For Aquinas, religion is only the beginning point of a lifelong quest for soundness and truth. He doesn't give in to the cult-like aspects of the faith, but strengthens his resolve by viewing his intellectual contribution as a service to others. Therefore, although he has to argue against people who strongly disagree with him, in basically every part of his career, he has the resolve to seek an objective point of view. Typically, his writing follows very strict mental methodologies, and the reader will begin to see that what Aquinas's mind really is is an exhaustive filing cabinet where he sorts through ideas and categorizes them as either belief or knowledge.
This dilemma between belief and knowledge is also valuable in the pursuit of objectivity, because without thoroughly examining the nature of human suspicion, we might not have separated our superstition from the real academic merit of Western religion. Because Western religion is largely historical in nature, there is much to consider about the facts of religion, but for Aquinas's time, the assumptions of religion were set—his point of view was so forward thinking in his time that he was constantly the enemy of dogmatists, because he thought for himself. Was he objective? Perhaps not, but he made his mark by pursuing truth.
The primary value of Aquinas's writing for those who don't really care about all the exhaustive religious imaginings of a monk is probably this: Aquinas truly prizes objectivity. He writes about Aristotle and notices that much of Aristotle's approach to thought is deeply pragmatic, and this makes him likely to adopt Aristotle's point fo view, although there is much merit, he feels in the writings of Plato. He combines the practicality of Aristotle's point of view with Plato's willingness to abstract situations to analyze their essence.
