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The secular settlement, the arrangement by which states hold themselves apart from religious authority and guarantee equal treatment across faiths, is under pressure almost everywhere, and its intellectual confidence has drained along with its political footing. The models were always plural: the strict separation of the American and French traditions, the "principled distance" of Indian secularism that permitted state engagement with religion in the name of equality, the established churches of northern Europe coexisting with robust religious freedom. Each is now contested. India's secularism, never a wall of separation but a framework for even-handed treatment of a deeply religious society, faces a majoritarian assault that reframes it as pseudo-secular appeasement of minorities. France's laïcité has grown increasingly restrictive, its application to Muslim dress and practice raising the question of whether neutrality has curdled into a majoritarian instrument of its own. Turkey's assertive secularism, imposed from above by the Kemalist state, has been steadily dismantled by a democratically empowered religious conservatism, illustrating the fragility of secularism that lacks popular roots. The deeper difficulty is conceptual as much as political: secularism is charged both with being a Western imposition ill-suited to societies where religion saturates public life, and with failing to deliver the neutrality it promises, favoring majority sensibilities under the guise of universality. The analytical questions are searching. Whether secularism is a necessary condition for managing religious diversity or one contingent arrangement among several; whether its various models can be defended and reformed or are exhausted; whether a state can be genuinely even-handed among faiths and toward the non-religious; and what, if anything, replaces the secular framework where it collapses. How plural societies govern the relationship between political authority and religious commitment remains among the most consequential unresolved problems of the age.