This paper examines Egyptian state programs to bring “high culture” to the middle and lower classes in the context of state security crackdowns on Islamist political groups and secularist intellectual anxiety about the spread of the piety movement. Egyptian state officials in the Nasser period initiated “cultural cultivation” (tathqif) programs directed mainly at workers and peasants, arguing that a modern nation requires a well-educated and discriminating populace – a high culture in addition to a national culture. In the 1990s, these programs gained a higher profile and were invested with a certain urgency by state officials seeking to contain or counteract the piety movement’s increasing visible presence in public space and Islamist groups’ attacks on the government and tourists. Viewing these different developments under one umbrella of threat, the Ministries of Culture and of Youth built many museums, poured significant resources into youth cultural programs, and expanded the “culture palaces” program in lower income and rural areas. Intellectual writing has, especially since the early 1990s featured, discussions of a “need for more culture” and a culture “crisis” that must be addressed. Through examination of the General Organization of Culture Palaces, this paper explores shifts in how “culture” (thaqafa) has been conceived, operationalized, and directed at certain segments of the population in relationship to political and economic shifts. It argues that while earlier socialist/developmentalist notions of culture and its role in society persist, state actors and affiliated secularist intellectuals now construct a notion of national high culture that seeks to co-opt, control, and secularize Islam.