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Iris Murdoch (in 'Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals', though I'm paraphrasing) says that there are first-order moral concepts (such as 'goodness' or 'faith'), which take their fire more or less directly from the Source, and then there are secondary and tertiary moral values, such as 'tolerance', 'openness' and so on, which are more contingent and more socially constructed. Disorder results from promoting secondary or tertiary moral concepts to do the work of first-order values.
In this scheme, many moral disorders are versions of the (itself cynical)principle by which persons rise to their level of incompetence - scepticism becomes cynicism, openness becomes a lack of identity or backbone, and respect for tradition becomes something hidebound and legalistic.
Another reason for avoiding cynicism is that cynicism is what THEY want 
That Iris Murdoch point is brilliant. The displacement of concepts such as "good/evil", "right/wrong" (which I assume all qualify as "first-order values") by concepts such as "openness", "tolerance" etc can be seen all around us.
It's not that openness and tolerance are inherently bad - and it's certainly possible to tip over into that error, in reaction to the contemporary fetishisation of these concepts - it's just that they need to be guided and bounded by the "first-order" values. Otherwise you end up with no ethical tools left for being closed and intolerant towards moral evil. Ditto maintaining evil "traditions".
However, a couple of other thoughts:
1. If I were you, I'd be a little worried about how enthusiastically I've latched on to this point. Who knows where you might end up if you're following Iris Murdoch's line of thought
2. More seriously: I don't think "faith" should be regarded as a "first order" concept. There is a very important sense in which faith is a contingent value just as "tolerance" is: namely, there is nothing inherently good or virtuous about "faith". What gives faith its value is not something inherent to faith as such, or even the intensity and clarity with which faith is held, but the object of faith.
The (post)modern concept that "faith" is a distinct category, so that one can distinguish "persons of faith" as an identifiable group with common interests and views, as distinct from those of "no faith" ("no faith"? as if!), is seriously flawed.
In particular, it's vital to note that in the NT, what's virtually always in focus when "faith" is discussed is not "faith" per se, or even faith in God, but rather faith in Jesus Christ, and in particular Christ as He is proclaimed and present in the preaching and sacraments of the church. See, among many examples, Acts 20:21.
The Bible's term for faith in anything other than God, including anything called "God" that is detached from Christ, that is other than the Triune God revealed to us in Scripture - is "unbelief". As Luther put it, "I know of no God except the one called Jesus Christ".
That's a good point about faith.
The word 'community' is used in a similarly distorted way in journalistic shorthand, as though the Muslim community and the thrash-metal community (for instance)were somehow morphologically similar.
(They overlap, but that's another story).
'Good/ evil' and 'right/ wrong' are better examples of first-order values. In Wittgenstein's terms, both can be 'shown' but cannot be 'said'; that is, you could BE good, and lead someone to goodness by words and PRE-VERBAL example, but you couldn't break it down for someone into an exhaustive concept which rests on other concepts.
To quote Gordon Dalbey's 'Healing the Masculine Soul':
"In the Bible... godly exhortation finds it mark only *after* encounter with the Living God. The Ten Commandments, for example, are given in the wilderness context of God's acting to save His people. Hence, God introduces the commandments not with a half-time pep talk to win the battle against sin, but rather, with a reminder of His authority by virtue of that saving encounter:
'I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, where you were slaves. Worship no god but me. [Ex 20.1]'"
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