Academic discussions on Nihal Atsız and Kemalism mostly concentrate on Atsız’s criticism about the official ideology. According to these criticisms, Atsız’s racism that is based on a genealogical investigation, his instruction on heroism and warfare visà-vis peace and indolence, his disposition to Westernization as degeneration and alienation are in opposition with the understanding of Kemalism on Turkish citizenship, modernization, and peaceful foreign policy. Divergent conceptualization on nation, civilization, and politics show an irreconcilable contradiction between two systems of thought. Unlike these claims, the article suggests that the perception of Atsız on religion overlaps with the religious practices of Kemalism and the aspiration to construct a national and secular religion also associate Turkism with Kemalism. Atsız’s appeal to a national Directorate of Religious Affairs to fight against religious monopoly and his desire for an ethno-secular religion under the command of the state against the command of religious orders show similarity with Kemalist religious practices in the 1930s. Taking their methodological roots from positivism and Social Darwinism, Kemalism and Nihal Atsız’s Turkism tried to ‘disenchant religion’ in Weberian sense by approaching religion as a social issue and they discussed religion within a nationalist framework. While positivism challenges religious dogmatism by presenting scientific explanations—which are based on experiment and observation—as the source of knowledge as opposed to theological and metaphysical speculations, Social Darwinism claims that religion as an institution as such is an archaic institution that has been redundant for nations’ struggle for existence. Importantly, both thoughts shaped the intellectual mindset of its era due to its position as Zeitgeist at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century. Indeed, intellectual responses to the question ‘How can the state be saved?’ passed through positivist and Social Darwinist routes during the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Religion was, above all, conceptualized not as a sphere of sovereignty for power, but as a social institution by these intellectuals. Similar to the endeavor of Kemalism—which traces its origin to the Enlightenment—to relegate political power from heaven to the earth, Atsız’s trace of a national and secular religion along with his criticism on religion from a positivist perspective joint them. By taking into account that positivist and Social Darwinist ideas united state elites and ‘traditional intellectuals’ at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century, the article concludes that Kemalism of the 1930s and Nihal Atsız’s religious politics share a common ground.