To fathom the support from Christian Americans (Evangelical and Roman Catholic) for Donald Trump, perhaps a comparison to Turkey will help. The republic of Turkey has a long history of religious and secular rivalry. To make Turkey a modern and western nation and to distinguish it from the Ottomans, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk embraced a French-styled secularism (laicity) that excluded Islam from politics entirely. Only with the 2003 election of Recep Tayyip Erdogan as prime minister as leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) did Islam make its way back into the Turkish government, thanks to AKP’s roots among the Turkish Muslim electorate. Erdogan has hardly ended hostility between secularists and Muslims as the 2013 protests in Istanbul indicated – disputes that escalated from objections to police brutality to protests over Erdogan’s efforts to reappropriate Turkey’s Ottoman past. Still, his party remains the political voice for many devout Muslims.
http://www.fpri.org/article/2016/03/defying-the-pundits/
I-BRIDGE's blog (Link Campus University's Research Centre on Global Affairs) - editor, Marco Emanuele - Critical thinking, complexity, international relations (Twitter, @Glob_Eye - Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/marco.emanuele.50)
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