Abstract:
From its inception to the present, "Deprivation Theory" has been the most common and dominant theory among social science scholars for explaining different levels of people's religiosity. Despite this, conflicting results from empirical research, on one hand, have turned the validity of this theory into a controversial issue, and on the other hand, these studies have been conducted solely within non-Islamic religious traditions. Therefore, the present research article is an attempt to empirically evaluate the general claims of deprivation theory among the Iranian Muslim population. First, the theoretical claims of deprivation theory were formulated as hypotheses regarding the positive correlation between objective deprivation and subjective deprivation with religiosity. Then, to examine the empirical validity of this theory, the aforementioned hypotheses were tested against survey data from more than 4,000 Iranian Muslims to evaluate the degree of conformity and correspondence between the theoretical predictions of the deprivation approach and empirical evidence. In total, the findings of this research could not provide serious and reliable support for deprivation theory in explaining the levels of Islamic religiosity among Iranians.
Machine summary:
On the other hand, in sociology, despite the relative hegemony of theoretical analyses of deprivation regarding the relationship between social inequality and religion, especially the relationship between socio-economic status and religiosity, empirical research on it has not reached convergent results.
For example, the findings of a large set of survey research were consistent with this idea, that socio-economic deprivation corresponds to higher levels of religiosity in three dimensions (belief, religious experience, and consequences) of religious commitment in the Stark and Glock (1968) model.
Finney (1978) obtained the same type of correlations in a sample of a general population (not church members); while Stark's (1972) analysis of a national sample led to finding positive correlations between socio-economic status and the belief dimension of religiosity (Wimberley, 1984: 224).
Although some sociologists of religion stated that the results of research conducted from the 1940s to date show that the relationship between social class and religiosity is weak and inconsistent (Stark and Finke, 2000: 32) and based on evidence and existing documents, is that the empirical basis for deprivation theory in explaining religiosity is very meager (Stark, 2003: 6),1.
2 Therefore, given the fundamental differences between Islam and the aforementioned religions, it is necessary and essential that the general claims of deprivation theory regarding the explanation of different levels of religiosity among individuals in the Muslim population also be empirically evaluated.
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