Well that's actually going to far. Now those who self-identify as "conservative" in the modern political context, in the West at any rate, are not "conservative" in that they have no interest in conserving much of anything. But to simply dismiss the term because the rest of the world does not speak the language of political science academics is to do nothing more than institutionalize a failure to communicate.
I don't see that that is what is happening at all. If I understand what you are arguing, it is that authoritarian secular despots used to subordinate themselves to ecclesiastic authority, and now do not, and that that is the source of the problem. But there are several reasons that that doesn't actually explain the real world. First, historically secular authorities were not under the thumb of ecclesiastic authorities, but rather the opposite was true, and that the secular authorities either co-opted the others to further their own power, partnered with the ecclesiastic authorities to serve both the secular and religious authorities at the expense of the population, or the religious authorities were subordinated to the goals of the secular despot. There weren't a lot of cases where the ecclesiastic authorities were really controlling the situation for the common good.
Second, you assume, or seem to, that the ecclesiastic authorities were, and are, actually right about anything, and that letting them be in control is actually a better situation. And really the only reason you have for believing that is that they told you to believe it.
But they are just men.
And as they are just men, they are every bit as likely to be wrong, to be self-serving, to be foolish, to be evil, as any other men. I mean, seriously, just look at how much of a moron Pope Benedict is. He is not a moral leader. He is not a moral man. And yet you seem to think that he, in some way, could lead others to a morality that he himself clearly has no grasp of.
But that's just one pope. History is full of religious leaders who are idiots and villains. Or just radically deluded. And you cannot separate what any religious doctrine is from the people who have been or are the leaders of that doctrine. And so you cannot make the claim that any one doctrine, if only we would adopt it, is the path to goodness. Because to do so would be to assign an infallibility to men that we know with a certainty does not exist.
You cannot say that "this doctrine is god's will and this doctrine is not, therefor everyone should be compelled to follow this doctrine", because ultimately every doctrine is just something some men made up because it sounded good to them at the time. And we have no way to know if the men who simply made that stuff up were fools or villains, or just entirely self-serving.
Third, compelling people to go through the motions of religious observance is not the same thing as saving souls. It is not the same thing as making people be moral or live moral lives. It only compels hypocrisy.
Fourth, those "good old days" you seem to be yearning for really were not good. They were not a more moral era than we are in now. Morally, as well as practically, they were actually a damned horrendous time.
Finally, I don't see that the trends are individualistic all that much. And even to the extent that they are, I don't see any reason to assume that it would be a bad thing. But the reality is that we are not moving in that direction any longer, and have not been for 30 years now. We were moving in that direction in fits and starts between WWII and the 1970s, and the morality of society was greatly enhanced through doing so. Much of the immorality of the previous era of traditionalism and conservatism was given a crippling beating.
However that era was brief, and that era is now long over. And all these complaints about the death of "moral society" and "moral ruin" and the destruction of "traditional values", all of this is taking place not in an era of rampant individualism, but in an era when individualism is under wholesale assault.
Things are getting worse not when we were moving towards greater individualism, but rather when we stopped moving towards greater individualism.
