While secularism, secularization, secularity and secularist have become part and parcel of our daily political parlance, their meanings have been hollowed out by contradictory uses. More importantly, the misappropriation and careless uses of these terms have not only handicapped a thorough understanding of the processes they seek to describe, but also hinder the solutions of the very problems that these terms were meant to capture and helped to address. In an effort to illustrate the implications of what could be a symptom of, in Sartori’s terms, a conceptual misformation or stretching, this study first briefly discusses how the derivatives of secular parsed into our daily lexicon with growing incoherent references. Second, it identifies the main contours of the theoretical debates on how religion can be a part of democracies. Third, drawing on select cases brought before the supreme courts in the U.S., Israel, and Turkey, it offers a cross-country review of the intricacies of questions posed by practices that defy a clear separation between church and state regardless of specific institutional settings. By bringing both theoretical and practical questions about secularism together in the same analysis, our discussions show how the complexity of issues posed by religion evades simple procedural solutions. Instead they invite us to rethink democracies' basic premises in societies marked by value pluralisms, revisit basic democratic constructs such as “representation,” redefine the concept of equality not across religious and a-religious groups but also within them, and reassess the importance of deliberative participation against the debilitating currents eroding the democratic capacities of citizens.
