Holy irony: how a theocracy secularized Iran
Naeimeh Doostdar
Journalist and Iran analyst
Half a century of rule built on clerical authority has secularized Iran, available data suggests, with most still believing in God but not in the theocracy.
Journalist and Iran analyst
Half a century of rule built on clerical authority has secularized Iran, available data suggests, with most still believing in God but not in the theocracy.
The story is not the “death of religion,” as it may appear from social media snippets depicting once unheard of public concerts and women spurning the mandatory hijab, but a fundamental reordering of how Iranians relate to faith.
Recent surveys by the Netherlands-based Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN) found 68% oppose the continuation of the Islamic Republic. Support for its leader and revolutionary principles fell from 18% to 11% between 2022 and 2024.
A leaked culture ministry survey reported that 73% favor separating religion and state. A peer-reviewed article by Ali Sarihan of Maryland's St. Mary's College, published in the journal Religions puts support for a secular system at around 70%.
Yet other indicators show Iran is not secular in the familiar Western sense. The World Values Survey (WVS) still finds 96% identify as Muslim and only 1.3% as atheist.
Faith endures, it seems. It is political Islam that is losing ground.
Hidden secularism
Classic secularization theory imagined that modernization would push religion out of public life. Iran shows something more layered: personal belief can survive even as the political project built around it collapses.
Sociologist Asef Bayat has called this “post-Islamism”—a phase in which political Islam has exhausted its appeal, even as many Iranians retain some form of private faith.
Iran is not “non-religious,” Bayat argues. It is post-theocratic in its political aspirations.
Religious practice has thinned markedly.
Sarihan's study also suggests that the share of Iranians who “always or often” pray fell from 78% in 2015 to 55% in 2023—a steady decline shaped, and likely accelerated in recent years, by repression and economic crisis.
The WVS relies on face-to-face interviews, which in a country like Iran give respondents every incentive to conceal dissent or non-conformity.
Belief recast
Religious rituals remain part of everyday life.
The Shi'ite religious holy days of Muharram and Arbaeen still draw large crowds especially outside major cities, and shrines remain busy.
But for younger Iranians, who express the highest levels of political dissatisfaction, religion no longer aligns with state intrusion into private life.
The compulsory hijab, morality policing and the regulation of personal behavior have turned religion, for many, into a vehicle of control.
The widespread protests of 2022, known by their rallying cry of Woman, Life, Freedom, exposed this rupture. The slogans were never an assault on faith itself but on the state’s claim to define and enforce it.
On social media, hashtags rejecting the Islamic Republic sit comfortably alongside posts defending personal belief. The distinction between faith and religious governance has become unmistakable.
Coercion to choice
Iran’s path to secularization is unusual because it runs in two directions at once: from above and from below.
Heavy-handed enforcement—from hijab rules to cultural censorship—has alienated generations and inadvertently strengthened the case for separating religion and power.
GAMAAN’s highest recorded opposition to the theocratic system came at the height of the 2022 protests, when women’s bodily autonomy became the central battleground: four out of five respondents said they would vote “no” to an Islamic Republic in a hypothetical referendum.
Meanwhile, everyday acts of defiance are reshaping religious life from the ground up.
Women walk unveiled. Families who still value faith increasingly bypass official religious bodies. Younger Iranians look for ethics and spirituality beyond state-sanctioned channels.
God versus government
Two caricatures usually obscure the real picture. Iran is not a “godless society”: personal belief, ritual and religious meaning remain widespread. But nor is it the devout political community the state insists it governs.
The Islamic Republic’s project of political Islam has lost its authority, and most Iranians now prefer a secular political order.
The theocracy has produced one of the region’s strongest secularizing shifts—not through reform but through coercion. The more it has enforced religious rule, the more clearly Iranians have separated faith from the state.
Iran today stands between private, chosen belief and state-imposed religion.
The secularization of politics is now a structural threat to Islamic rule—one that often goes unnoticed amid a myriad of more immediate, louder crises.
Speaking at a ceremony marking Student Day, Pezeshkian addressed the controversy surrounding the preferential access system, which drew widespread criticism after a November update to X revealed that numerous journalists, officials and pro-government figures were using unfiltered connections.
“We have instructed that these white internet lines be turned black as well, to show what will happen to people if this blackness continues,” he said.
Pezeshkian has repeatedly promised to lift filtering, a key pledge of his 2024 presidential campaign. On Sunday, he again suggested that political constraints lie beyond his control. “It is not enough for me to simply order the lifting of filtering. If it could be solved by instruction, we would have done it on the first day,” he said.
The comments came as government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said that the administration seeks “free internet for all,” despite saying last year that no such promise had been made. Instagram, X, Telegram, and some other platforms remain blocked more than a year into Pezeshkian’s term.
A stalled pledge
Filtering reform was central to Pezeshkian’s campaign, when he said he would “risk his neck” to fix it. Yet in his first meeting of the Supreme Cyberspace Council he emphasized implementing the Supreme Leader’s directives on internet governance rather than easing restrictions and ordered action against the flourishing trade in VPNs.
Since then, senior officials have offered varying timelines. In December, Majid Farahani from the presidential office said filtering would be removed in three phases by the end of the year. The newspaper Farhikhtegan later reported consensus among Iran’s three branches of government to move from blocking toward “smart restrictions,” indicating the system is being recalibrated rather than dismantled.
Public anger intensified after revelations of the white SIM scheme, which critics said exposed a tiered access system contradicting the government’s rhetoric about digital equality.
In a letter addressed to Google, Meta, YouTube and Amazon Web Services, the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with the Iranian People warned that Iran’s widening use of AI-driven surveillance, recurrent shutdowns and a “white SIM card” scheme for officials had created a two-tier digital system isolating ordinary citizens.
The Iranian government enforces some of the world’s toughest online restrictions, blocking platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Telegram for the general public. Most people rely on slow, unreliable VPNs that authorities routinely disrupt.
By contrast, X's new location feature recently revealed that select users receive government-issued SIM cards or whitelisted connections to bypass national filtering and throttling altogether.
The issue drew wide attention over the past few weeks, when the X feature revealed numerous pro-government figures were posting from inside Iran without VPNs – despite long claiming they used the same circumvention tools as ordinary citizens.
The disclosures triggered heavy public criticism, with many describing the system as “digital apartheid” or a “caste-based internet” that rewards political loyalty and entrenches inequality.
EU says firms must bolster anti-censorship tools
Hannah Neumann, who chairs the EU delegation, said a free internet remains the only barrier against propaganda and intimidation. “Technology companies are the guardians of this freedom, and now is the time to take their responsibility seriously,” Neumann said, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Euronews.
She added that companies were capable of measures that “ensure these voices are not silenced.”
Deputy chair Bart Groothuis said digital repression had become central to Iran’s authoritarian model. “By supporting tools to circumvent filters, we can improve secure communication and give Iranians access to the free internet,” he said.
The letter urged firms to fund open-source VPN and censorship-bypass projects, expand encrypted communication features and develop in-app proxies to keep users connected during outages. It also asked Amazon Web Services and human-rights–oriented VPN providers to offer free or discounted server space to stabilize services for Iranian users.
European legislators pressed Google to continue backing Jigsaw, Outline VPN and its SDK, and to consider integrating these tools into major apps. Meta was asked to embed filter-bypass technologies into Instagram, Facebook and Threads. Companies were also urged to provide simple procedures for appealing blocked accounts and to increase cooperation with digital-rights groups.
US lawmakers pursue parallel push
In Washington, lawmakers introduced the FREEDOM Act on Thursday, which would require the secretary of state, the FCC and the Treasury to assess technologies capable of supporting unfiltered internet access for Iranians.
Representative Claudia Tenney highlighted the potential of satellite-to-mobile systems that could “bypass the limitations of censorship and government networks.” The feasibility review will also evaluate UAV-based platforms and counter-jamming tools.
Representative Dave Min, whose district includes a large Iranian-American community, said promoting internet freedom strengthens global family ties while confronting authoritarian practices.