Christian Right in the US and pro-Islamic Turkish-movements

I read this scientific article in which the author (Esen Kirdis) compares the Christian Right in the US and the pro-Islamic movement-parties in Turkey. He researches the moderation of the Christian Right and the failure of the pro-Islamic Turkish movements by using the "most different systems approach". Below you'll find my remarks I want to share with you.

Kisir first starts off with the emergence of these parties, which is actually not relevant for now. He continues to employ the inclusion-moderation theory, which describes the mechanisms of how and why a political movement (once evolved into a political party) moderates. The Christian Right in the US demanded, for instance, that school's continued with the prayers like before. However, during and after (thus actually contributing to) the Christian Right's successful integration into the Republic Party as an important force to be reckoned with, the Christian Right changed their firm ideologically-based stances into demands for rights. Getting back to the previous example: they now demanded that students have the right to pray. Indeed, this is not radical and within the confines of liberty unlike their stances before the inclusion.

Now, the pro-Islamic Turkish-movements also had a similar problem of organizing. However, unlike the Christian Right that had to integrate itself into a political party (perhaps also due to the two-party system in the US), the Turkish pro-Islamic movements had to come up with a new strategy to transform themselves and become elected into parliament AND being allowed by the laic order of Turkey—the last requirement being the most important one. AKP successfully gathered the support of enough though different pro-Islamic Turkish-movements and became the first party being elected into the Turkish parliament and even government with a Muslim and perhaps Islamic background. They, of course, did this by staying within the boundaries of the laic political system and with the help of economic reforms and the EU. However, because there was no party to challenge them—personally, I think because the other parties and in particular the CHP never established themselves as true political parties—the AKP had some sort of carte blanche to prepare for the future decade. Especially since the Turkish electoral rules are thus that the AKP started out with only 34-35% of the votes and their best seat-score in parliament, while seeing seats vanish at the same time that more people vote AKP. 

My take from this article is that the crucial thing, among many, is that the Turkish pro-Islamic movements needn't to integrate themselves into an already established party and they met little effective resistance—they met real difficult and hard resistance—when they successfully got elected into parliament and government. This paved the way for stretching boundaries of the religiosity of the state and created the situation in which we are now. This sounds quite bad, but at the same time it is the inevitable sociology of Turkey, since many Turkish citizens are religious and have been repressed for decades. I think (hope) that this'll change over the course of the coming 1-1.5 decades when the Turkish economy modernizes. Modernization theory explains that when the economy modernizes (further), the political will follow. Many people will loose their religion since affluence will be their religion (cf. Western Europe just after WW2 and now). 

- Esen Kirdiş (2016) Immoderation: comparing the Christian Right in the US and pro-Islamic movement-parties in Turkey, Democratization, 23:3, 417-436, DOI: 10.1080/13510347.2014.975125