State-Led Desecularization and Its Limits: Imam Hatip Schools and the Paradox of Youth Religiosity in Türkiye

Öz

This article examines why Türkiye's sustained state-led effort to expand religious education through Imam Hatip schools has coincided with, rather than reversed, evidence of declining religiosity among the young people such schools were designed to reach. Drawing on recent grounded-theory and desecularization-theory scholarship published between 2023 and 2026, the article develops a conceptual account of this apparent paradox, arguing that it is best resolved not by treating institutional religious expansion and individual secularization as contradictory but by recognizing that they operate as only loosely coupled processes within a broader dialectic of state-managed religious politics. The article traces the historical trajectory of Imam Hatip schooling from its origins as a vocational institution through its transformation, after 2002, into a flagship instrument of state-led desecularization, before examining expert-interview evidence on how politicization, exposure effects, and digital-era competition from alternative worldviews interact to produce reactive secularization among students formally embedded within the religious education system. The article concludes that assertive, top-down religious revival, much like the assertive secularism it was designed to counter, struggles to durably shape individual religious consciousness, and it discusses implications for religious education policy and for desecularization theory more broadly.