Kirkian conservatism founds its logic of a higher order on religious conviction. God provides the benchmarks of extrinsic, absolute value. What currency does conservatism have in an increasingly secular age? Can we determine extrinsic value without God?
Taking this in reverse order, for my part the last question is really quite meaningless. Nothing has "extrinsic value". I don't even know what that phrase means, to be honest. What is the "value" of a flower? Of a mosquito? Of a human being? How do we determine what the word "value" means in each of these questions? Does even granting the existence of God somehow both define and ground "value" in a way that not so granting does not?
Furthermore, if we grant the premise, what about the market? How do we constrain the market - the other deity of conservatives - in the face of counterclaims to "value" that cannot be measured in dollars and cents? Or, does the market work in some way heretofore unknown to eliminate itself from consideration in these matters? Based on the evidence, this is demonstrably untrue. Changing the definition of value from some intangible quality a thing possesses apart from our desire to measure its worth, and the market's determination of a fair trade value for any particular item, it seems to me we have reached a kind of incompatibility in conservative thought.
In actual practice, Kirk's views on religion are little different from the sociological, functional approach. Not really all that interested in the subtleties and nuances of theological argument, conservatives view religion as a necessary social and cultural glue, without which value becomes, like currency exchanges, free-floating. Yet, so viewed, religion can be easily substituted, as it has been in the US, for the rule of law as determining a minimal social and cultural standard for behavior and accepted norms and practices. Once religion becomes reduced to a social necessity in this way, we aren't that far from Eisenhower's nonsensical idea that it doesn't really matter what we believe, as long as we believe in something.
Yet, if conservatives are correct, that ideas have consequences, it seems that theological and confessional disagreements and arguments are vital to understanding the role of religion in society. In northern Ireland, in the Middle East and across the Levant, in India, in Sudan, the remnants of Somalia, even in secularized western Europe, religious disputes turn on what people believe, which informs how they live their lives. In these instances, religious belief is as fraught with peril as it is with promise. It is a force for social disintegration as much as it is for tribalistic integration. Kirk, I believe, is mistaken in the view that social cohesion comes from acceptance of religious belief; the world is far too full of religious conflict to make such a sanguine view of religious practice acceptable.
We are, by far, the most religiously observant industrialized country on the planet. Part of our strength, socially and culturally, has been the acceptance - not always given freely and very often honored in the breach - of a variety of religious practice. Kirk's views would include a kind of renewed intolerance for differences of religious opinion; if it becomes a force for social disintegration, disagreement becomes a threat to social well-being, and therefore needs to be addressed by the society at large. This is as un-American an idea I can imagine.
Finally, I would reference Dietrich Bonhoeffer's now-famous quote, that the challenge for our time continues to be how to speak of God in a religionless world come of age. The combating forces of sectarianism and secularism, part and parcel of western history for over two hundred years, have yet to reach a final conclusion, but it seems to me the question of the social role of religion, approached in a purely functional way, rests upon far too narrow and shallow a foundation to be of any help whatsoever.
