Edmund Burke ping. A fine article by Bill Kristol’s mom.
In this sense, the Reflections was even more provocative than it seems on the surface, for it was an indictment not only of the French Revolution but of the French Enlightenment,
It was an indictment of more than that. One reason that Burke was so vigorously attacked for the Reflections was that before he even got to criticism of the French he went after two English private clubs - revolutionary societies - that offered ideological and monetary support to the French revolutionaries and with whom, by a similarity of overall sentiment toward Enlightenment liberalism, his French correspondent (the Reflections is, actually, a long letter) assumed him in sympathy if not an actual member. Far from that.
It was unclear at the time and for many not so much less unclear now why Burke, a vigorous supporter of the American "revolution," should oppose the French one with equal vigor. The Reflections are, as a document, the answer to that question.
It might have been Burke, in the Federalist Papers, observing that “a man must be far gone in Utopian speculations … to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.”
It was, of course, Publius and not Burke (yer a cynic, Pub') but I can think of fewer more accurate summations of one of the foundational premises of conservatism.
As to the nature of superstition and its relationship with religion I have two points. First, that this too must be judged with an eye toward Burke's own antecedents - his mother was Roman Catholic, his father probably a Protestant convert - and with respect to the degree to which the French Enlightenment was virulently anti-Catholic. The latter constitutes one major difference between the American War of Independence and the French Revolution that might account for part of Burke's different views of the two.
But all popular religion contains an element of superstition, if by that we mean a belief in dogma for which there is little Biblical (in the case of Christianity) foundation. It is a topic over which hours are spent in debate in the FR Religion Forum. For a radical Jacobin all religion, and specifically all Catholicism, was superstition; for a Calvinist, the Catholic church hierarchy, and so on. I'm guessing here Burke was more hedging his bets with respect to the reader than attempting to draw fine lines himself.
But central to Burke's views of both politics and religion was that it really didn't matter when one was confronting the overthrow of an established set of mores, that the latter had grown, by the time of consideration, to fill functions that were not apparent from the view of theory or dogma, and that their careless dissolution might be fraught with unintended consequences. It is there that Burke's genius made the step from the clear (even at the time) possibility that the dissolution of the strictures of the Crown might lead to chaotic violence, to the bold prediction that it was inevitable. As, perhaps, it was, but in any case, to take a Burkean approach to our own perspective, regardless of theory it did happen. Observation trumps prediction. We know that he was right.
And that's a problem for the theorists. It disturbed Thomas Paine enough to pen his monumental Rights of Man in reply. And with the greatest respect for Paine, who was probably as much in touch with the spirit of the time as Burke, he didn't really answer the principal objection of the Reflections, which was, shortly, that a tree is to be known by its fruit, not its seed.