The core of urban Shanghai death ritual today is “memorial meetings” — a civil funeral that commemorates the dead as model socialist citizens primarily through speeches given by work units. However, Shanghai people have also created a variety of religious variations on this modern secular ritual despite the fact that all of these funerals continue to be held in state institutions — state funeral parlors. This talk compares three different religious variations of memorial meetings — popular religious, Buddhist, and Protestant versions — in order to show how different types of religious authority engage in the politics of identity formation for the dead through ritual and how various forms of religious authority interact with the different actors that enact local governance through state institutions.