Religious rebound, political backlash, and the youngest cohort: understanding religious change in Turkey.

This article examines religious change in Turkey, a Muslim-majority country, through the lenses of cohort-based cumulative decline theory and political backlash theory. Using age-period-cohort interaction models on World Values Survey data from 1990 to 2018, the study finds minimal evidence for a cumulative cohort-based decline in religiosity, contrasting with patterns observed in Western countries. Instead, period effects linked to political transformations—especially the rise and evolving authoritarianism of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) and President Erdogan—play a dominant role, influencing religious identity and behavior differently through processes termed "identity updating" and "performance signaling." Political affiliation with the AKP is associated with increased religious attendance but not necessarily increased religious identification, while non-AKP supporters show declining religious identification, highlighting the complex interplay between politics and religiosity in Turkey's contemporary context.