The distinction is quite significant. Every country is full of cultural and ritual symbols of the past, but few are actually celebrate for the original values that they once mark. To take an example of ritual, are people dancing around a may pole because they enjoy dancing or are they spinning around an erect phallus in order to impregnate mother earth? If a person go into an old church is it because the person is religious or are they a tourist looking at architecture?
If you live in the southern part of the US, maybe they want objects that show that the southern has a history that stretches back further than what living people remember.
Here in Sweden we have a designation called historical memory. Any object can be designated such status and once it has there is a bunch of law that exist to preserve them. The law does not care about the values behind the object. The purpose of the law is explicitly so that further generations may have access to memories of the past. Anything from a old house, a tree, a wreck, a whole in the ground, a stone, to whole living forests. Anything older than 1850 is automatically given this status, with younger objects being designated per case based on a large number of properties like historical/cultural significance and uniqueness. No one talks about revering those symbols, even if they come from past wars where people died.