Various Types of Piety and Clergies; Investigating the Effect of Piety on Imitating the Clerics

In spite of historical influence of clergymen in Iran and the society’s obedience to them, public obedience to them has been decreased in recent decades. What is the reason for this? Theoretically, we may refer to three groups of major reasons: reasons relating to structural evolutions, reasons emphasizing evolutions in clerics, and reasons focusing on the addressees of clergymen. In the present article, the emphasis is on the reasons pertaining to the addressees of the clergies, and the type of their piety is referred to as the reason effective on decreasing their obedience to clergies. Therefore, three kinds of piety influencing people’s obedience to clergies were identified. They are as follows: direct piety, piety with no need to clergies, and uncommitted piety. Having explained and theoretically expanded the mechanism of effect of these types of piety on people’s relations to clergies, three hypotheses resulted from the discussion were analyzed. The results of the research, conducted in the form of a survey, showed that the more people’s belief in clergies’ roles and duties (their functional necessity) and some religious rites is decreased, the more their needs are fulfilled by persons other than clergymen; and the more they are uncommitted to religious laws, the less their obedience to clergies would be.