Investigating the Relationship between the Level of Social-Cultural Development and the Level of Religious Religiosity among the Provinces of Iran

Since the advent, intensification, and expansion of modernity, the relationship between religion and religiosity and development has been one of the most enduring and intense cultural, scientific, policy-making, and day-to-day challenges. In Iran, with the occurrence of the two constitutional revolutions and the Islamic Revolution and the emergence of liberal and fundamentalist religious ideas and currents, this challenge has emerged and intensified. In Iran, the relationship between religion and modernity and related debates and challenges have been mostly analyzed and studied at the level of insight or at the level of micro survey. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between the level of social-cultural development and the level of religious religiosity at the provincial level. The research method was a documentary method of secondary analysis. First, the level of social and cultural development of different provinces and the level of their religious religiosity are calculated; after the relationship between the two variables is investigated. Provincial clustering was done based on indicators of social and cultural development and religiosity using the K-means cluster method. According to the research results, at the individual level, with the exception of Khorasan Razavi and Kurdistan, respectively, all provinces that have a higher rank in terms of cultural and social development indicators have a lower rank in terms of ritual religiosity. Also at the cumulative level, provinces with low and medium levels of development have a higher degree of religiosity than developed provinces; But the difference between the religiosity of the less developed and the moderately developed provinces and the average developed is not statistically significant.