Although I’m not a social conservative, I can make an argument for it that doesn’t rely on religion. It’s basically the social precautionary principle.
The argument goes like this: Like any ecosystem, society is an evolved construct. When looking at social structures, it’s important to consider that these evolved for a reason, even if we don’t quite understand it. We muck with them at our peril.
This is the same argument for not having a ‘progressive’ policy towards managing an ecosystem to make it ‘better’. If we tried applying ‘social justice’ to animals and started mucking about in the ecosystem to make it more fair, do you think we’d be likely to make it better? Or would we get bitten in the ass for mucking about with things we don’t understand?
For example, should we implement universal day care? What will be the social effects of that? Is it better for young children to be in institutions than with their mothers? Will the long-term effect of this be that more single mothers have children? Or perhaps child birth will increase if parents can have children and both still work? What happens to the generation after that? How will this change social attitudes? How will this affect family unity in the long run?
It could be argued that the replacement of charity as a largely private function into an entitlement has broken a number of social conventions that were very useful - in the past, people who received charity were generally given it with expectations that they would A) work to relieve the conditions that required the charity, and B) pay it forward. It was part of a social contract that helped keep people in line and kept communities more tightly bonded as everyone relied on each other. Taking that function and giving it to a faceless bureaucrat, and turning it into a ‘right’ removes all such obligation and exchanges local decision-making for bureaucracy. How does that effect society in the long run?
And religion seems to be touching a universal need, since it arises pretty much everywhere. If we destroy traditional religions, will people seek something else to replace it? Perhaps something more dangerous like worship of the state, or something equally goofy like Gaia theory, new age nonsense about crystals and chakras and healing auras, Wicca, or tribal politics as secular religion?
The social order is always changing. The automobile did more to destroy the nuclear family than did any ‘progressive’ politics of the time. So you can’t avoid change, and conservatives need to realize that. But at the same time, there’s an argument to be made that destroying old social orders because they are ‘unjust’ is a dangerous thing to do. It may be the right thing to do, but it needs to be approached with a little more humility and care.