Recent scholarship and journalism on Turkish politics, society, culture, and religion has exhibited an essentialist tendency to divide the nation into polarized camps of Kemalists and Islamic Revivalists. By examining Kemalism and Islamism in Turkey as pervasive historic and national responses to modernity – equally politically, societally, and culturally entrenched – I will demonstrate the ways that (1) pragmatic state building and modernist synthesis have necessitated constant Islamist and Kemalist intersection and dual engagement, rather than dichotomy and laicism and (2) that Atatürk and Islam are both being used as potent symbolic solutions for moral fissures at the forefront of Turkish society today, and often in tandem. The legacies and symbolic meanings of Islam and Atatürk are both used to stress the necessity for a unified society. Turkish politicians and citizens past and present have accommodated and appropriated both legacies and symbols to their own ends, whether Kemalist or Islamist. The crux of necessity for both symbols lies in cultural identity. I do not deny that there is bifurcation between pro-Kemalists and pro-Islamists, but rather that these “camps” do not reject or historically exclude the platforms of the other. Atatürk and subsequent Kemalists include Islam in their ideology and Islamic institutions in their government – harnessing its potency in ways compatible with the regime. Islamists as well embrace Atatürk as the savior of Islam in Turkey in the face of geographic fragmentation and colonization, using his more public and fervent embrace of Islam in the 1920s as a means to legitimize their current political platform.