Secularization can be understood as the privatization of religion. In my paper, I analyze this process through the fate of the concept “public opinion”. Specifically, I examine the role this concept played when the Swedish parliament debated freedom of religion during the 19th century. In these debates, liberals drew on epistemology and stressed the unity between public opinion and reason. Conservatives on their hand saw public opinion as something deeply religious, as the soul of a people seeking harmony with God, thus opposing religious reform.As in many other countries, the liberals eventually won this struggle over meaning and definition. Religious freedom was granted and public opinion commonly defined in the liberal sense. At the beginning of the 20th century, the conservative usage survived only in cursory references to the silent or “real” opinion of the people. By then, however, the systematic manipulation of public opinion through press agents and large media conglomerates had weakened the ascribed link between public opinion and reason. Still, this did not challenge the centrality of the concept. Public opinion already was institutionalized as a final and non-negotionable source of political legitimacy, a concept independent of its actual referent. Indeed public opinion shared many traits with the godly will it supposedly replaced. It was a faceless authority, a unitary moral abstraction, in stark contrast to the often mistaken multitude of conflicting human voices.