Turkey’s state religious authority used its Friday sermon to urge people to marry and have children, as the country faces a record-low birthrate and a government campaign to reverse the decline.
The sermon, titled “Being a Family,” was prepared by the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) and sent to mosques across Turkey for Friday prayers.
“Although our faith stresses that sustenance belongs to Allah, claims that having children makes life harder are increasing by the day,” the sermon said.
The Diyanet, a state body that writes weekly sermons for Turkey’s mosques, also argued that marriage had been made burdensome and that single life and life outside marriage were being promoted.
“The future of nations depends on the founding, protection and strengthening of the family,” the sermon said. “The greatest wealth of nations is generations raised with national and spiritual values.”
The message placed a religious frame around a problem that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has described as a national threat: Turks are having fewer children.
Turkey’s total fertility rate fell to 1.42 children per woman in 2025, the lowest level in the country’s modern history, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat). The rate has remained below 2.1, the level needed to replace a population without migration, for nine years.
The drop marks a sharp change for a country long seen as younger than much of Europe. Turkey’s fertility rate was 2.38 in 2001 but it has fallen every year since 2014.
Erdoğan has urged Turkish families for years to have at least three children and has at times raised that call to four or five. His government declared 2025 the “Year of the Family” and announced 2026-2035 as a “Family and Population Decade.”
The issue has also entered health policy. In 2025 Turkey restricted planned Caesarean-section births at private medical centers as part of a campaign to promote vaginal delivery, a move that critics saw as part of the government’s broader attempt to steer women’s reproductive choices.
The Diyanet sermon also criticized expensive engagement, wedding and marriage ceremonies, saying they put heavy burdens on young people and families.
“Let us not load heavy burdens on the shoulders of our young people and their families through engagement, marriage and wedding ceremonies based on show and waste,” it said. “Let us see our children, who are God’s blessing, as a source of abundance.”
The sermon comes as many young people in Turkey cite high rent, food prices, job insecurity and the cost of raising children as reasons for delaying marriage or avoiding parenthood.
Critics say official appeals for more children ignore the financial pressures that shape individuals’ decisions about marriage and family life.