skeptical accomodation of religion so I'm reading my Burke (ok, just looking up a quote) and come across this paragraph→[More:]

He's talking about French Revolutionaries forcefully confisticating and disbanding church properties or something along those lines:

Did fifty thousand persons whose mental and whose bodily labor you might direct, and so many hundred thousand a year of a revenue which was neither lazy nor superstitious, appear too big for your abilities to wield? Had you no way of using them but by converting monks into pensioners? Had you no way of turning the revenue to account but through the improvident resource of a spendthrift sale? If you were thus destitute of mental funds, the proceeding is in its natural course. Your politicians do not understand their trade; and therefore they sell their tools.

But the institutions savor of superstition in their very principle, and they nourish it by a permanent and standing influence. This I do not mean to dispute, but this ought not to hinder you from deriving from superstition itself any resources which may thence be furnished for the public advantage. You derive benefits from many dispositions and many passions of the human mind which are of as doubtful a color, in the moral eye, as superstition itself. It was your business to correct and mitigate everything which was noxious in this passion, as in all the passions. But is superstition the greatest of all possible vices?

He's out and out calling the (catholic?) church system superstitious; but even in his contempt he's more 'protective' of it than the revolutionaries. It's essentially an appeal to the circumstantial convenience of religious institutions. Here's something similar I came across last night while watching some Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture; the guy who popularized 'black power' in the 60s) on youtube:

If you're a Marxist-Leninist, you must be an atheist. That means you must say that, "God does not exist." I used to tell them, "Ok, I can say it. No problem. But my people?" *laughs* Not in this generation. Maybe the next one, but not in this one. For them God and revolution, religion and revolution are one and the same. [...] Nat Turner was a righteous preacher. [...] Malcolm X was a rigtehous Muslim preacher. Martin Luther King was a righteous Christian preacher. Jesse Jackson is a preacher. Minister Louis Farrakhan is a preacher. So if you look very properly, you'll see for us Africans, religion and revolution has never had this dialectical break. [...]

I'll give you one example. Once in Greenville, Mississipi. When I was doing a program there, of protest against the police. We had to fill the jails, but there were young kids and the discipline was breaking down. So I had to go into the jail to establish discipline. So I picked some cadre to go with me just to go to jail and made two lines to confuse the police.

I looked up on the line and I hand picked and I see an old woman on the end of it.

I run back there, I said, "Ma'am, you're in the wrong line." I said, "this line is getting arrested."
She said, "I know, that's what they told me."
I said, "You ain't going to jail."
She said, "Yes I am."
I said, "They're brutal in there!"
She said, "I know, they brutalized my daughter, brutalized my granddaughter, now I must go."
I said, "They don't respect age nor sex."
She said, "I know." She said, "You worried about me son?"
I said, "Ma'am, I'm very worried about you up in there."
"Don't you worry son, I got a telephone in my bosom. Soon as they touch me, I'mma call Jesus. He gonna take care of me."

*laughs* What am I going to do with that? *laughs* Tell her take the telephone out her bosom?

I think there is a long tradition of intellectual secular people with political skills who have really 'lithe' views on religion, who step in and out of communities of religion with maybe a *touch* of patronizing thoughts ("I don't believe this stuff, but I'll roll with the rituals") but that patronizing is still better than dealing with things on the face of it and ending up with an Us vs Them thing going on. In a way all social / political people have to do this to some extent because even if they're religious they deal with members of some other religion they don't belong to; so they respect and maybe even participate in the 'shadowboxing' of mechanistic participation in rituals of funerals and weddings, prayers, etc. In the end these are all manifestations of social behavior as much as they're theological. It's hypocritical in a way if you look through the young-20something atheist lens of the reddit generation, but, in a Burkean conservative way, it's very wise.