Religious Pluralism and Religious Commitment in Iran

How Religious Pluralism relates to Religious Commitment has been one of the main axes of conflict between the two dominant paradigms on the sociology of religion in the last three decades. The knowledge storage primacy of the social sciences under the secularization paradigm suggested that religious pluralism undermines religious commitment. In contrast, the new paradigm of the religious economy or the market model of religion argued that religious pluralism leads to increased religious commitment. In the present paper, the mechanisms of the relationship between the two variables of religious pluralism and religious commitment are described from the perspective of the two paradigms secularization and the market of religion, and then, their conflicting hypothesis with secondary data of Iran are tested through an inter-country comparative analysis with the provincial analysis unit. The results showed that there was no relationship between religious pluralism and religious commitment in Iran. In fact, the findings of this research could not provide empirical support for two dominant paradigms on sociology of religion in the relationship between religious pluralism and religious commitment, rather, it should be seen as an empirical challenge for both the secularization and the religion market’s paradigms.