Secular governance was designed to keep the state neutral among competing worldviews, yet in practice it often drifts toward treating religious conviction as a private eccentricity that has no place in public debate. Defenders argue that neutrality requires relegating faith to the home, while critics respond that a public square stripped of religious voices is not neutral but merely occupied by a different orthodoxy. The real question is whether secularism can remain a procedural guarantee of pluralism, or whether it inevitably becomes a substantive ideology with its own unspoken creed.