Nonversion: The Conversion of Young Turks to Non-Religion

Amidst transnational cultural contestations over moral values, questions surrounding youths’ religious socialisation and education provoke heated public debate, as young people represent for adults the possible 'religious' or 'secular' futures of a nation. In Turkey, tensions emerging from the uneasy coexistence of religious and secular education entered a new phase with the recent government commitments to bring up a 'pious generation' (Lüküslü 2018). These policies have resulted in the conversion of many secular high schools into Imam-Hatip (religious) schools. Yet despite the government commitment to increasing religiosity amongst the young, quantitative research suggests that levels of piety are declining, with many young people who receive religious socialisation ending up as 'nonverts'. With growing research attention over recent years to contemporary forms of secularity and 'non-religion' across different global contexts, there is now a burgeoning research literature exploring the growth of 'non-religious' identities, beliefs and worldviews. Yet we know little about the experiences of individuals who become 'religious nones' in predominantly Muslim societies such as Turkey. This research aims to advance understanding of how, when, where, and with whom young people self-identify as non-religious (Strhan and Shillitoe 2019). In the context of the Turkish government’s campaign to raise young people as pious Muslim subjects and its view on social media as a potential threat to their religious identity, this project will adopt a combination of digital ethnography and in-depth interviews to explore what it means to be 'non-religious' in Turkey. Given the increasingly prevalent religious educational environments which limit schooling options for the lower social strata, the project will focus on young adults from lower social-class backgrounds. The novelty of this project lies in its capacity to: 1) address top-down religious reform and conservation projects in the Middle East, illustrated by the current Turkish government’s politics of religion, 2) advance theoretical and methodological innovation in the sociology of religion and contributing to growing research interest in religion in youth studies, 3) advance the multidisciplinary literature on non-religion, which has to date largely focused on (post)Christian contexts, and 4) enhance the knowledge base on how religiosity interacts with gender and class in shaping young people’s identities.