Introduction
Given that religious expression is known to differ across societies (Berger, 1967) and given that most research on secularization today occurs in Western populations, it is important that we begin considering the process of declining religiosity in non-Western contexts. In this paper, we build on past work (e.g., Cragun and McCaffree, 2021) to further develop our understanding of sex and identity differences in secularity by focusing on a sample of men and women raised in Iran, a Muslim-majority country.
We are now decades into the study of religious decline, and overwhelmingly, existing data indicate that church attendance, church affiliation and the self-reported importance of religion are all in decline across Europe and North America (Bruce 2011; McCaffree, 2017a; Zuckerman et al. 2016; Kasselstrand et al., 2023). While some scholars in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s (e.g., Chaves 1989; Stark 1999) maintained that rates of religious commitment were staying stable in some countries like the United States, better specified models are now showing that even in these countries, religiosity is declining inter-generationally (see Voas and Chaves, 2016).
Yet, secularization outside of the West remains debated, despite the long-standing global influence of Western media critical of religion such as the Simpsons, Family Guy, or South Park along with the global rise of the “new atheist” movement in the 2010s and other openly anti-clerical social movements (Stenger, 2009; Shupe, 2011). However, even outside of the globalization of culture, there are other reasons to suspect countries around the world—not just in the rich West—to be secularizing.
Synthesizing existing research on secularization, Wildman and colleagues (2020; see also Bruce 2011), for example, model several distinct but overlapping pathways that will contribute to declining religiosity in any country. They argue that a combination of rising existential security (e.g., per capita income, life expectancy), religious and demographic pluralism, access to information (education and internet) and social movement demands for civil rights protections, among other things, can create a social and political context wherein devout, fundamentalist, religiosity declines.
Though existential security might reduce peoples’ need for the structure that religion provides, secularization is not likely to be a phenomenon particular to extremely economically developed societies. It has been argued that people in small-scale traditional societies had no formal religion to speak of outside of “pragmatic cults and ceremonies” oriented towards alleviating specific problems or disputes as they arose and that otherwise people had “[little] interest in religion as such, only an interest in the practical results that some religious activities can bring about” (Boyer, 2018, p. 121). In fact, contemporary anthropological research on forager tribes and other small-scale societies has provided considerable evidence that irreligiosity is common, leading the authors of one recent review to conclude that religious doubt has likely played an important role in shaping the culture of all societies known to anthropology (Purzycki and Sosis 2019).
The Study of Secularization Amongst Those Socialized in Muslim-Majority Countries
In this study, we examined peoples’ expression of religious doubt, specifically in the context of having been raised Muslim in a Muslim-majority cultural context. Until recently, academic scholarship on secularization has all but ignored the possibility of secularization in Muslim-majority countries (Sevinç et al., 2018) despite several journalists and other high-profile “ex-Muslims” having come forward with accounts of their own (and others’) loss of religious commitment (e.g., Ali, 2008; Warraq, 2009; Nawaz, 2016). Warraq (2009), for example, notes several catalysts driving individuals to question their Islamic faith, ranging from general concerns about the politicization of Islam (including legalized discrimination against women and homosexuals), to the prophet Muhammad’s alleged marriage to a 9 year-old child, to particular passages of the Quran (e.g., Solomon and Tausch 2021) which ostensibly condemn all non-Muslims to hell (Surah At-Tawbah verse 9:73).
A recent face-to-face survey of 25,407 people across countries in the Middle East and North Africa, conducted by the nonpartisan research network Arab Barometer, provided striking evidence of secularization (see Solomon and Tausch 2021). For example, the proportion of the population in Algeria, Morocco, Egypt and Sudan identifying as “not religious” grew considerably between 2013 and 2019. This growth was particularly noticeable in Tunisia and Libya where the proportion claiming to be “not religious” more than doubled from about 10% to over 20% of respondents. In particular, declining religiosity seems most prevalent amongst younger age groups. A survey of Arab youth in 2019 revealed that a clear majority of respondents felt that sectarian Islam was to blame for most political conflicts in the Middle East and that religious values were “holding the Arab world back” (Sanderson, 2019). Another recent report from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change concluded the following:
“Continuous depictions of Iran as a religious and conservative country have led the West to misjudge the extent of the demands and liberal values of the Iranian people as well as the nature of dissent since 2017. The polling clearly reveals that Islamic values and practices are not held or followed by the overwhelming majority of Iranians – confirming society’s secular shift” (Aarabi and Shelley, 2022, pg. 20).
Indeed, this declining religiosity appears to parallel increasingly socially liberal attitudes, particularly since the 2010 “Arab Spring” social uprising across Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen Libya, and Syria which advocated for democratic governance and greater protections for civil liberties (Tausch, 2019). For example, over 50% of respondents in Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Libya agreed that it would be acceptable for a woman to become president or prime minister of the county, though, majorities in most surveyed countries continued to insist that husbands should have the final say in family decision-making. Nevertheless, fewer than a third of respondents across the Arab world now agree that formal education is more important for men than for women and fewer than a third report agreeing that religious leaders should interfere in political elections (Solomon and Tausch, 2021).
Of course, it is still true to say that in countries with greater numbers of adherents to Islam, self-reported atheists and agnostics are less common in the population (Sevinç et al., 2018). Past work suggests that the stigma associated with being nonreligious is greater in more religiously devout countries and/or regions (Cragun et al., 2016; McCaffree, 2017b). This stigma appears to be particularly severe in countries where legal penalties (including execution) exist for openly expressing criticisms of Islam, such as in Afghanistan, Malaysia, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, Qatar, and Sudan (Fenton, 2016). And, given that those reporting non-belief in the Muslim faith are also less likely to attend Mosque, individuals may face compounding stigma for both a lack of belief and a lack of religious community involvement (Sevinç et al., 2018). Data also indirectly support the existence of such stigma—while research shows that most people raised in Islamic households are likely to maintain some level of religious adherence into adulthood, 96% of people raised Muslim maintain their religiosity when they continued to reside in Muslim-majority countries, compared to 85% of those raised Muslim who now reside in non-Muslim majority countries (Sevinç et al., 2018).
Sex Differences in Secularity
Very little work exists examining how men and women experience secularization after having been raised in an Islamic social context (Schnabel et al. 2016). Sex differences amongst non-religious people in Western samples have, on the other hand, been studied extensively. In one of the earliest studies on the topic, Vernon (1968) found that over 70% of those identifying as atheist or agnostic in American samples were men. In Western countries, the consensus is that atheists tend to be younger, unmarried without children, socially liberal and are also more likely to be white, male, and highly educated compared to those who are not religiously affiliated but who decline to identify as “atheist” (Galen, 2009; Hunsberger and Altemeyer, 2006; Kloet and Galen, 2011; Pasquale, 2012; Zuckerman et al., 2016). The sex difference, however, is substantial: past research suggests that, across Western samples, there are just over two male agnostics for every one female agnostic and about 2.6 male atheists for every one female atheist (Baker and Smith, 2015). In addition to being less likely to leave the religious tradition in which they were raised, women in Western samples are also less likely to remain religiously non-affiliated over time (Kosmin et al., 2009).
Sociologists have argued that gendered socialization experiences explain these findings in the West. They suggest that females raised in devout Christian households may be subjected to especially strict gender norms (Collett and Lizardo, 2009). The result is that these girls grow up to become risk-averse adults who are fearful of questioning religious traditions as well as their role in these traditions (as mothers and homemakers). Such socialization is not only direct, but also indirect, given that girls in parochial Christian households are often raised by mothers who have spent less time in the workforce and have lower levels of education than their husbands; thus, a power imbalance between men and women, projected through interpretations of the doctrine of Christianity, may serve to reinforce women’s roles as subservient to God and husband. To the extent that this portrayal of fundamentalist religious households is correct, the expectation would be that girls raised in more gender-equal households would grow up to be less religious, and this is what some data appear to show (Collett and Lizardo, 2009).
Smith’s (2011) influential analysis of 40 non-religious Americans (most of whom were women) is particularly relevant for the present study. Smith identified three stages that people in his sample went through while rejecting religion. The first stage involved a process of questioning their religious upbringing and the (perceived) religious hypocrisy of their parents, which often led to family disputes and arguments that further motivated individuals to leave religion. The next stage involved a complete rejection of the faith within which they were raised, typically due to construing their religious upbringing as being coercive and forced upon them. A final stage of religious rejection involved some degree of “coming out” as a non-religious person—allegedly akin to how people come out as LGBT to their homophobic parents.
While, in general, work on nonreligious people in Western Christian countries suggests that women are more religiously committed than men on average, there is emerging work suggesting that this sex difference may not apply equally to women in Islamic countries. For example, in Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Pakistan, Yemen, Algeria, Turkey and Malaysia, men report being more religious than their female counterparts (Schnabel, 2018). Other work has come to similar conclusions, namely, that women may be no more religious than men in Muslim-majority countries and may, indeed, be less religious (e.g., Sullins, 2006). If women in Christian-majority countries are more religious than men, but this dynamic is either null or reversed in Muslim-majority countries, this difference harbors a great deal of potential to develop theory in the sociology of religion and secularism.
Some have speculated that religious norms, “hegemonic discourses,” and legal practices in Muslim-majority countries may drive sex-differences in nonreligion (Duile, 2018; Schnabel, 2018). However, one problem is that most work on secularization amongst those raised in Muslim-majority cultural contexts is heavily quantitative, relying on country-level surveys. By contrast, here, we sought to uncover potential mechanisms operating at a deeper, more nuanced level.
Finally, though research on Western populations has focused on self-identified “atheists,” most available data show that fewer than 10% of people in Western samples self-identify as “atheist,” thus, any research on non-Western samples should not be beholden to such a self-identification but should, rather, assess degrees of religious doubt (Sevinç et al., 2018).
Methods
In seeking to further develop theory in the area of sex differences in secularity, we conducted a qualitative study with a phenomenological approach using in-depth semi-structured interviews. Interview questions were generated based on a content analysis of prior work (e.g., Bengtson, 2017; Zuckerman, et al., 2016). The purpose of this study was to understand the experience of secularity amongst those raised in a Muslim majority country, with a particular focus on how those experiences may differ between men and women.
Participants
Data for this study was drawn from twenty-one, in-depth, semi-structured interviews with non-religious adults who grew up in Iran. This was an acceptable sample size given the in-depth nature of the interviews, the lack of research conducted with this population, and the social stigma associated with having a secular identity among this population (Dworkin, 2012). Though not necessarily representative of all Muslim-majority countries, Iran is an officially designated “Islamic Republic,” having undergone a merging of government and religion since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. According to the official Iranian census (2018), during the period of data collection, 99.6% of Iranian citizens were Muslim (the census document itself opens with a quote from the Quran). However, one recent study of 40,000 Iranian adults found that only 40% identified as Muslim and 22% reported having no religion (Maleki and Arab, 2020). Rates of belief in God were still fairly high at 78%, though 8.8% reported being atheist and 5.8% agnostic (Maleki and Arab, 2020). These inconsistencies between official state narratives and available survey data about the religiosity of people in Iran make interviewing people from (and raised in) this country important for understanding the contours of secularization.
Participants included eleven women and ten men, all of whom, as stated above, grew up in Iran in Muslim families (see Table 1 for demographic breakdown; thirteen participants still live in Iran, one lives in Italy, and the remaining seven now live in the United States). Participants in this study represented a relatively younger age demographic (M = 32.00 years, SD = 4.03; Range = 25 to 40 years) that is typically associated with being less religious (Pew Research Center, 2018). There was no significant difference in average age between men (M = 32.7, SD = 4.76) and women (M = 31.36, SD = 3.35) in the study.1
Table 1
Participant Demographics.
| PARTICIPANT # | SEX | AGE | EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Female | 34 | Bachelor’s Degree |
| 02 | Male | 31 | Doctoral Student |
| 03 | Male | 36 | Bachelor’s Degree |
| 04 | Female | 28 | Master’s Degree |
| 05 | Female | 30 | Master’s Degree |
| 06 | Male | 31 | Doctoral Degree |
| 07 | Female | 33 | Master’s Degree |
| 08 | Female | 35 | Master’s Degree |
| 09 | Male | 29 | Bachelor’s Degree |
| 10 | Female | 25 | Bachelor’s Degree |
| 11 | Female | 30 | Doctoral Student |
| 12 | Female | 36 | Doctoral Degree |
| 13 | Male | 40 | Master’s Degree |
| 14 | Female | 31 | Bachelor’s Degree |
| 15 | Male | 38 | Bachelor’s Degree |
| 16 | Female | 29 | Bachelor’s Degree |
| 17 | Male | 36 | Bachelor’s Degree |
| 18 | Female | 34 | High School Diploma |
| 19 | Male | 25 | Bachelor’s Degree |
| 20 | Male | 28 | Master’s Degree |
| 21 | Male | 33 | Bachelor’s Degree |
Study participants were highly educated with 50% holding a graduate degree. There was no significant difference in educational attainment between males and females, with 55% of women and 50% of men achieving a graduate degree.2 To protect participants’ identities, because persecution for participating in this study is a genuine possibility, all participants are referred to as “interviewees” identified only by their self-reported sex. Pseudonyms are not used due to potential risks associated with misidentification and social backlash (see Guenther 2009).
Procedure
Interviewees were found through snowball sampling. Though this is a non-random sampling approach, given the limited research on this topic, the taboo nature of the study topic and the difficulty of accessing this population (i.e., secular Muslims from a country where apostasy is legally punishable), this was the most viable recruitment method available to the researchers at the time. As a non-probability sampling approach, snowball sampling generates a sample that is not representative of the population. However, this limitation is common to most qualitative research and generalizability is not the primary objective.
Interviewees were eligible if they were raised in Iran, identified as non-religious and were over the age 18 years-of-age. Prospective interviewees were told that they would be asked about their experience of being non-religious. Consent was obtained via an emailed consent form. Interviewees were not monetarily compensated for their participation. Interviews were conducted between October 2019 and July 2020. Each participant was interviewed for approximately 60–90 minutes via one-on-one encrypted WhatsApp calls. The interviews were recorded for later transcribing. The interview was broken up into six sections which inquired about the participant’s religious upbringing, current religiosity, attitudes/opinions about religion, and social life. This research was approved by University of North Texas’ Institutional Review Board, approval number IRB-19-10.
Data Analysis Approach
Interviews were first transcribed from Farsi by the third listed author who is fluent in both Farsi and English. Qualitative data were then analyzed using thematic analysis in accordance with the six phases outlined by Braun and Clark (2012). The first and second listed author familiarized themselves with the data, generated initial codes, searched for themes, reviewed themes, defined themes, and produced the report discussing them in the next section. ATLAS.ti (Version 23) was used to code and organize the data.
Results
Our thematic analysis uncovered three interconnected themes — “mixing politics and religion,” “desires for personal freedom,” and “exposure to diversity facilitates secularization” — which can be understood as contributing to our target focus, individuals’ “uncertainty about religion.” The thematic map depicted in Figure 1 illustrates the interconnections among these themes, each of which has subthemes discussed in more detail below.
Figure 1
Thematic Map.
Mixing Religion and Politics
All interviewees expressed dissatisfaction with the mixing of religion and politics in Iran. One woman, for example, explicitly stated that she, “hope[s] the current political system is abolished.” In general, interviewees described the oppressive role they believed a theocratic government has played in their lives; half of the interviewees thought that government forcing religion onto the public has contributed to their irreligiosity. A characteristic example is below:
“When I see that schools try to influence children using religious poems and perspectives to shape their minds and make them all similarly religious to act in favor of the [political] system, it bothers me. I do not have positive feelings about that.”
Nearly all the interviewees (19 out of 21) brought up a desire for the separation of religion from politics in Iran, saying things like, “I do not feel comfortable with politics mixed with religion” and “I think religion should not be forced from the government.” Towards the end of the interview, each participant was asked directly if they would be bothered if a religiously committed Muslim was their locally elected political official, and all 21 of them stated they would be bothered by it. Female respondents typically used stronger language when expressing how upset they were with devoutly religious political officials, for example:
“I think, as I mentioned earlier, religious people try to impose their beliefs on you. If a religious person became president and gained lots of power, the situation would become worse for a person like me. Religion spreads its shadow on your life, it is not really a good feeling.”
And another woman told us:
“I believe religion should not be part of politics. Society needs to be governed by civil rules. Being Muslim should not be an option for their selection [of political officials]. I hate it.”
Fusing Religion and Politics is Oppressive
Due to the conflation of Islam with political power in Iran, we cannot infer a rejection of Islam as an assertion of being non-religious. Often, women in our sample denounced religion but appeared to do so because they felt coerced by official political-religious rules.
“I was struggling with Islam and hijab. Around 17 or 18 I concluded that Islam is not an appropriate religion for me. Maybe it is good for others but not me. I stopped praying and I do not care if I am religious or Muslim.”
One woman specifically asserted that “I think religion is a tool for power,” while others stated that religion “makes [political] corruption possible” and that “Islam is a religion of force.” In total, seven out of the eleven women interviewed expressed that Islam was often used as a means to justify arbitrary and unnecessary rules which had disparate impacts on them. Men in this sample were also fairly critical and sometimes tersely so; one stated that the first religious cleric emerged when “the first fraud met the first stupid person” and another said that religion “brings poverty and ignorance for society.” However, and importantly, only five out of the ten men interviewed expressed a consistently negative view of Islam on par with the attitudes expressed by female interviewees. Women in our sample were typically more vivid in their comments:
“Islam spoils people’s lives…Religion is a personal issue but when it is mixed with social orders, it turns society into a jungle…I think children who are born and grow up in religious culture are oppressed, as with closed eyes in a dark room, like puppets. If they are lucky, they get out of it. If not, they remain in such a situation till the end. A life full of force.”
Social Stigma
Interviewees also discussed how others have responded to their questioning of religion. People with attitudes critical and dismissive towards religion are well known to risk stigma and ostracism and anecdotal and journalistic accounts suggest such stigma may be more severe in countries where religion and state are fused, as they are in Iran (Edgell et al., 2006; Edgell et al., 2016; Schielke, 2012; Nawaz, 2016).
When asked how comfortable interviewees would be talking to members of their family about religious doubts or critiques of Islam, five women said they would feel completely comfortable, and six men said the same. However, even where women reported feeling comfortable expressing doubts, they were more likely than men to hedge and specify that their intellectual doubts were distinct from their de facto behaviors. A characteristic example of this mixed response—which typically distinguished women’s responses from men’s in our sample—was the following:
“I feel totally comfortable [expressing religious doubts]. But I try to follow some rules because of my family when I visit them. My family expects me to wear hijab because of the environment and atmosphere of the small city that they live in. But I am comfortable talking about irreligiosity and my criticism about Islam with them.”
When probed a bit further, eight of the ten men responded that their family had not acted unkindly toward them when they had expressed religious doubts and a ninth stated that his family was “a little [unkind] but nothing big” because the conversation had been dropped when it was clear an agreement could not be reached. Only four of the eleven women answered similarly, suggesting stronger socialization pressure to avoid criticisms of Islam in our female sample.
Despite this pressure, the women in our sample were not necessarily deterred from further critical thinking about their religion. One woman, for example, told us:
“The first time, I think it was in school, I told my father I do not believe what you believe, he suddenly left and did not stay to listen. He did not blame me but asked me to not share these ideas with anyone else. He said, ‘it is a blasphemy what you are saying.’ He could not accept that his child, a daughter, is saying such things… I just laughed and sarcastically told him that he should accept criticism, but I felt happy because I said what I believed.”
Another woman told us:
“When I was a child and I had questions about God, they told us ‘Do not say such things, it is blasphemy,’ and taught us to not ask [questions] and this made me more religious when I was teenager. If they tell you, ‘Do not ask [questions],’ it just leads you to accept religious things without questioning. When I went to college, I made friends and studied religion myself.”
A different pattern emerged when our interviewees were asked about stigma from friends or peers—eight of the eleven women interviewed told us that they had not been discriminated against or treated unkindly by their peers for expressing religious doubt. None of the women interviewed had been publicly “outed” by friends as having doubts about religion.
However, interestingly, only six of the ten men we interviewed said the same. In fact, one man told us that he’d been formally reported by a roommate for expressing doubts about Islam:
“In Iran it was so harsh…. I was talking [about my doubts] with him. He responded, ‘If you think this way we cannot live under the same roof because you are an unclean person,’ and later he wrote a report to the principals and caused me a lot of problems.”
When asked why they thought people in Iran might be distrusting of atheists and other non-religious people, an interesting discrepancy emerged. Five of the ten men interviewed gave uncertain answers or simply said “I don’t know,” and another two actually suggested that stigma against atheists might be to some extent justified because “atheists do not believe in anything” or because “religious people believe in some rules and follow them but not atheists.” On the other hand, only one woman told us that she “didn’t know” why people in Iran are distrusting of atheists. The answers given by women in our sample more often described such distrust as an arbitrary result of historical circumstance. The following is a representative example:
“Religion takes control of societies, so irreligiosity becomes a taboo for people, and it seems that a person who is not religious or does not believe in God is a bad person. I think that is the reason. Because of the dominance of religion for a long time on humankind, taking positions against religion seems like a taboo.”
As mentioned above, all interviewees expressed that they would be bothered if their local political officials were religious. However, there was much more variation in their answers regarding neighbors and coworkers. Though our sample of interviewees expressed a moderate-to-high level of doubt about Islam, they did not report hostile attitudes towards all devoutly religious Muslims—only four women and three men insisted that they would be irritated or bothered if a very religious Muslim was their neighbor. And, when asked if they would be irritated or bothered if a devout Muslim was their co-worker, again, most women (ten of eleven) answered that they would not. Men gave different answers to this question. Four of the ten men interviewed said they would not be bothered if a co-worker was very religious, but the remaining six gave varying answers in the affirmative. Unlike in the case of having devoutly religious political officials, interviewees often indicated that they would only be bothered by having other devoutly religious people around them if those people tried to impose their beliefs:
“If one keeps his/her beliefs to oneself it is not really a big deal, but it is not really common that such a person does not impose his/her beliefs on others in a social situation like Iran.”
Desires for Personal Freedom
Our interviewees all lamented the inability to openly question religious ideas. They expressed a strong desire to be able to display themselves as they wish in public settings, to be open about their beliefs, and for greater religious autonomy.
Beliefs vs. Appearances
As discussed in our literature review, existing research on Western populations suggests women tend to be more religious than men, on average. However, in our sample of nonreligious Iranians, we found women to be more frustrated by religious tradition, than their male counterparts. None of the male or female interviewees in our study reported engaging in private Islamic religious practices in their home (now that they are adults). Also, none of the male participants reported attending Mosque and only one female participant reported doing so to “experience the nostalgic feelings of childhood.”
Nevertheless, women in our sample were more likely to associate desires for personal freedom with the disconnect between their private religious beliefs and their public displays of religiosity. Female interviewees more often indicated that they still “appear” religious in public despite not believing in religious practices. As one woman told us:
“I am a not a religious person, but I live in a religious society. My appearance might be religious, because of the rules in the society, but I am not religious myself… I am still living in a situation that is religious and sometimes I have to follow and perform, like wearing hijab or not shaking hands with men [unless they are members of my family].”
Another woman told us:
“There were paradoxes everywhere like in family and society…I experienced paradoxes. In society, I was religious, but once I met some [non-religious] people I disconnected [from religion].”
All male and female interviewees reported being non-affiliated with a specific religion, but as another female interviewee explained, she along with her family still make efforts to appear as if they are Muslim, fearing the consequences if they do not:
“…it is against the law if you call yourself an atheist. You will end up having problems, you can’t go to school, they can put you in prison if you call yourself non-Muslim or [a] communist. So yes, all of us register as Muslims but we are not.”
Religion vs. Spiritually
We found evidence in our sample of a disaggregation of “religion” from “spirituality,” which has, up to now, primarily been documented only in Western populations (e.g., Fuller, 2001). The evidence from Western populations suggests that, as countries become less religious, individuals begin to expect a greater degree of personal autonomy in matters of faith (i.e., deciding for themselves what to believe or what religious rules to follow) and begin to resist organizational requirements which dictate they believe or behave in particular Islam-prescribed ways (Bruce, 2011).
In our sample, all but two women and one man told us that there was an important difference between religiosity and spirituality. The women in our sample said that spirituality is “not about punishment or reward” and “doesn’t have dos and don’ts,” rather, they told us, spirituality is “more open in meaning,” that it is about “internal development” that it is “less strict” and is a “personal thing.” In contrast to spirituality, the women we interviewed said that religion was and “used as justification,” (i.e., more arbitrary), “oppressive,” “enforcing and limiting,” “ordering and threatening,” and just about “following some rules.”
The men in our sample gave very similar responses, telling us that while spirituality was “more individual,” and an “internal experience” related to being a “good person,” and about “avoiding extremism,” religiosity was “more about obligation,” “manipulation,” “enforcement,” and “following specific ways and methods of living.” These varying responses, similar as they were across men and women, and across cultural samples (given concordant research in the West), suggests that as our interviewees became more secular, they disaggregated religion from spirituality and began to define their faith and understanding of metaphysics more in relation to their goals and personal development, and less in relation to enforced organizational standards or community expectations.
Exposure to Diversity Accelerates Secularization
Sixteen of our participants told us that exposure to ideological or cultural diversity contributed to their doubts about religious beliefs and behaviors. Other factors were also discussed, such as political corruption in the name of religion or believing Islam was an inadequate means for overcoming life’s obstacles. However, overwhelmingly, we were told that exposure to other ways of thinking and behaving contributed to their irreligiosity.
Many Sources of Exposure
Exposure to diversity happened via reading books, watching non-religious television, viewing social media, being in a college environment, meeting new colleagues, and spending time in more cosmopolitan areas like cities. Eight of the eleven women interviewed, and seven of the ten men told us that their experiences in higher education made them less religious. The women we interviewed gave various reasons for this, telling us that college gave them a “scientific perspective,” that the “more they read the more they doubted,” and that college “broadened [their] horizon” and encouraged their critical thinking. The men gave similar responses, telling us that college had “expanded [their] point of view” and encouraged their thinking to become more “flexible.”
Critically, education was important to those we interviewed not (only) because of classroom or textbook learning but, even more so, because college allowed them some geographic distance from their family as well as exposure to new people with varying attitudes about religion. This is a point that has been made by others in Western scholarship (e.g., Sherkat 2014) but it remains relatively unexplored in research on populations in Muslim-majority countries. Consider, for example, the following passage from one woman which was echoed by several of our interviewees:
“The starting point [of religious doubting] was not really obvious and sharp for me like some other people. I think of my college atmosphere, new friends and my experiences with people who had different lifestyles…But because [Islam] was the common way of thinking, nobody was resisting. But gradually people [around me] tried to reject established ideas in society. Because we lived in a society that was religious, conformity was a must for everyone and lot of things were mandatory and it was not a matter of choice or options… [but] then my ways of thinking began to change. This started in primary school and continued all the way to college. At each stage, I had experienced new ideas by meeting new people, reading new books, being in different contexts…”
Some articulated a combined impact of college and social media. One woman, for example, told us:
“[My religious doubt began when] learning about other ways of thinking when I started college…I met new people…My appearance changed, I did not wear hijab very strictly, maybe because of keeping distance from my dad. Also, an NGO [non-governmental organization] that I joined after I got my BA gave me a political vision as a social activist. Most of them were non-religious and communist. It was obviously an important starting point in the way that I changed. Also, the political situation in Iran, the popularity of Facebook and facing very new ideas in social media all led me to become anti-religious.”
Others described the impact of spending time in other countries and experiencing life without “forced religion.” As one male described:
“When I went to Malaysia, most of my friends were from Southeast Asia. Some of them were from Japan, some China, and South Korea. They asked questions about Islam. I saw people who were not living under any religion, and they lived freely with peace of mind, and it made a big impression on me.”
Self and Others
It is crucial to note, from the standpoint of secularization as an intergenerational process, that our interviewees talked about how exposure to diversity had impacted not just them personally, but also older generations of people in Iran such as their parents. One female interviewee cited her parents’ exposure to people with different attitudes via media as a reason for their acceptance of her being nonreligious. Another woman described how both her and her father became less religious because of media:
“We could not believe that my father would buy a satellite TV, but he bought it, and sometimes we watched some programs and news…TV and social media helped me a lot … these new things accelerated the process of changing him.”
A male interviewee described something similar when talking about his mother becoming less religious:
“So, there was a foreign video series and people who watched those became familiar with other cultures…how parents get along with their children when [those] parents were not religious, I think that affected her beliefs.”
Uncertainty About Religion
A majority of our interviewees (15 out of 21) expressed some degree of uncertainty about the existence or nature of God, particularly the one taught in Islam. Their uncertainty was often related to their frustration about government-enforced religion, their desires for personal freedoms, and exposure to ideological and cultural diversity. Only two females and one male outright denied the existence of God, but another six females and five males expressed being unsure (or agnostic) about the existence of God. Three females and four males did express an affirmative belief in God, although four of these individuals rejected a belief in the vision of God taught in Islam and instead suggested that God might just be an “energy.” As an example, one interviewee said,
“What do you mean by God? As an existence who is supervising the world and gives you penalties in case of disobedience, no, I do not believe that. But if you define God as a kind of energy in the world, yes, I agree [that God exists].”
While a comparable number of males and females held atheistic or agnostic beliefs, the female participants in our study articulated their position in a slightly more forceful way. In fact, both women who identified as non-believers self-identified as “atheist” while, notably, none of the male non-believers identified as “atheist.” One female participant who denied having a belief in God referred to such belief as a desire to indulge “illusions.” She told us:
“No. Totally disagree [that a god exists]. I think everything has a scientific explanation…and if we cannot explain and understand something, it is because of our incompetence in understanding and knowing. There is no reason to be illusional… [Humans] did not know many things but as science develops, we learn about more. There is no reason to justify [our ignorance] with more illusional things.”
Discussion and Conclusion
Given the dearth of research on the topic of sex differences in secularization in Muslim-majority countries, our results offer several new directions for scholars of religion and secularism to pursue further. As a qualitative research study, we intend for our results to be read not as definitive, but as a call for further development of theory and empirical research regarding people growing up in Muslim households in Muslim-majority countries.
We found several interesting themes in our sample. Unlike what has been found in Western samples, we found that (slightly) more women than men self-identified as “atheist,” and did so with more assertive language. Notably, in fact, none of the men in our sample self-identified as an “atheist.” On the other hand, consistent with research on Western samples, women in our study articulated stronger gendered socialization experiences encouraging them to display a greater religiosity in public than they held privately. Most of the women in our sample (seven of eleven), but only two of the men, acknowledged that members of their family had, at some point, acted unkindly towards them for expressing religious doubt or criticism.
However, a particularly intriguing finding, deserving of more research, was that women in our sample reported asymmetrical religious socialization pressures—women reported substantially less unkind treatment from peers when expressing religious doubt than did men. Though speculative, it is possible that family religious socialization was stronger for females than for males, but that peer socialization was stronger for males than for females. Differential religious socialization by domain (family versus peer) has not been extensively investigated even in Western samples, though the prevailing assumption is that family religious socialization tends to be stronger (e.g., see Bengtson, 2017). However, in countries where the religious oppression of women is particularly strong—that is, written more extensively into governmental policy—it is possible that resistance to such policy differentially foments in female-female (relative to male-male) peer groups.
Further evidence that women may be leading a secularizing trend comes from our finding that men tended to give more general or dismissive responses when asked why they thought some people distrusted atheists. Though this will need further study, our results preliminarily suggest that women had given this question greater thought and regarded the stigmatization of atheists as more obviously arbitrary and unnecessary. However, an important caveat is that seven of the eleven women interviewed told us they would not be bothered if their neighbor was a very religious Muslim and ten of the eleven women interviewed said they wouldn’t be bothered if their co-worker was a very religious Muslim. These findings do not necessarily indicate the absence of a secularizing trend—it is possible that non-religious Muslims will often still be tolerant towards more religious Muslims so long as Islam is not a dominating force in public politics. Indeed, our finding that all people interviewed reported being bothered at the prospect of a devout Muslim in a position of political power, supports this interpretation.
Lastly, most of the people we interviewed reported being at least moderate social media users and several told us that they’d used such platforms to express their religious doubts. Supposing broadband internet becomes increasingly accessible in Muslim-majority countries, the study of the impact of social media on secularization will be critical. While western scholars have, for the most part, only speculated about the impact of the internet and social media on secularization (e.g., Zuckerman et al., 2016)—largely because social media emerged only after significant evidence of declining religiosity had already emerged in the US, Canada and Europe—the role of social media in the secularization of people in Muslim-majority countries today holds promise for studying a potential causal effect in real time. Indeed, the events of the Arab Spring or of the “My Stealthy Freedom” movement (a women’s rights movement in Iran which began with rejecting mandatory hijab and has since grown to represent other forms of resistance, see Basmechi and Ignatow, 2021) are cases in point, where social media has been used to organize anti-clerical and pro-democratic social movements across Muslim-majority countries. Social media is also a means of spreading awareness of perceived injustices; social media played a key role, for example, in broadening public awareness of the recent death of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, who fell into a coma after being beaten by Iranian “morality police” for not covering her hair while in public (Winchester, 2022).
The same goes for access to higher education, perhaps especially for women. In our sample, clear majorities of men and women insisted that access to education—particularly college—provided a context that facilitated their freedom and motivation to doubt religious dogma. A subtle but important point is that book-learning and classroom experiences may not be the only (or most important) drivers of education’s effect on secularization. Rather, being away from family and having the freedom to interact with a variety of different people in an unsupervised manner seemed to be an even more salient influence on our interviewees’ religious doubting.
The study of secularization outside the West is crucial for expanding our general understanding. Granted, it can be difficult to find individuals who feel comfortable talking about their religious doubts, particularly in countries where there exist credible threats to their lives for doing so. Yet, again, to the extent that participant anonymity or confidentiality can be ensured, the study of non-religion amongst those growing up in Muslim-majority countries promises to add important context to our existing understanding.
For one, terms for non-belief or atheism in Islam may have no direct corollary to the terms used by Western researchers in the sociology of religion. While this might be an issue of language translation, it is also at least possible that expressions of religious doubt might be in some ways conceptually distinct in samples of ex-Muslims compared to ex-Christians. Another point, referenced throughout this paper, is the de facto separation of church and state in Europe and the formal legal separation of church and state in the United States. Such separation is non-existent in Iran and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Thus, it is at least possible that expressions of non-religion are, to a greater extent among ex-Muslim populations, expressions of opposition to political corruption or political ideologies.
And, finally, as the present study indicates, it is likely that men and women experience secularization somewhat differently depending on the broader political and cultural context. To the extent that women feel a greater sense of being arbitrarily oppressed by legalistic rules enforced by religious authorities, and to the extent that access to education and social media allow them a forum for open debate and critique, we might find a degree of religious criticism that would surprise Western scholars.
Data Accessibility Statement
The participants of this study did not give written consent for their data to be shared publicly, due to the sensitive nature of the research questions, and due to the risk of governmental persecution.
Notes
Competing Interests
The authors have no competing interests to declare.
Author Contributions
Kevin McCaffree designed the study, analyzed data, and wrote the manuscript. Anondah Saide wrote the manuscript and led data analysis. Kevin McCaffree and Anondah Saide share first authorship. Farinaz Basmechi interviewed study participants and transcribed the interviews.