ABSTRACT
Secularism is a stance to be taken about religion. Secularism as a political doctrine arose to repair what were perceived as damages that flowed from historical harms that were, in turn, perceived as owing, in some broad sense, to religion. If secularism has its relevance only in context, then it is natural and right to think that it will appear in different forms and guises in different contexts. Secularism might speak to their concerns regarding religion without doing so via the goals of pluralism, but via other goals addressing other problems that they find more central. Liberalism is a wider notion than secular liberalism that qualifies liberalism to a restricted domain, just as liberal secularism qualifies secularism to a restricted set of cases of secularism. Someone may find the authoritarian methods by which secularism was imposed in both Kemal Ataturk's Turkey and the Soviet Union to be wrong without denying they were committed to secularism.
