Since the transfer of power from the Soeharto government to his successor government, various religious-based conflicts and feuds have occurred in Indonesia. As a result, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, which was initially considered to have a powerful ‘civil’ character, shifted to become ‘conservative’. Therefore, the Indonesian government launched a ‘religious moderation’ program to bring back moderate religious life. This paper raises crucial questions about how this program relates to public space. Starting from Nancy Fraser’s problematization of the concept of public space and counter-public, this article will discuss religious moderation in the debate about the relationship between religion and the state, which led to the decline of the secularization thesis and broader constellations of power. In the end, this paper argues that the religious moderation program was carried out as a response to symptoms of religious conservatism. However, if carried out in an unequal state and society relationship, it could have a negative impact on the public sphere.