Though their altars are consecrated to separate deities, Christians and Libertarians both adopt a man-centered viewpoint, and then inquire outwardly as to how mankind might best create a habitable culture. Their shared conclusions regarding good citizenship and good governance are soundly conservative in their evocation of immemorial wisdom: the good person makes his own way in the world via voluntary transactions, without inhibiting others who do the same; the good government manages to keep taxes low, the currency strong, the courts honest, and nothing else. Grace and material well-being, as well as Christianity and rational certitude, abide together insofar as regimes can perfect these longings.

But these systems have now become barricades behind which the wisdom of ages is held hostage to the aggrandizement of useless doctrine, a Vatican anxious to assert authority in any realm but the moral,¹ and the alien purposes of an internationalist Likud. Acceptance of some sort of explanatory system is mandatory in order to assuage what is undoubtedly the repressed and intolerable doubt that is ill-concealed within the evangelist’s demand for acceptance. One longs for the time when conservatism could assent to Russell Kirk’s definition as the negation of ideology rather than the ideological battleground it has become.²

When conservatism’s adversaries remain obdurate, they are presumed innocent and in need of enlightenment. The possibility that adversaries of good governance and upright citizenship are proceeding with knowledge and purpose toward well-essayed selfish ends does not occur. All difficulties in propagating needful wisdom are sourced back to an insufficiently attentive audience, e.g.: Wake up America!. Tragically, what these frustrated totalitarians are and do pollutes whatever good they might eventually get around to espousing.

If the cultural right wished accord with SFEcon, it might consider the acceptability of a simple premise: civility forms citizens whose collective character and inventiveness are the boundary within which economic forces rule. It would then follow that, if those who have set themselves up to cultivate our citizenry were to get materialism’s boundary right, then the ensuing autopoietic generation of commodity values within that boundary will be both useful and just. A determinant expression of economic adjustment would then be no more of an affront to human dignity than is the Periodic Chart of Elements.

And, as discovery of the Periodic Chart once operated to preserve Western culture by advancing its unique scientific outlook, so might the West be further preserved by advancing its science into the realm of supply and demand.

Should materialism's fundamental causality be quantified in the manner of an engineering discipline, then economics would be a fragment — not the whole — of our morality; and it would be a fragment — not an irrelevance — to our biology. However upsetting this might be to those in need of metaphysical certitude, we would likely be better off knowing as much as possible about the size and shape of these fragments. Our current refusal to know these things only serves obtuse moralists and evangelical rationalists who sell fear by inflaming our potential for beliefs a good bit more hysterical than z = pl.
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¹       His Holiness Pope Francis has spoken authoritatively (though without
         apparent cause) on the scientific reality of global warming. Yet, in
         response to a request for the Church's position on gay marriage, this
         same Pope asked Who am I to judge? (c.f., Pontius Pilate: What is truth?
         Pilate did not stay for an answer either.)
²       Jonah Goldberg has since overturned conservatives' appreciation of
         Kirk with:

               As a confessed ideologue, I've always taken offense at the
               suggestion that ideology -- i.e., a fixed set of principles -- deserves
               to be listed alongside prejudice, bigotry and small thinking.

         townhall.com, 21 December 2016: 'Will Trump Be the "Transformative"
         President Obama Wanted to Be?'