The early modern terms laicism and laicity, like laity itself, go back to Greek laós (“people”), but belong to the context of the specifically early modern process of secularization. The English words translated the 19th-century French neologism laïcité and its negative variant laïcisme [1]. In Romance countries, laicity is synonymous with “secularization,” but in the English-, Scandinavian-, and German-speaking world it generally denotes its p…