Article one's revision of the secularization thesis concerns a process theorists thought was happening on its own. A different and clearer case is where a state deliberately imposed or codified secularism as policy, and comparing two such cases shows the word covers more than one arrangement.
France's laicite, given legal form by the 1905 law separating church and state, is an assertive secularism: the state does not merely decline to establish a religion, it actively excludes religious symbols and authority from public institutions, a principle later extended into contested restrictions on religious dress in state schools. American disestablishment, by contrast, restrains the state from favouring or suppressing religion but is generally read as protecting religious expression in public rather than removing it, producing a far more religiously visible public culture than France's despite both being constitutionally secular.
Turkey's Kemalist reforms after 1923, including the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 and the removal of Islam as the state religion in 1928, imposed a version closer to the French model on a Muslim-majority population from above, through legal and educational institutions rather than gradual social change. That imposed secularism has been substantially contested and partly reversed since the 1980s, and especially under the governing party since the early 2000s, with religious visibility in public life expanding again. The Turkish case is often cited against a simple version of the secularization thesis, since a state can mandate secularization by decree and still see religious practice re-emerge within a few generations.