Religious Systems and the Secular-religious Cleavage: Turkey and Western Europe Compared

The Christian Democratic movement of Western Europe is a good example of how a radical, illiberal, and undemocratic force can be integrated into the democratic political system. Up to now, it has been one of the few examples of religious movements’ moderation. The recent period in Turkey has shown that the Islamic movement can also be compatible with democratic politics. The paper aims to find reasons and incentives for the transformation of the Islamic movement in Turkey.Paper considers organizational structures of Christian and Islamic religions, as well as the secularization processes that were implemented in both the Turkish and Christian Western European cases, that made an impact on the transformation process of the religious movements. We can conclude that Western Europe and Turkey have witnessed different types of secularization processes (the former implemented polity separation, in the cases of the Catholic and Protestant Churches, while the latter focused on the polity dominance model). Structural differences in religious systems, which are completely different for Western Europe and for Turkey, played a decisive role in choosing an appropriate model. The former represents the church type, and the latter, organic religion. The only similarity we have witnessed between Turkey and Western Europe (here I mean Roman Catholic Western Europe) is the nature of the church-state cleavage. The nature of the church-state cleavage in Catholic Western Europe is more antagonistic than in protestant North-Western Europe. The former type of split was more similar to Turkey's.Conclusionsof this paper were basically drawn on the basis of the field research in Istanbul: observations of the Islamic parties of Turkey, organizations connected to Islamic movement, and in-depth interviews with their representatives and supporters.