Leopard hijack getting too interesting. Move it here.
Noah Smith, quoting the facile Douthat of the NYT: “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” Once you strip away religion (and religious authority) what you are left with is conspiracy theory. Noah, “Conspiracy theories have replaced Christianity as the animating cosmology and purpose-giving belief system of a whole segment of American society.” He links to a Rawstory article: " Fox’s new Jan. 6 documentary implies 9/11 was a false flag."
This doesn’t exactly conflict with Der’s POV: it’s more in the way of elaboration. Substantively, we are left with a knotty causal problem for social scientists: “To what extent does religion cause an anti-scientific mindset and to what extent does it merely reflect pre-existing non-scientific views of a slice of its followers?” These sorts of questions are not statistically unanswerable in general, but they do require careful specialist analysis.
Change-skepticism would remain though, appropriately. Your claim applies to American conservatism, sociologically/electorally speaking, but not center-right politics of the other-high-income-democracies variety. The latter wouldn’t be affected much more than center-left politics, again outside of the US. IMO.
Again, by way of clarification. Conservatism is an ambiguous word, much more so than other ideological characterizations.