Explanation of Religious Behaviors: A Theoretical Model & Empirical Test

Religious behaviors in the form of rituals and ceremonies, as the most obvious manifestation of religion in society, have great importance for sociologists. For explaining religious behaviors, theories of deprivation, religious socialization, and doctrinal beliefs are three major and dominant theoretical approaches in sociological researches. In the present research article an attempt has been made, first, to combine the basic ideas of these three theories in a theoretical model for added richness of explanation of the topic namely, religious behaviors, and in the second step, some competing predictions of these theories are made to empirically evaluate and to clearly determine which of them are preferable. Finally, the developed theoretical model was tested by data obtained from the National Iranian population (n = 4937) to find out the level of empirical fitness. Overall, the results of this study indicate that theoretical model derived from aforesaid theories, generally and in sum, could explain about three-quarters (73 precent) of variance of Religious behaviors. However, the theory of deprivation failed to obtain empirical support. Also, the findings of the present research once again proved the importance of religious socialization and indicated that religious behaviors are more direct function of their religious socialization experiences.