Democratic solutions to Turkey’s Kurdish question require some kind of a cooperation and compromise between Turkish and Kurdish actors who hold different variants of Turkish and Kurdish, and explicit and “banal” nationalist beliefs and identities. Turkish nationalism of all variations has been diversity-averse for historical reasons, and official state policies dismissed even the existence of a Kurdish question until the 1990s. Within this context, until the 2000s, it was secular-leftist Turkish political actors who were relatively more open to explicitly Kurdish demands and cooperation with secular Kurdish nationalist actors in pursuit of more democratic and inclusive policies. This situation changed, however, during the last decade. Religious-conservative Turkish nationalists represented by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) have drawn significant support from Kurdish constituencies and taken important yet limited steps to meet Kurdish cultural and political demands. The goal of this paper is to explore religious and secular Turkish nationalist values in pursuit of three questions. First, to what extent can changes in the religious Turkish nationalist beliefs explain both the opportunities and limits of the AKP’s approach toward the Kurdish question, in comparison to alternative explanations based in domestic and external political considerations? Second, how do these beliefs compare to secular nationalist and pre-AKP religious nationalist beliefs? Third, how sustainable is the AKP’s ability to cooperate with Kurdish actors considering the potential conflicts between the AKP’s nationalism and Kurdish nationalist demands, and to what extent can we expect more cooperation among Turkish and Kurdish secular actors in the future? In order to address these questions, the paper conceptualizes different types of nationalist beliefs and strategies, distinguishing between explicit-banal, religious-secular, and instrumental-formative beliefs and strategies. It will then employ these analytical tools to better explain the Turkish-Kurdish case in light of domestic and external political constraints on and empirical evidence regarding religious and secular Turkish nationalist beliefs. Empirical support is drawn from, among other sources, a comprehensive content analysis of religious and secular newspapers and political party documents.