Annaliese Nurnberg/Missourian via AP/File

The playground at Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia, Mo., shown in 2016. Justice Neil Gorsuch's first week hearing Supreme Court arguments features a case that's giving school choice advocates hope for an easier use of public money for private, religious schools in dozens of states. The long-delayed argument Wednesday deals with whether Missouri should pay for a soft surface at the church playground.

Dig beneath the rubber playground surface at issue in the latest landmark case before the United States Supreme Court and you’ll find a tricky question – a conundrum born out of the gray area between the Constitution’s two key religious protection provisions.

Dig a little deeper, and you’ll find potentially momentous implications for the nationwide debate over school choice voucher programs.

The case to be argued before the high court on Wednesday – now with a full complement of nine justices after Justice Neil Gorsuch took his seat at the bench this week – dates back to 2012, when the Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia, Mo., applied for a state grant to fund the resurfacing of its preschool’s playground with recycled tire rubber. While the state ranked the church’s application fifth out of the 44 it received, it denied the application, citing a provision in the Missouri constitution – known colloquially as a Blaine amendment – that prohibits money from the state treasury from going “directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or denomination of religion.”

Trinity Lutheran challenged the decision in federal court, saying it violated both the free exercise and equal protection provisions of the First Amendment, but both the district court and the 8th Circuit court of Appeals ruled for Missouri. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case 15 months ago, and the unusually long wait before arguments (the longest such delay in 2015 was 12 months) is one sign of how contentious the case could be, with the justices possibly delaying until a ninth justice took office to avoid a 4-to-4 tie. (Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens announced a change in the state policy last week, saying religious organizations are now eligible for those grants, but the case itself is still scheduled to proceed.)

The Trinity case could just be the beginning of “a pivotal period” for the school voucher movement in America, says Patrick Wolf, a professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas.

“It’s either going to reach escape velocity and just become a much more prominent part of our education system,” he says, “or it’s going to be heavily constrained in this moment.”

The core question is complex, asking at what point separating church and state becomes so involved that it harms churches. But what does it have to do with vouchers programs?

The answer lies in the Blaine amendments. Modeled on – and named after – a failed amendment to the federal constitution proposed by 19th-century Republican Congressman James Blaine, they are provisions in state constitutions that prohibit direct government aid to parochial schools (provisions that historians believe were motivated by a fear of Catholic teachings infiltrating schools).

Missouri is one of 38 states with such an amendment, and since about two-thirds of schools participating in voucher programs across the country are religious – according to research from Professor Wolf – Blaine amendments have for decades been an obstacle to implementing voucher programs around the country.

If the Supreme Court were to issue a decision supporting Missouri’s Blaine amendment, it “would restrict” the options parents have to enroll their children in private schools, strengthening prohibitions against funding for religious schools, says Wolf, who supports school choice.

On the flip side, if the court rules broadly the other way then it could invalidate Blaine amendments nationwide, and voucher programs could grow exponentially.

“To rule against the Blaine Amendments would open the door to subsidizing religious schools with public dollars,” wrote Diane Ravitch, a public schools advocate and former assistant Education secretary in the George H.W. Bush administration, in The Washington Post.

As with many Supreme Court cases however, broad decisions are the least likely kinds of decisions.

Firstly, the justices may choose to re-tread safer ground already covered by the court. In 1947’s Everson v. Board of Education, the high court ruled that it would not be unconstitutional for a state to provide to parochial schools services like busing and emergency services protection that are “indisputably marked off from the religious function” of the school. The justices could decide that Missouri’s recycled tire program falls into the category of bus and fire services, which wouldn’t touch the federal constitutionality of school voucher programs writ large.

The court may also have a better case waiting in the wings.

The justices have agreed to hear arguments in a case out of Colorado, where the state supreme court struck down a school voucher program there because it would violate the state's Blaine amendment. Lower courts around the country have offered starkly different interpretations of various Blaine amendments – supreme courts in Wisconsin and Arizona ruled the opposite way from Colorado, for example – which is a classic precursor to Supreme Court intervention.

“If the church wins in Trinity Lutheran, Douglas County [the Colorado case] will probably be vacated and remanded to the Supreme Court of Colorado,” writes Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, in an email to the Monitor.

“Whatever that court decides would tee up the schools issue for the Supreme Court,” he adds. “A win on the merits for Douglas County would probably make [Blaine amendments] mostly irrelevant.”

Either way, the Supreme Court is likely to make a big decision on voucher programs soon, and that decision could also be pivotal for American churches generally.

In Milwaukee, home to the country’s first ever school choice program (created in 1990), Catholic churches now get more revenue from vouchers than any other source, according to research from Daniel Hungerman, an associate professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

“The legal landscape [around school choice] going forward is going to matter a lot for the bottom line of churches,” he says. “When you think about school choice, and when you think about American religion, in the coming decades the future of those two things may be very much intertwined.”

Morry Gash/AP/File

Donald Trump holds up Green Bay Packers jersey given to him by House Speaker Paul Ryan at a rally in West Allis, Wis., in December. On April 18, President Trump is visiting Mr. Ryan's congressional district in Wisconsin, facing low approval ratings although his standing remains strong with core voters who backed him during the election campaign.

President Trump’s rocky first months in office haven’t much bothered his voters. At least, not yet.

Yes, there have been lots of stories from the Rust Belt about stirrings of discontent among the Trump faithful. But those are mostly anecdotal and so far data – meaning polls – don’t back that thesis up.

For instance, in a big new Pew Research survey fully 92 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say Mr. Trump has done as well or better than they expected. Only 7 percent say he’s done worse.

What this means is that Trump’s base remains intact. In turn, his ability to lead and pressure the GOP-controlled Congress probably does too. After all, Congress as a whole is less popular than he is. House Speaker Paul Ryan’s job approval rating, in that same Pew poll, is an abysmal 29 percent. That low number could damage Representative Ryan’s ability to drive any upcoming tax reform effort.

But Republicans haven’t yet become a populist-tinged Party of Trump. Chaos matters. The administration’s flopped travel ban is still stuck in the courts. Obamacare remains, stubbornly, unrepealed. Tax reform is receding into the distance. Trump’s GOP backing might dwindle as well.

“His support even among Republicans is a mile wide but an inch deep,” says Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Texas.

Of course, many Democrats can’t believe that Trump’s standing in the GOP remains as solid as it is. To them, his administration has been a rolling disaster, a circus of misstatements and poorly planned initiatives.

You can see this in Gallup’s rolling daily average of Trump’s general job approval rating. For the week of April 10 to 16, only 10 percent of Democrats gave a thumbs-up to Trump’s performance as president. That’s a historically low figure, even by today’s partisan standards. And it was an improvement from the previous week, when the comparable figure was only 6 percent.

The view from Logan, West Virginia

In contrast, Trump’s job approval among Republicans for the week of April 10 to 16 was 87 percent. That’s comparable to the support past presidents had from their own party at a similar point in their administrations.

"He's trying his best," says Loletta Evans, who's been a waitress for 34 years at Morrison's Drive In in Logan, West Virginia. "They are fighting him tooth and toenail, but he is trying. Of course, I do pray for him every night ... I would like to see him do good and I think his heart is in the right place."

Ms. Evans, a septuagenarian who has lived in Logan all her life, says that in her view, Congress and the Senate need to stop fighting the president's initiatives. "If they want to turn this country around, they're going to have to get together."

Trump’s overall job approval ratings are quite low, especially for a chief executive who’s been in office only a few months. But as the above split shows, that’s not due to widespread opposition. It’s due to intense disapproval from the other party (and, to a lesser extent, independents).

The contrast with Speaker Ryan

Those ratings are higher than Paul Ryan’s, however. If the struggle to be titular head of the Republican Party were a battle of numbers – and to some extent it is – than the president would beat the speaker. Ryan’s positive job approval is 29 percent, versus almost twice as many, 54 percent, who disapprove of the job he’s doing.

To some extent that rating may come with the position. Congress as an institution isn’t popular, and the House Speaker is the personification of Congress. But it is also something of a referendum on Ryan. His predecessor John Boehner had better numbers at a similar point in his own speakership. So did Democrat Nancy Pelosi. Even Newt Gingrich, the Republican firebrand House leader, had somewhat better poll ratings in 1995, according to Pew.

Ryan may just be suffering an image letdown. For years he’s positioned himself as a legislative whiz-kid who could pass big, meaty bills if given unified control of Washington. In his first chance, with the attempted repeal of the Affordable Care Act, he failed badly. That’s inevitably going to damage his ability to frame any upcoming tax reform debate, vis-a-vis the White House.

“The Obamacare debacle made him look feckless, at best,” says Dr. Engel at SMU.

For his part, Trump may have run as an outsider, a populist beholden to no one in the establishment wing of the GOP. But rank-and-file Republicans are now the bedrock of his political support. That includes the prototypical Trump voter – a white male without a college degree – as well as other demographic categories of party members.

So if Trump’s standing in the Republican Party slumps even a modest amount, the result on his overall numbers could be dramatic. And there are some warning signs. The just-released Pew poll shows somewhat bipartisan concern about Trump’s decisionmaking process, for example. About 30 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents judged it “too impulsive.”

And continued problems with his agenda could well cost Trump some GOP erosion in the months ahead.

The president’s problems with Congress are only going to continue, judges Engel. Trump has just passed through the easiest portion of his administration – the first part of his first term – and has missed picking even the low-hanging fruit, in this view. The travel ban was badly mishandled, the Obamacare non-repeal even more so. As a candidate who ran partly on a promise to be a great dealmaker, Trump has proved remarkably unable to strike any agreements at all, even with different factions in his own party.

“I’d put the vast majority of blame on Trump himself,” says Engel.

Will Trump's pivots hurt his popularity?

That said, there are some signs Trump is learning in office, Engel adds. That’s a valuable trait for a chief executive. His foreign policy seems increasingly mainstream GOP, despite his campaign promises to get NATO allies to pay up and to confront China on trade.

Will that make GOP voters happy – or do they really expect an “America First,” inward turn? The answer to that question could help determine Trump’s popularity, and by extension his ability to maneuver in Washington, over the rest of his first year in office.

Staff writer Story Hinckley contributed to this report from West Virginia.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor/File

Stay-at-home dad Darrell Humphrey prays with his son Ethan before eating a meal at a fast food restaurant, in Charlotte, N.C., in 2015. Darrell, an ordained minister, chose to stay home to raise his boys while his wife works as a bank manager. Surveys of high school seniors find a rising number say it's ideal for children to be raised with one parent staying at home rather than working.

Brianna Hoffman had a lot going on growing up. She was a three-sport athlete, played multiple instruments in the school band, and pulled late nights and constant rehearsals working stage crew for her high school’s theater productions in Hampstead, N.H. She couldn’t have done it all, she says, without her mom, who was mostly stay-at-home while her father worked in sales at a small power equipment company.

“It was better to have one parent [at home],” she says. “My mom was always there, she could help me with my homework and drive me to stuff. I wouldn’t have been able to have all of those experiences if she wasn’t there to … I don’t want to say be my taxi, but we’ve always joked about that a little bit.”

Ms. Hoffman, now a senior at Syracuse University in New York, thinks her family’s arrangement, with one parent working and one wrangling childcare and household duties, is ideal. “I don’t think it matters which parent stays home, but it was better to have someone there,” she says. And her views on the matter are increasingly common among people her age.

In fact, among young adults, support for this type of traditional family structure has been on the rise for the past 20 years, while a preference for two working parents is falling out of favor, according to a batch of reports released in March by the Council on Contemporary Families.

In one survey, which has tracked the attitudes of a cross section of the country’s high school seniors for the past four decades, only 42 percent of respondents in 1994 thought a family in which the father worked and the mother stayed at home was the “best” possible arrangement. By 2014, that was the majority view, with 58 percent support.

What’s happening isn’t all about turning back the clock on gender roles in US society. Part of it, yes, reflects the staying power of "the status quo" for men and women, especially among the religious. But the shift may be more about the ideal of a parent – mother or father – being at home: At the same time that young Americans’ views on what the family dynamic should be are skewing more traditional, there is a strengthening penchant for women to have equal opportunities in the workplace.

Still, the trend line on parental roles, which holds true for female and (more so) for male respondents, has confounded researchers, and anyone who would expect social views to get uniformly more progressive among younger generations.

“Kids today answer these questions the same way my cohort did during the Reagan administration,” says David Cotter, a sociologist who co-wrote the new analysis of high school seniors' attitudes in the Monitoring the Future survey, which has been conducted since 1975. “I don’t think I would have guessed that. I’d guess that it would become more egalitarian over time.”

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Searching for why

Experts have come up with a few possible reasons for the disconnect: The US population has an increasing share of Latinos, who have more traditional views on gender and family, for example. But more prominent are theories that have to do with family stability and the failure of the US workplace to adapt to the needs of families with two working parents.

Out of sheer economic necessity, those are now more the rule than the exception: Both parents work in 66 percent of married couples with children, but have higher expenses (like health care and child care), than single-income families did a few decades ago. At the same time, the share of women as the sole or primary breadwinner is increasing, but that trend is present primarily among lower-income households, so it’s not exactly a sign of have-it-all moms on the rise.

Even families with more financial stability, the experts argue, are overextended. “Some youths who saw their parents experiencing disagreements and stresses as they tried to integrate work and family without supportive policies may have concluded that a male-breadwinner arrangement would have made family life easier,” writes sociologist Dan Carlson in response to the new research.

Hoffman, the college student, agrees. “I have friends my age with two parents working, and it doesn’t seem like they are nearly as close with their parents,” she says. “It’s not dinner with your parents; it’s sitting with a microwave dinner, watching TV.”

“In the 1950s, one two-parent family was expected to give about 40 hours a week to the labor market,” says Barbara Risman, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She says that essentially doubled as women entered the workforce en masse in the 1980s, and in the 2000s the time commitment of work may seem greater still.

“No really successful worker is assumed to have responsibilities to anyone but himself,” she says. “If you feel the negative consequences of parents not being able to juggle everything, there’s a way in which you might think, this doesn’t work, let’s go back to the good old days.”

That may be counterintuitive, observers note: For one, health-care, college, and other costs are showing no signs of returning to 1950s levels. And two-income households are better able to weather times of financial stress, such as a job loss or health crisis.

Also, young people on the whole have more progressive views on gender roles than their parents or even their elder Millennial peers; many in Professor Risman’s research reject the construct of gender altogether.

Carlson adds that there’s evidence that a more equal division of household and child-care duties between couples makes everyone happier. But that research finding doesn’t necessarily make it easy to implement load-sharing in practice.

“Our current lack of supportive institutions and policies to help families integrate work and family life has begun to take its toll,” he writes. “If something is not done soon to structurally support the egalitarian arrangements that research now shows to be best for most relationships, people may no longer want them to begin with.”

Backsliding on gender equality?

In fact, the recent poll findings may have drawn attention in part because they come on the heels of a rocky period in the march toward gender equality. Hillary Clinton, the first woman nominee of a major political party, lost the presidential election, and the new administration aims to roll back some current policies that promote abortion rights and workplace protections for women. Russia decriminalized domestic violence in February. Proud public declarations of sexist attitudes seem rampant: In March, for example a Polish lawmaker argued that women should make less money than men on the basis that they are “weaker, smaller, and less intelligent.”

There are hints of this more pernicious brand of sexism in the polling data, too: A small but growing number of high school seniors are more likely to agree that the “husband should make all the important decisions in the family ” than they were 20 years ago, suggesting “a significant minority of youths have reverted to an endorsement of male supremacy,” according to researchers.

“Young women used to believe, I’m equal, [feminism] was my mother and grandmother’s issue, I’m beyond that,” says Risman. “That has been shattered like broken glass. You can’t possibly believe right now that your rights are safe as a woman.”

Contradictory views

But young adults’ attitudes toward gender aren’t entirely sliding back to the 1950s. Even as the preference for more traditional family roles is increasing, so is support for women to have equal footing in the workplace. Professor Cotter, of Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., analyzed responses of high school seniors along with Joanna Pepin at the University of Maryland. The two researchers found increased agreement, over time, with the idea that women and men should have equal opportunities in the workplace.

Notably, they also found agreement that working mothers can have just as strong a bond with their children as stay-at-home moms.

Risman has uncovered this contradiction in her own field research interviewing young adults in the Chicago area for the forthcoming book, “Where Will the Millennials Take us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure.” Even young people with the most traditional views on gender, typically from religious families, supported equality in the public sphere, or the workplace, even as at home “there were strong, distinct roles for men and women.”

Tiksa Negeri/ Reuters/ File

Eritrean refugees wait to get registered on arrival at the Indabaguna refugee reception and screening center in Tigrai region near the Eritrean border in Ethiopia in this February 9, 2016 file photo.

When Yordanos and her two young children slipped safely across the Mereb riverbed between Eritrea and Ethiopia late one recent night, they thought the worst of their journey into exile was over. The smuggler had done his job, and they were safely over the border.

Then they heard the hyenas.

Yordanos and her children began to yell for help, their panicked calls fading into the solid darkness. Suddenly, she saw a group of Ethiopian soldiers coming towards them. The men comforted the young families, and then escorted them to the nearby town of Badme. “They were like brothers to us,” says Yordanos, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of reprisals from the Eritrean government against her relatives at home.  

In some regards, Ethiopia – and in particular this sliver of Ethiopia’s arid north – is the last place you might expect an Eritrean refugee like Yordanos to receive a warm welcome. In 1998, after all, an Eritrean invasion of this sleepy border town touched off a two-year war between the two countries that cost tens of thousands of lives and more than $4.5 billion, along with destroying most of the then-flourishing network of trade between the two countries. And before that conflict, Eritreans fought a 30-year civil war for independence from Ethiopia, which ended only in 1991.

Even today, the ashes of those conflicts still smolder. The internationally-brokered peace settlement ending the 1998-2000 war decreed that Ethiopia should give the town of Badme back to Eritrea, which claims it as historical land. But Ethiopia never did, and border clashes between the two countries’ militaries continue into the present. [Editor's note: This story has been edited to specify the area granted to Eritrea by the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission in 2002.]

Still, Yordanos’ story is not uncommon. Fleeing enforced, indefinite military service, illegal imprisonment, and torture, about 165,000 Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers currently live in Ethiopia, according to the United Nations. Upon arrival and registration, they are automatically granted refugee status, and the country continues to welcome more. In February of this year alone, 3,367 new Eritrean refugees arrived in the country, according to Ethiopia’s Administration for Refugee and Returnee Affairs (ARRA).

“We differentiate between the government and its people,” says Estifanos Gebremedhin, the head of the legal and protection department at ARRA. “We are the same people, we share the same blood, even the same grandfathers.”

The reasons for that openness, indeed, owe much to shared history. As in many parts of Africa, colonialism sliced much of this region apart in illogical ways (though Ethiopia itself was never colonized), sowing political conflicts between members of the same community that have persisted to the present day. For much of the roughly 600-mile Ethiopian-Eritrean border, people on both sides share the same language – Tigrinya – as well as Orthodox religion and cultural traditions.

“It’s only the Eritrean government creating problems, not the people,” says Benyamin, a resident of Axum, a town in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, who didn’t give his last name. “I haven’t got relatives in Eritrea but many people here do. Some from the refugee camps go to the university here.”

But there may also be more strategic reasons for Ethiopia’s open-door policy, experts say.

“Ethiopia strongly believes that generous hosting of refugees will be good for regional relationships down the road,” says Jennifer Riggan, an associate professor of international studies at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania, who studies Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia.

There’s also an increasing amount of money in hosting refugees, some highlight, as the international community tries to block secondary migration to Europe. One recent example was the joint initiative announced by Britain, the European Union, and the World Bank to fund the building of two industrial parks in Ethiopia to generate about 100,000 jobs, at a cost of $500 million, with Ethiopia required to grant employment rights to 30,000 refugees as part of the deal.

It might also be a way of countering international controversy about the Oromo protests and shoring up Ethiopia’s standing in the world, according to Milena Belloni, a researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, who is currently writing a book about Eritrean refugees. The protests, which roiled the country's largest region throughout 2016, have prompted a government crackdown that left hundreds of Ethiopians dead and sharply curtailed basic freedoms, according to human rights groups. 

Either way, Ethiopia’s approach is in marked contrast to the strategies of reducing migrant flows that are being adopted in much of the West, Dr. Riggan says.

“Ethiopia's response is to manage the gate, and figure out how it can benefit from these inevitable flows of people,” she notes. “I definitely think Ethiopia's approach is the wiser and more realistic one.”

After Yordanos, her children, and another mother and her two children who crossed with them were collected by the soldiers near Badme, they were taken into town and left at a so-called “entry point,” a cluster of disheveled government buildings. From there, refugees join the bureaucratic and logistic conveyor belt that assigns them asylum status and moves them to one of four refugee camps in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region.

There, relationships between refugees and locals do sometimes grow strained, particularly as both groups compete for scarce shared resources like firewood and cattle pastures. And many Eritrean refugees regard Ethiopia as only a stopover point on their journey to the West. In 2013, there was unrest in all four camps, with riots in two camps, Adi Harush and Mai Aini, when refugees demanded more opportunities for international resettlement and protested authorities' alleged corruption. 

“People recognize the shared culture and ethnic background, and that helps for many things, but there’s still distrust because of the 30-year-war [for independence], and mostly due to 1998-2000 border conflict and related mass displacement,” says Dr. Belloni. “There’s a double narrative.”

In addition to the camps, meanwhile, thousands more Eritreans live in Ethiopia outside the asylum system, both legally and illegally. About 650 miles south of the border, in the capital Addis Ababa, whole neighborhoods function as Eritrean enclaves, where the distinctive, guttural sounds of Tigrinya pour out of cafes with Italian-sounding names like Lattria Piccolo, a nod to Eritrea’s history as an Italian colony.

But even here, homesickness sometimes creeps in.

“Life is difficult here, it’s expensive, and people’s behavior changes here,” says Yonathon, an Eritrean former journalist living in the Mebrat Hail suburb of Addis Ababa, an Eritrean area. “You can’t replicate home.” 

AP Photo

A man sales flags with Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk near the Eminonou mosque in Istanbul April 17.

For nearly a century, Turkey’s political history has been one of largely secular rule over a mostly Muslim people. Its model of balancing divine faith and earthly governance, however, may soon be sharply reshaped. In an April 16 referendum, Turkish voters narrowly approved a plan to grant semi-authoritarian powers to a presidency now controlled by a man who founded the governing Islamist party.

The vote itself remains contested because of a crackdown on dissent since last July by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Yet the plebiscite’s near-even split did make clear that Turks have now joined the rest of the Muslim world in the struggle to redefine the proper role of religion in the public sphere.

From Tunisia to Indonesia, the rise of radical Islam has forced Muslims to debate the overlap of mosque and state. In Turkey, President Erdogan has promised to “raise pious generations,” a goal he could soon pursue by dictate. The approved changes to the Constitution are expected to keep him in office until 2029 and will give him strong powers over the legislature and judiciary. Yet about half of Turk voters indicated they prefer the secular system set up by the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. His reforms undercut the notion of religion as a source of authority for the state in a diverse society.

At the same time, the Ataturk model also repressed many outward expressions of faith, such as women wearing head coverings. The fact that Turkey may now be swinging the pendulum toward a new accommodation of religion might be welcomed – except for the fact that its democracy will soon concentrate many powers in the hands of one person. Democracy itself, in other words, may be at stake, perhaps leading Turkey toward the Iran model that blends religious and secular authority.

If anything, religious faith calls for humility in ruling over others, not coercion, and a wide respect for the dignity of the individual in choosing faith. At the same time, secular rulers must recognize that that the moral precepts of governance, such as rights and liberties, have their origins in religion.

Turkey could easily be the world’s most important Muslim country. Both its economy and its military are the largest in the Middle East. And it has long served as a bridge between East and West, serving as a member of NATO while regarding itself as the leader of the Muslim world.

It has also struggled over its national identity, not only in matters of faith but in dealing with ethnic minorities and in its leanings toward being European.

A country that straddles the Bosphorus can also learn to straddle the sometimes difficult divide between Islam and modern governance. Ataturk may have gone too far in secular governance, but now Erdogan could also go too far the other way. As long as Turkish voters are in charge and Erdogan does not further erode the democratic process, they can keep searching for the right balance.