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At the height of Turkey’s modernization project, secularism was enforced with authoritarianism and disrespect of people’s freedom and religious diversity. However, this illiberal secularism gradually weakened during the slow institutional democratization process that started after the Second World War, and more recently between 1990 and 2000, when the country sought to join the European Union. The party currently in power, the AKP, with the help of its longtime ally, the Hizmet movement of Fethullah Gülen, played a major role in the liberalization of Turkish secularism. Yet, since 2011 the AKP has ruled with more authoritarianism than ever, and the liberalization of secularism is in jeopardy. Now that the AKP has separated from the Gülen movement, it wants to put an end to neutral state secularism in favor of a more openly religious society.