Grace Thorn argues that "Conservatism" cannot succeed because its metaphysics has disintegrated, those being [post-Augustine Western] Christian. She dates the start of the decay somewhere before anno domini 1722. She is talking politeia: human interaction and the place of religion within that. Religion / dîn being based on doctrines which have been failing.
One result is that morality is now being divorced from faith (iman). This means (actual) religion (din) is enforced outside what we all know, innately, to be true. "Oh you can be Catholic or Muslim but that is a private matter." Meaning - a meaningless matter. Trajan is king - and reserves the rights of Diocletian. To engage with the wider culture, we must lie.
Back to Thorn: why the early eighteenth century and not Westphalia? Why not the Reformation itself?
By the way I think Christian metaphysics is hit less hard as Jewish metaphysics. We can both work with the Big Bang and with the cladistic approach to species diversification. Jews have a problem where their clade excludes other clades. Christians might be able to evangelise even to Neanderthals; Christianity has managed this with Africans. Christianity has other problems.
The malady lies within what has been Christianity's greatest success: the division between the two cities of God and Man: mooted at Nicaea, enforced by Theodosius I, explicated by Augustine, restored at Chalcedon, defended by Sophronius (and Maximus), and reïmposed by Karl der Große. This has become our "wall of separation between church and state" where too many of the church's prerogatives lie now on the state's side of the wall. The Church of the East, which adopted Nestorius, serves as our test-case here; it is now almost exterminated.
If we are to save Christianity we need to define better what it is for. Time was, we called those "sacraments".
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