The Directorate of Religious Affairs (DRA or Diyanet) is one of the most controversial institutions in “secular” Turkey. It is a state agency that continues, to this day, to execute its mission “to educate and enlighten society on religious matters and administer the places of worship.” In 2020, the Diyanet’s budget appropriation was $1.7 billion, exceeding the combined budgets of the Ministries of Commerce; Foreign Affairs; Energy and Natural Resources; Internal Affairs; Culture and Tourism; Industry and Technology and Environment and Urban Planning. The elevation of the agency’s institutional standing, expansion of its social and geographic reach and budget in the past two decades are well-documented. Recently, observers and scholars have pointed to Diyanet’s increased power under Erdogan’s rule as evidence of the backsliding from secularism and the unprecedented influence of religion in politics. While there is some merit to this view, it tends to be premised on the religious/secular binary. In historical reality, religion/religious arguments shaped the making of the nation-state and its secular/izing reforms, institutions, and sensibilities in the formative years of the Republic. Moving beyond the secular/religious binary, how do then we make theoretical sense of the relationship between religion, secularism and nationalism in the Middle East? This article discusses religion, secularism and nationalism as different kinds of ideologies. My analysis of fifty-one Friday sermons that the DRA published in 1927, in Turkish (as distinct from Arabic) for the first time, demonstrates that Turkish secularism was not “hostile” to religion. Nor did nationalist reformers view Islam as an impediment to Turkey’s modernization. I show that Kemalists rearticulated religious concepts and practices to create a modern Turkish Muslim morality. Employing a neo-Gramscian theoretical approach on ideology, and moving beyond the dichotomous view of religion and secularism, I develop the concept of “hegemonic morality” to refer to the moral dimension in ideological struggles to help explain the relationship between religion, secularism and nationalism in the modern Middle East.