As a conservative I must be willing to conserve what is good in my society, and christianity is good and deserves to be conserved in a christina society. Revival must allways have something firm to stand on, and when a nation can stand on 1000 years of christianity it can be beliewed that the next 1000 years will also be on christian grounds. This is our culture, and it is my duty as a conservative to preserve my nations culture, but I also want it to be revived as a living, breathing christianity, like my own church (not the national church) has preserved, but the solution is not to rip apart the link to the past and become a secular society.
But I agree that the churches have to be free from the state, it does not have to be the same thing to have the priests on government payrole (wich I am opposed) and to have the state to rely on its christian grounds. The reason that the government pays the national church´s priests is a contract made between the church and the state in the year 1907 about that the government got all the land in the church´s ownership (aroun one third of the country) instead of paying the church´s priests. I consider this one of the worst thing in our political and religous history, but before that, the church and christianity were supported to be defended and preserved by the state, as is claimed in our constitution, and that is possible in many other ways than direct government payrole.
Now, when liberals are rallying for separation of church and state, I at least, am opposed to give any religon the same standing in Icelandic society, but I am not opposed to what most people really want, to make the church economically independent, but most people think of these two things as the same, wich they are not. To rift this contract is though difficult, as the government has to find a way to pay the church for the land it has allready sold, or return the land, or something like that.
I noticed one thing you said in your homepage, that conservatism is optimistic. I recently read a paper about the difference between european and Us conservatism, and our tend to be much more pessimistic than yours. I am at least pessimistic, the liberals are taking everything over.
Conservatism IS optimistic. If you read Reagan, William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, Burke and others, you can not help but notice that each had a true love for living and was consistently optimistic. At the core of this optimism is Christian faith!