The in-betweens: Contesting the Secular and the Religious Hegemonies

This article explores the interplay of religious and secular hegemonies experienced by young secular individuals in contemporary Türkiye. We elucidate this condition as in-betweenness through the resistance to conforming to exclusive or extreme discursive arrangements imposed by religious and secular people. Focusing on the online youth group Gray Zone on X, we draw on Habermas’s postsecularity and adopt Constructivist Grounded Theory to show how this hegemonic dynamic manifests through participants’ reflexive thinking and the reduction of rigid ideologies. Our findings, based on semi-structured interviews, demonstrate that the shift from hegemonic to "in-between" interactions emerges through the everyday articulations of lived social practices that reproduce religious-secular engagements. These articulations show that different hegemonies challenge each other daily, which we call the multiple hegemonies effect. Despite the contradictory practices within secularity itself that create a sense of being in-between, secular participants reinforce their commitment to secularity by continuously redefining its meaning to explain “true” secularity.