Following the terrorist attack on the Reina nightclub during the New Year celebrations, a number of messages appeared in social media that praised the callous attack. These messages not only praised the attack but also openly targeted the secular lifestyle. Columnists who are critics of current government policies lost no time in using these messages twisting it to their own agenda, and the lifestyle debate, which had already begun before the New Year, was revived with even more fervor.

As in every year, the lifestyle debate this year took place during the New Year’s celebrations. Glamorous New Year’s preparations and stuffed turkey recipes as well as images of people beating Santa Claus also made its way into the media. But these discussions which have turned into an annual ritual were not very prolonged. So much so that a well-known cleric known as Cübbeli Ahmet Hoca, raised eyebrows when he declared that chess was forbidden, the lifestyle debate was taken out of the context of New Year’s celebrations. But the attack on the nightclub resurfaced the lifestyle debate when the debate had only just bitten the dust.

The President of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) issued a statement regarding the dispute and reaffirmed the public, saying that lifestyles in Turkey were under no threat and protected by the state. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also made a number of statements to dispel any question of a danger to normal everyday life and that it had not been for the past 14 years. Fortunately, many people in the public arena also protested the numerous attempts to link terrorism with the current lifestyle debates – an effort that was seen by many to mask the true face of terrorism – and to prevent the rise of social tensions exploiting a dominant social pattern in Turkish society.

Terror attacks allegedly made in the name of Islam in Turkey are not dissimilar to those that have taken place in Europe. No doubt that these attacks are intended to convey messages to both the targeted country and the world. Many terror experts agree that terror attacks often have many other goals than the incident itself. It was evident that the rampage at Reina was intended to disrupt and create a tension on the secularist-conservative duality balance in Turkish society. However, there are structural obstacles to activate this line of tension.

Firstly, the relationship between state and religion in Turkey is unique to the country and it has capacity to cope with this tension. Moreover, the tension has long become a central dynamic for Turkish society, in which both conservative and secular segments transform one another. The Diyanet, the view of leading political parties, and also the tendencies of these two groups themselves guarantee the presence and futures of secularists and conservatives in Turkey. Occasional conflicts and tensions between secularists and conservatives, though sometimes disturbing, should be seen as natural in this way.

In fact, Turkey’s modern political history is almost based on this disturbing tension. For example, the February 28, 1997 coup was a severe blow to the large number of conservatives and to their upward mobility. But, by the end of the process, the conservative block achieved in winning the political power that opened new spaces for secularists and conservatives to engage one another and even to establish new alliances. Since then, there is no doubt the lifestyle debate in Turkey has become less intense under the Justice and Development Party (AK Party). The official Islam portrayed by the Diyanet does not posit it as a religion against or in relation to secularism. Turkish Islam marries both traditional Islamic and traditional secular practices shaped within the same tradition. In Turkey, neither Islamic nor secular practices resemble those in Europe, especially when one considers the transformative power that each group is able to exercise over one another. On the other hand, religious communities in Turkey, nourished by various Islamic sources, draw their justifiability by the very presence of the Diyanet, with the institution owing this to the high level of its social acceptance.

Nevertheless, the controversial field has occasionally been exploited by other groups, and the Fetullah Gülen Terror Organization (FETO) has been a bitter example of this. The group turned into a terror organization gradually in the last three years. But it should be remembered that the group owed its success largely to infiltrating state institutions by disguising themselves as secularists. The group, which principally promised upward social mobility to middle classes conservative Muslims by offering them a quality education, exploited the secular-conservative tension and found room for hiding its various illegal and unlawful acts. The official Islam in Turkey represented by the Diyanet acts as a guarantor, which can call various religious sects (cemaats) in the country to account. The presence of the Diyanet is also a guarantee for secularists. Although some statements of certain Muslim clerics caused contention, especially among conservative people themselves, outlandish statements are generally viewed with a veiled sarcasm. What is important to remember is that the secularists in Turkey generally do not give credit to radical interpretations of the religion they believe in.

The debate on lifestyles between secularists and conservatives and its association with increasing social tension is actually related to the nation’s past experiences. Secularists are afraid that conservatives are eager to take revenge for the February 28th coup, which caused much suffering and traumatized many of them. Indeed, the secularists see it a zero-sum-game: if religious life is not constrained, their own lifestyle would then be under threat. They are disturbed by official praise for religious life and believe that this praise poses a threat and jeopardizes their own lifestyle. However, the struggles in the political sphere should not lead us to overlook the class features of secularist and conservative circles that have been intertwined in the last twenty-thirty years.

There are two major political parties in Turkey that represent both lifestyles: the AK Party and the CHP. Despite this, boundaries of secularism and religiosity are neither solid nor static. With the AK Party government, the conservatives found opportunity to express themselves, while this led the secular circles to have concerns about their future. This anxiety was expressed during the 2013 Gezi Park protests, in which the secular wave created almost a kind of terror in the country. Yet a critical view on the Gezi protests enables us to see that it was not actually secularism, producing terror but the involvement of certain ideological groups, mainly radical leftist groups, which terrorized the protests.

Additionally, some ethnic groups in Turkey could negatively contribute to the secularist-conservative tension. For example, when the HDP, a Kurdish nationalist political party with separatist tendencies, realized that it cannot merely survive with the votes of Kurds, it aspired to gain secular Alevi votes and prepared an Alevi “package” claiming to meet their identity demands. Indeed, the overlapping of secularist-conservative tension with ethnic separatism is a worst case scenario for Turkey, and has the real potential to give birth to brutal conflict. On the other hand, ethnicity-based ideological tensions regard the division between the secularist-conservative lifestyles a favorable ground to exploit. But the peculiarity of state-religion relations in Turkey structurally prevents manipulations in this field.

The strength of the secularists-conservatives duality, which Turkish society was built upon, finds the beginning in the birth of the Republican Era. Today, political parties still pay attention to this tension and win votes through it. However, secularism and religiosity/conservatism, though in a conflict, have created their own idiosyncrasy in Turkish society. Seculars and conservatives experience and discover one another in this process. Both are being diversified, intertwined and transformed. The transformation of this into terror is possible only through an intervention or by way of a non-local force from outside of the social formation. This unique relationship of secularism and religiosity/conservatism in Turkey becomes even more critical in a period when terror is rising in the name of Islam around the world.

A brief look into the international and domestic media coverage on Turkey, as well as the academic debate, in recent years reveals a rather bleak picture of a country divided along several fault lines, namely the seculars vs. the conservatives, Turks vs. Kurds, and the Sunni vs. the Alawites. Among these, most of the attention has been given to the divide between the conservatives and the seculars although the recent terror attacks has brought the Kurdish issue to the forefront.

Many claim that the policies of the current governing party, the Justice and Development Party (JDP), and especially the rhetoric and style of its founder and the current president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has divided the country into two camps: the conservatives who support him on one side and the seculars who oppose him on the other. The polarisation of Turkish society between these two camps is treated almost as a given both inside and outside the country.

The polarisation of Turkish society between these two camps is treated almost as a given both inside and outside the country.

Claims regarding the division of the Turkish society on the basis of adherence to Islamic values and practices are nothing new. Religion and its role in society and politics has always been a contested issue in Turkey. In the early years of the Republic, the westernisation process, especially some of the reforms initiated by the founding cadre, was met with a degree of societal backlash, which often drew harsh reactions from the state. Although the tension of those early days has subsided, the supporters of the founding ideology have always carried deep suspicions about religion and the conservative elements in Turkish society. When expounding on his ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, Samuel P. Huntington claimed that Turkey has an internal clash of civilizations, and it is a ‘country torn’ between Western civilization and its rival Islamic civilization.

However, the rise to power of the JDP in 2002 and its continuing dominance in Turkish politics gave rise to more intense claims regarding the polarisation of Turkish society. In 2007, millions of secular Turks took to the streets to prevent the election of a conservative president, a position that was first held by the founder of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and that was regarded as nearly sacred by many secular Turks. Again in 2010, during the constitutional amendment referendum, there was significant mobilisation and political tension between the secular opposition and the Government. Finally, in May and June 2013, the Gezi Park protests turned into a showdown between the government and the secular opposition. These protests received widespread attention outside the country and further inflamed the claims regarding the polarisation in society.

We previously assessed this claim, regarding whether social and political attitudes have become polarised in Turkish society.

We previously assessed this claim, regarding whether social and political attitudes have become polarised in Turkish society, in a study that analysed data from the period of 1990-2011, when conservative politics became more prevalent and the political scene was dominated by what we label as ‘the religiously-oriented political parties’. In this study, we used data from the World Value Surveys (1990, 2001, 2007 and 2011) and the European Value Surveys (2001 and 2009). The results of this analysis have been published in the journal Social Currents.

In doing so, we drew extensively from the ‘the culture wars’ debate in the US because of the similarity between the claims and the rigorousness of the methodology used by American social scientists to assess these claims. In the 1990s, some in the public debate claimed that American society was polarised between liberals and conservatives, which was akin to a ‘culture war’. In the early 1990s, political scientist James D. Hunter (1991) claimed that American society was divided between the ‘orthodox’ and ‘progressive’ camps, which rallied around issues such as abortion, gun control, and gay rights. During his famous speech in the 1992 Republican National Convention, presidential candidate Pat Buchanan declared that there was an ongoing war for the soul of America.

In the early 1990s, political scientist James D. Hunter (1991) claimed that American society was divided between the ‘orthodox’ and ‘progressive’ camps, which rallied around issues such as abortion, gun control, and gay rights.

In line with the empirical tradition in the American social sciences, academics approached the issue by developing measures of polarisation and testing their hypotheses with survey data rather than reaching conclusions based on circumstantial evidence, which was what was happening in the public debate in the US at the time, as well as what is happening in Turkey today.

In their seminal study, sociologist Paul DiMaggio and his colleagues defined polarisation in four dimensions: (1) if attitudes were becoming more dispersed than concentrated (the dispersion principle); (2) if attitudes were moving to separate modes (bimodality principle); (3) the extent to which opinions in one domain were dependent on opinions in other domains (the constraint principle); and (4) the extent to which individual characteristics and identities determined attitudes (the consolidation principle). When they explored these dimensions with survey data, they found no evidence of widespread polarisation between 1972 and 1994 except for views on the issue of abortion. Remarkably, they found increasing agreement on the issues of crime, racial integration, and women’s rights.

Although their methodology and findings drew some criticism, the academic research into the ‘culture wars’ debate showed that polarisation was limited to specific issues and debunked the myth of increasing division of American society into two camps based on religious conservatism. Similar claims still resurface from time to time in the popular discourse, but American sociologists seem confident that no such polarisation exists in the US.

There was some evidence that the differences increased in 2007, when political tensions were high, but these differences disappeared later.

Following this debate, we assessed the differences between the people who reported that they would vote for the religiously-oriented political parties (ROP) and those who reported a preference for secular-oriented political parties (SOP) between 1990 and 2011 in Turkey. The ROP category consisted of the three political parties established by Necmettin Erbakan, the father of conservative politics in Turkey, and his followers. We also included the current governing party JDP and the Grand Unity Party, which subscribes to what is known in Turkey as the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, to this category. The SOP category included all other political parties, including those of the center-right and the center-left, as well as the far-left and nationalist parties.

We assessed polarisation in four areas: family and sexuality, gender roles, economic and social justice, and democracy. Regarding family and sexuality, we assessed attitudes towards abortion, divorce, and homosexuality. With regard to gender roles, we assessed attitudes towards women’s participation in the labor force and working mothers. When assessing the issues of economic and social justice, we analysed attitudes towards income inequality and individual vs. government responsibility. Finally, we assessed people’s perceptions of military rule and democratic political rule.

Any polarisation that was caused by those events did not have any lasting impact. Extrapolating from this finding, we expect that the Gezi Park protests will also not have a long-lasting effect.

The results of our analyses revealed that people who voted for ROP differed only slightly in terms of their attitudes towards family and sexuality and gender roles. However, this difference in attitudes with regards to gender roles was not a pronounced difference, and there were no significant differences in attitudes towards democracy, nor in attitudes towards economic and social justice. Furthermore, there was no evidence of a steady increase in differences over time between the two groups. In fact, attitudes towards family and sexuality and gender roles moved in the same direction in both of the groups. There was some evidence that the differences increased in 2007, when political tensions were high, but these differences disappeared later.

To sum up, whatever the current tensions in the political sphere are, Turkish society is not being torn apart on the basis of religion nor its politics. As in the case of the ‘culture wars’ debate in the US, the popular claims based on circumstantial evidence cannot and should not be used to make overreaching claims about society. Some may argue that the Gezi Park protests of 2013 changed the societal dynamics significantly and created polarisation that has not been seen before. Unfortunately, our analyses did not cover the most recent period, as the relevant data are not available. However, similar claims were made during and after the 2007 protests. Any polarisation that was caused by those events did not have any lasting impact. Extrapolating from this finding, we expect that the Gezi Park protests will also not have a long-lasting effect. Also, we are in the process of planning for a data collection effort of our own in order to assess the current situation. We will be happy to utilise any secondary data that becomes available as well.