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Diminishing Religiosity: The New Abnormal

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Iran's youth has become less religious due to a piecemeal approach to religion, with many adopting the idea that religion can be broken into individual pieces. The increasingly secular public assigns various degrees of loyalty to each aspect, therefore employing rational choice theory when deciding how to practice. This theory focuses on maximizing benefits and minimizing costs in terms of religious behavior. By using rich new data and old data from the post-revolutionary period, the author assigns 4 dimensions to the data; individual aspect, collective aspect, practice aspect, and belief aspect. The data reinforces the rational choice concepts presented earlier; all correlations coefficients between the dimensions of religiosity and religio-political dimension are negative. This signifies that the stronger attachment to religio-political views correlates with less emphasis on conventional aspects of religiosity. With the decline of religiosity, the author argues that Iran is unique to comparable Islamic countries like Turkey or Egypt. Iran's rates are declining in terms of religious practice relative to the rest of the world, more than religio-political thought and Islamism is.

The author then argues that Islamism, closely linked to this religio-political dimension, is favored among the youth, although with less emphasis on daily practice, which has declined significantly. The author examines other factors that influence the decline, such as demography. With the effects of the baby boom and shifting demographics, the author references Durkeheim's concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity to offer a potential explanation between the relationship between demographic shift and a changing religious character. Meanwhile, as Iranian society continued to modernize, so too did ideas surrounding gender roles during the 1990s. With the latent women's movement for greater access to divorce or education, for example, religiosity became further divorced from legal matters, which, the author argues, is reflective of society at large. Here we see an Islamist government gradually granting freedoms to women in the form of secular law. Without a secular base there would be no secular state ideology, therefore this process also represents secularization. Iranian youth as well as the secular sector of the population in general have become more selective in what aspects of religion they prioritize. While daily practice has declined, thinking in terms of a religio-political frameworks has not, therefore the people reflect their Islamist, gradually liberalizing government.

References:
           Kazemipur, Abdolmohammad. Part 3, “Backlash: Streets, Young People, Women, and Demography” in Sacred as Secular : Secularization under Theocracy in Iran.Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queens University Press, 2022. 

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