Despite the vastness of studies on institutional and public forms of secularism and Islamism, few scholars have tackled the secularization process in Turkey and how secularism prescribes a particular understanding of what religion is. As Talal Asad argues, the relegation of religion to the private realm through its formulation as personal belief has been a central tenet of secular-liberal politics. In Turkey Islam has been configured as a ‘religion’ according to this secular-liberal model, i.e. as personal faith and conscience. This paper explores how television broadcasting in Turkey has played a significant role in the creation of a shared understanding of Islam as a matter of private faith. First, it examines the period when broadcasting was in the hands of a state monopoly under the Turkish Radio and Television Broadcasting Corporation (TRT). The overall effect of TRT’s demarcating certain programming as “religious”—and its dealing with issues only related to “personal faith” in these programs — was to subtract “religion” from other factors regulating the public lives of Turkish citizens and to reinforce the notion that Islam is primarily a matter of “faith.” The remainder of the paper explicates the period since the liberalization of broadcasting in the 1990s, which has witnessed the proliferation of Islamic television channels. These Islamic channels have provided an alternative for the official “secularism” represented by the state broadcaster’s policies and thus have helped fashion an alternative public where religion could be represented as part of the daily public life and religious authority could be kept a part of the process of public deliberation. However, as Eickelman & Salvatore argue, increasingly accessible forms of communication and new media have also resulted in the fragmentation of traditional forms of religious authority. The commercial nature of the broadcasting media has resulted in the bolstering of the idea of Islam as a personal faith since Muslim viewers could now experience their faith in the privacy of their homes without having to interact with people from their religious communities. Through Islamic television, practices associated with an Islamic identity have increasingly been dissociated from their political orientation and have become available to ordinary individuals who are not affiliated with Islamism culturally or politically, but who are interested in experiencing and displaying their “Muslimness.” All in all, Islamic television channels have contributed immensely to the transformation of Islam on the secular-liberal model and the mainstreamization of Islamic cultural identity.