A Comparative Study of the Relationship between Religion and Social Cohesion in Iran

Sociologists have long regarded "religion" as an important factor in providing and maintaining the social cohesion of societies, and had proposed arguments for rationalization of this relationship. In contrast, some recent theorists of secularization in the social sciences have argued that one of the most important consequences of modernization and development on the religious life of the societies today is that it has sharply weakened the link between religion and social cohesion to the extent that social cohesion is no longer dependent on the religion and religiosity of the community members. In the present study, the arguments of these two competing theoretical views in sociology were first translated into two conflicting hypotheses about how religion is related to social cohesion. Then, an attempt was made to experimentally test the validity of these hypotheses using an inter-country comparative method in Iran by analyzing the "province" and using the collective data of the second half of the 2021s. The results of this test, on the one hand, provided empirical support for the traditional hypothesis in sociology claiming that religion reinforces social cohesion. On the other hand, the research findings did not provide any empirical support for predicting the empirical secularization theories. Overall, the findings of the empirical test of the hypotheses of this study in Iran, using an inter-country comparative method and an inter-provincial analysis, showed that religion is an important factor in strengthening the social cohesion even when the effects of development are controlled and eliminated