Is religious faith necessary for conservatism? A more basic question is whether it is necessary for good sense, since it is for the sake of good sense that we are conservative. If it were otherwise, conservatism would be a hobby or an ideology, and it is neither; it is simply the appearance good sense takes on in an overly-rationalistic world.

Conservatism begins with the acceptance of limits. It tells us that not everything can be said, let alone proved; that we did not make the world and cannot remake it; that we are creatures of habit; and that loyalty to the ways and understandings that order a particular social world is necessary for our lives to be coherent and reasonable. As Joseph de Maistre points out, we are not simply men; we are Frenchmen or Italians, Europeans or Americans, Yankees or Southerners, Protestants, Catholics, or Jews.

Acceptance of limits is thus part of conservatism, as well as good sense, but it is not the whole. Conservatism is not a dogma and conservatism cannot be purely conservative. We recognize limits by reference to what goes beyond them, so to know them we must also know something about the unlimited. To accept that we cannot remake the world is to accept that much of it forever exceeds our grasp. If we do not have some sense of what it is that exceeds us, however, the matter becomes too abstract to seem relevant. Religious faith gives us the sense of the transcendent that we need, and conservatism cannot do without it. It is the absence of that sense that turned acceptance of particular loyalties into the right-wing extremist ideologies of the last century.

Nor can good sense do without religious faith. Good sense is dealing with our situation as a whole in a fitting way. It is elusive, because we cannot understand everything about our situation. We must act, but self-sufficient certainty is out of reach. Simply accepting things as they are denies that there is anything important beyond what is before us here and now. It means the end of all standards by which things could be judged. To believe that we can demonstrate how things should be, however, ignores the importance of what we cannot pin down.

Since we can neither simply rest content with what there is nor demonstrate what is better, we must rely on faith. Faith is our connection to what exceeds the limits of thought; as Saint Paul says, it is “the evidence of things not seen.” While we cannot comprehend faith, we need it to comprehend anything. Our thought must rely on it, simply because thought has objects outside itself and cannot be self-contained.

By its nature, the connection between thought and faith cannot be altogether clear to us. It requires, however, that faith be somehow brought into relation with experience and reason. Without a settled balance among the three, thought becomes disordered in all its aspects: experience becomes blind, faith erratic, and reason unreasonable.

It is hard to explain things that are so fundamental to human life, although we must do our best so that we can defend them when they are challenged. Where we cannot explain, practice must be our guide. Hence the importance of cultural loyalty; it is less theory than a concrete way of life that brings things as diverse as experience, faith and reason into a stable and productive relationship.