Highly intellectual people are statistically more likely to be liberal, while less intellectual people tend to be conservative. This makes sense. Those with more dynamic intellects will reflexively buck against any preexisting structures, whether they be moral, ideological, political, economic, or social. They will be more likely to want to improve and innovate; to develop new ideas and approaches. They will not appreciate the value of the conventional and traditional. This makes them more liberal and iconoclastic. And, I believe, this also explains the connection between Atheism and liberalism, and why religious people are often stereotyped as being unintellectual.
The problem, as should be obvious, is that this liberal tendency among the highly intelligent can cause them to pursue paths which are enormously destructive simply because they crave the mental exercise of building new structures and ways of doing things. In other words, they disregard the maxim, “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”, and instead believe, “if it isn’t broken, break it anyway and build something else”.
But this attitude, if we are honest, stems less from their intelligence and more from the egotism that is also often found in the highly intelligent. Indeed, it is an attitude that can lead otherwise brilliant people down very foolish paths.
Intellectuals need to recognise that every preexisting idea or system is not antiquated, and that adhering to convention and tradition is not always an intellectually lazy thing to do. It is not smart to throw away ideas and structures just because they were already around when you arrived here; it is entirely probable that they have lasted as long as they have precisely because they are irreplaceable; this is certainly the case with religion.