Conserving Religion in a Populist Era

In Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor John Wilsey calls for harmony between religion and (political) liberty in America. “Harmony” implies the possibility of dissonance, a clashing relationship he assigns to religious postliberalism. If we are to infer a connection in Wilsey’s subtitle, however, what then is the relationship of religious liberty to conservatism? Since freedom for freedom’s sake is not the aim of conservatism, what is being conserved, and to what end? If, as Wilsey asserts, “Protestantism was essential to the ideas of the Founding” then must Protestantism in America be conserved? What else must be conserved?