Can the State Make you More Religious? Evidence from Turkish Experience

Abstract

This paper first evaluates the impact of a two-decade-long Islamization policy carried out by a pro-Islamist party, which came to power in 2002 in Turkey, on the attitudes of Turkish people toward religious values, religious practices, and clergy. In this regard, how the importance of religion, frequency of going to mosques, and trust in the clergy have changed among Turkish Muslims between 2002 and 2018 were examined by using World Values Survey data and employing logistic regression analysis. Estimation results indicated a reduction in belief in God, attendance to mosques, and trust in clergy, which imply the failure of the Islamization policy. Second, we explored what caused the failure by using the same data set and methodology. Our estimations suggested that the symbiotic relationship between the pro-Islamist government and religious clergy and institutions may explain the failure. As the government is identified with religion in the eye of the public, dissatisfaction with the government turned to dissatisfaction with religious values.

Economy of Shadows: The Effects of Restrictive Regulation on Religiosity in China

“…It also makes broader contributions. Many people are interested in the relationship between state and religion generally (e.g., Cokgezen 2022; Cosgel, Langlois, and Miceli 2020; Ettensperger and Schleutker 2022; Howe 2021; Mataic 2018; Schleutker 2021). Many more are interested in the situation of religious minorities, including Christians, who worship under heavy restrictions.…”

Religious Fundamentalism is Positively Associated with Feeling Privileged: Findings from a Representative Turkish Quota Sample

“…Such a process of secularization is not unilinear, but processes of religious self-assertion, like RF, are also a result of modernization and go alongside or against secularization (Riesebrodt, 2005). A fundamentalist worldview is not restricted to individuals who support the current government, which could suggest that with the control of education, press, and religious infrastructure (Aydin & Avincan, 2021;Çokgezen, 2022), the Turkish government was presumably able to spread RF beyond their supporters (Bashirov & Lancaster, 2018;Özpek & Yaşar, 2018). With the same mechanisms (Yardımcı-…”

“…To maintain power, Erdoğan repressed against those who do not support him and reward those who support him and the course of his party, the AKP (Yilmaz et al, 2020). For example, Erdoğan restricted freedom of education (Aydin & Avincan, 2021;Babacan, 2020), press (Akser, 2018;Karatas & Saka, 2017;Reporters without borders, 2018), and state-led religious infrastructure (Babacan, 2020;Çokgezen, 2022;Öztürk, 2016).…”

Preaching to Social Media: Turkey’s Friday Khutbas and Their Effects on Twitter

“…Although testing secularization theory in Turkey is beyond the scope of the present study, there is evidence that individual religiosity has not increased under AKP rule. In fact, individual religiosity, measured for example by the frequency of praying, mosque attendance, and veiling, seems to have declined in this period (Çokgezen 2022; Ertit 2018; KONDA 2019).…”

“…Despite the recent surge in TPRA’s reach, religiosity seems to be in decline since 2008 (KONDA 2019). In fact, Çokgezen (2022) argued that the decline is caused by the heavy investment of the Turkish government in religion, for the failings of the government are associated with the religious institutions the government is identified with, and dissatisfaction with the government is then projected on to those institutions. As to the khutbas specifically, a rare systematic study shows that the sermons respond to the “threat salience” (e.g., frequency of terrorism-related news) (Alper et al 2020).…”