The Politics of Religious Education in Turkey, 1940s–1971: Modern Conservative Consensus in Reformulation and Regulation

Abstract The establishment of the Turkish Republic marked a sharp break from the centuries-old connection between education and Islam. Within two decades, secular reforms had nearly erased religious education from the public sphere. The subsequent rise of religious education after the 1940s is often interpreted with respect to reactionary forces challenging political actors of progressive secularization. This study offers a critique of this narrative by problematizing popular dualisms and reframing the phenomenon within broader trajectories of twentieth-century legitimacy and governance. By tracing late-Ottoman antecedents, it shows that modalities of state involvement and moral education were reorganized rather than invented. The rise of religious education was a product of statist and modern conservative synergies between dominant center-right and secular actors which shaped policy agendas through functionalist and pragmatic frameworks. This dynamic interplay was defined not only by the changing grounds of international and domestic political legitimacy, but also by a transformation of the role and meaning of religion in Turkish public life. After World War II, religious education became both an instrument and a product of negotiated consensus on moral and civic foundations of citizenship and collective identity, which was further reinforced by the expansion of mass education, populism, and anti-communism.