conclusion, they directly ignore the declarations of secession by the seceding states, the declarations of congressmen who left Congress to join the Confederacy, and the treatment of slavery in the Confederate Constitution. Though it synthesizes numerous ideas, proponents of the Lost Cause primarily argue that slavery was not the main cause of the Civil War.