I just finished Samuel Hungtington's Who Are We?. Before I comment much on this book I feel I should reread the voluminous critiques of the book/thesis on the more rational non-conservative blogs (I'm talking about you Matthew Yglesias!). Since I am busy with non-blog activities that might be a while, but, I wanted to offer some data that I think might illuminate something I've been questioning of late: how "secular" is Turkey?.

Here is data from the 1990-1993 World Values Survey on the percentage within each nation who affirm "strong religiosity."¹ I am inserting in a variety of nations for context, but focus on the number for Turkey:

• Nigeria - 93%
  
• Poland - 85%
  
• Turkey - 71%
  
• United States - 65%
  
• Italy - 57%
  
• West Germany - 44%
  
• Britain - 38%
  
• France - 34%
  
• Sweden - 26%
  
• Japan - 19%
  

I highlighted France & "West Germany" (remember that the time frame was contemporaneous with reunification) because they are large EU nations. Poland is an example of a "religious" nation that just joined the EU. The United States is supposedly a right-wing evangelical God-crazed nation which scares the shit out of rational secular Europeans. Note that Turks affirm more religiosity than Americans!

Two points though:

• "Strong religiosity" is often not precisely defined, so there will be a great deal of individual variation in what it exactly means.
  
• "Strong religiosity" might have different implications in different cultural contexts.
  

Now, Poland is clearly an example of a religious nation that has joined the EU. I would argue though that Polish Catholicism is a difference of degree from the more moderate religiosity of Italy (or Spain), while Turkish religiosity, being Muslim, is qualitatively different (though this is open to dispute).² Second, there is the old joke that the United States is a nation as religious as India governed by an elite as secular as Sweden, but it seems to me if there is any correspondence between American and Turkish religiosity, a similar assessment might also apply to the Turkish polity.

1- I estimated the numbers off a graph, so I am likely off 1% here and there.
2 - I have argued elsewhere that differences of doctrine and practice mask cross-cultural cognitive similarities in various classes of believers, so any qualitative difference is tempered by that reality. Nevertheless, I do think that religious phylogenies have more validity than arbitrary accidents of theological disputation. To be more specific, strongly religious Turks (and Kurds) can draw upon a long history of Hanafi shariat law, while religious Poles do not have such an explicit Catholic legal tradition (Canon Law is applied within the Church) to challenge the Civil Code.