Context: Randy has left his longtime girlfriend and now has a different girlfriend. They are a better match, but his old acquaintances are judgmental, with the following exception of one couple he knows:

Randy hadn't the faintest idea what these people thought of him and what he had done, but he could sense right away that, essentially that was not the issue because even if they thought he had done something evil, they at least had a framework, a sort of procedure manual, for dealing with transgressions.

To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz, society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack.

They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

I don't think that such religious beliefs are necessary for such functional moral adaptability. But I do like the illustration provided by them. Heuristics, even bad heuristics, are sometimes valuable even when they cannot be straightforwardly applied. In such situations, they at least encourage certain semi-orderly patterns of response, allowing for failures which are less chaotic and more graceful.

This seems related to the social analysis given at the beginning of Slate Star Codex's essay, "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup".