Religion occupies a large place in the greater part of conservative writing: in Hooker, Coleridge and in the French and German conservative thinkers of the early nineteenth century. Burke's references to the divinely ordained character of the state play little part in his essential argument, but are not merely rhetorical; they express his sincere religious faith.
In general terms conservatives have seen the church as an indispensable support to the state in ensuring social order and stability. They have favoured an established church in some shape or form, indeed, in the cases of Hooker and Coleridge, they have seen it as an aspect of the state, even as identical with it, being the state itself considered from a particular point of view.
For better or worse it is hard not to see this as an anachronism. Two sorts of religious division have taken place which have to be taken into account. One is between adherents of the established church and other sects: dissenters and Catholics in Britain, for example. The second is between Christians and non-Christians or, going even further, between believers and those with no religious belief.
The hard political core of establishment is the relegation of those outside it to an inferior form of citizenship, in which only restricted civil rights are enjoyed, of, say, occupation or residence, and the rights to vote and to hold public office are withheld. Tolerance and, in a broad sense, enfranchisement of those outside the established church has been a long and consequently gradual process, usually fiercely resisted by conservatives at every step. It has been accompanied by a steady attenuation of the social functions of the church in education and social welfare. In the contemporary world churches are voluntary societies, of which an individual may attach himself to any or to none.
Although there were conservatives in the past without much or any religious faith—Halifax, Bolingbroke, Hume, probably Disraeli—they still supported the view that there should be an established church. But with the historic transformation of religion it is entirely consistent for a conservative to adjust to changes he would, at the time, have opposed, as Burke absorbed the reduction of royal power brought about by the minimally revolutionary revolution of 1688. Today, to the extent that it is politically active, the church is dominated by left-wing dissidence.
(Anthony Quinton, "Conservatism," chap. 9 in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993], 244-68, at 258)
