The World Values Survey (WVS), one of the leading databases on global cultural change, shows that Turkey is now among the countries experiencing the steepest decline in religiosity worldwide.

Between 2007 and 2019, survey respondents in Turkey reported a significant drop in the importance of God in their lives. The pace of change places Turkey alongside Britain, Switzerland, and Scandinavian countries — societies long known for secularization.

This shift is especially notable given Turkey’s unusual trajectory. For much of the twentieth century, the country stood as a bastion of political secularism, built on Atatürk’s vision of separating religion from state institutions: a unique case as a Muslim-majority country where secularism coexisted with widespread piety. That tradition defined Turkish politics and public life for much of its modern history.

Exceptions like Turkey were never unheard of. In fact, the United States long occupied a similar place in the literature as an outlier—what Tocqueville described as a nation pairing a secular constitution with unusually high levels of personal religiosity. This case was often taken to show that religion’s role as a social force was not inherently antithetical to modernity, many argued, but could coexist with democratic institutions and economic development.

Over the past two decades, however, the rise of President Erdogan and his religious conservative party led many to question whether the secular order in Turkey would endure. The expansion of religious schools, the growing influence of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, and the use of Islamic references in political discourse all fueled suspicions that Turkey’s secular legacy was at risk—prompting a familiar question: did the secularization theory get it wrong again?

Yet, the WVS findings demonstrate that Turkey is not an anomaly but part of a broader global pattern of declining religiosity. As Ronald Inglehart highlighted in Religion’s Sudden Decline (2021), secularization has accelerated across many societies in recent decades — and Turkey’s sharp shift shows that this trend is not confined to Western cases. What once stood as exceptions — Tocqueville’s America and Atatürk’s Turkey — now appear in the ranks of secularizing countries.