Contestation over Morally: Who Gets to Define National and Family Values?

On September 16, 2024, Erdogan's address marking the new academic year warned the students against the ongoing moral decay. "It is absolutely unacceptable to legitimize violence, immorality, racism, hate crimes, and even abuse under the guise of freedom." On another occasion, the birthday of Prophet Mohammad, he noted how people " are in danger of losing our civilizational values, common sense, and common conscience. Characters such as modesty, decency, compassion, and mercy are being withdrawn from daily life a little more; LGBTQ+like perversions that separate people from their nature are being encouraged and incentivized like never before. Hypocrisy, denial, and treason are living their golden age on earth." While such statements dominate Erdogan's appeal and policies, he is not an outlier. In fact, he has become a poster boy of religiously rooted populist-authoritarian discourse that marks global politics. Thus, understanding the political shifts in Turkey and the contestation over defining "morally acceptable" between religious and secular groups and whether and how the state regulatory institutions play a role in this discourse offers a critical case study.   Behind this paper is the idea that an essential layer of populism has been its ability to turn politics into a cosmic war between morally corrosive forces and the defender of faith and morality, turning political questions into plebiscites on morally acceptable and unacceptable. Various religious and far-right groups primarily justify their involvement in political and exclusionary discourse by citing the threat to established moral and national values. Populist leaders, in their speeches, present politics as a war to conserve moral values but how do they enforce their ideas? to answer these questions this paper focuses on the operations of state regulatory agencies that monitor media content, and that has been a tool to penalize morally offensive content or promote ideas inconsistent with family values. The paper tackles a series of theoretical and empirical questions. It delves into how authoritarian populist parties use these state regulatory institutions to monitor media content and how they decide what to censor or not to censor. This paper's analysis centers on RTUK Turkey's state regulatory institution, the Radio and Television High Council (RTUK). This paper offers a textual examination of the RTUK council's rulings between 2014 and 2024 and an ethnographic assessment of how it operates daily. These texts are used to explain RTUK's interpretation of "morally offensive" and "family values" and how they rationalize actions perceived as morally objectionable.  The findings draw attention to how, instead of using a religious discourse, the definition of moral values is presented as scientifically justified interventions and responses to popular demands, while secular groups fail to develop a right-based discourse that resonates with local groups. The findings highlight how Turkey's use of RTUK is not an exception, as other countries like India and Hungary use similar regulatory bodies to control media content and define it as morally acceptable, thereby undermining the role of these institutions as the guardian of a deliberative environment.