White and African-American students in the American South are able to meet and learn from Confucianism on its own terms much more readily than their peers elsewhere. This is because of their tendency to respect authority, participate in intergenerational ritual performances (especially those concerned with manners, meals, and mortuary practices), and judge the present in terms of the past (especially the U.S. Civil War). This is true despite the incompatibility that many southern students sense between Confucianism and their own religious doctrines. Instead, southern students' grasp of Confucianism rests on the grounds of lived religious experience. When southern students learn to see in Confucianism a set of beliefs, practices, and experiences that, in some ways, mirror their own, they are empowered to identify the tradition as "religious" in a way that renders "religion" a descriptive category of comparison rather than a limiting category of unique identity.