Causes and Contexts of the Tendency Toward New Spirituality in Iran: A Survey of Tehran

From the seventies onwards, Iran saw the emergence of New Sprituality and the increase in the tendency towards it, primarily confined to fringe groups which later on spread rapidly among different classes. The present study examines the causes and contexts of this tendency among different groups of citizens in Tehran by using the factors mentioned in various theoretical approaches. To achieve this goal, 23 semi-structured interviews were first conducted with New Spiritualists. Then, according to the results of the interviews, a questionnaire was designed and distributed among 600 citizens of Tehran. Sampling was done purposefully in the qualitative section and randomly from the blocks of Tehran in the quantitative section. The interviews were analyzed by the thematic analysis method, and the quantitative data were processed through the SPSS software and various tests such as Pearson correlation and linear regression. The results indicated a significant relationship between five factors and the tendency towards new spirituality. The ethical stress, emotionalism, access to new spirituality, and experiencing suffering had respectively the strongest to the weakest direct relationships and deprivation had a reverse relationship.