This chapter analyzes how the distinctive institutional environments and their corollary ramifications on religious authority drive religious movements to adopt different strategies in shaping their political activism and creating religious parties, focusing on religious competition and conflict. Islamist movements, unperturbed by a hierarchical religious authority, found the liberty to pursue hybrid organizational structures. This carte blanche to assume religious authority enabled Islamist movements to operate both as a religious movement that serves in religious, social, and educational areas and as a religious party in the political arena. The Church hierarchy, by contrast, forced Catholic mass movement leaders to choose between expulsion and avoiding political activism in the name of Catholicism. Catholic political activists largely responded to this challenge by formally parting ways with mass movements and creating their own Catholic parties without the Church's blessing, ultimately deprived of the ability to rely on religious authority in their political ventures. In addition, this chapter focuses on the implications of distinct organizational trajectories on the electorate.

The politicization of religion and emergence of a religious political identity in the modern era is firmly anchored in the rise of mass religious movements – a hitherto unknown phenomenon. These movements became the main instruments for fulfilling the newly developed religious sociopolitical vision. Not only did they play a crucial role in raising a religious generation to confront social change and secularization, but they also aimed to confront deviant ideologies and remake the political system in line with their religious visions. In this distinctly political objective lie the seeds of religious political parties, which carry the missions of religious mass movements into the political arena. Religious movements embody the ideal organizational form of modern religiopolitical activism – they can lay out a vision for societal and political transformation, teach and preach this vision, and mobilize resources and communities to achieve it. These movements translated the bourgeoning religious responses to modernization and secularization into tangible social, religious, and political agendas. This chapter analyzes the emergence of mass religious movements in the Middle East and Western Europe.

This chapter discusses the revival of Islamism as a counter-hegemonic paradigm in Turkey. After giving a brief definition of Islamism, it looks at the genealogy of Turkish Islamism, it looks at how the Kemalists put an end to Turkish Islamism, securitised and criminalised it. Then, the chapter summarises the several Turkish Islamist parties that were by the National Outlook Movement, after the closure of each party by the Kemalist constitutional court. After briefly evaluating National Outlook Islamism’s divisive, Islamist populist, anti-Western and conspiratorial rhetoric, the chapter proceeds to the emergence of AKP and consolidation of its own authoritarian regime. This chapter argues that there are three different versions of AKP. The first one’s (AKP 1.0) emergence can be traced back to 1997 when the Kemalists profoundly victimised and traumatised the Turkish Islamists once again after staging a coup. The AKP was established in 2001 as a Muslim Democrat party and until 2008 continued to democratise Turkey in line with the EU’s requirements. AKP 2.0 emerged in authoritarian drift times between 2008 and the Gezi events of mid-2013 when Erdoğan decided to crush the peaceful demonstrators with violence. AKP 3.0 is the full authoritarianist and Erdoğanist version of the AKP that started with the Gezi protests of mid-2013 and has continued until present.