Is Iran becoming a post-Islamic society?

Washington and Tehran signed a memorandum of understanding that has not stopped the exchange of fire in the Gulf but has already produced a renewed and more aggressive repression campaign inside Iran.

This crackdown can be understood as the regime’s response to Iranians who had begun to imagine what their country would look like without it.

Since its founding in 1979, the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy has rested on the claim that it governs in the name of Islam. “In Islam, the legislative power and competence to establish laws belong exclusively to God Almighty,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared shortly after the revolution.

Yet a 2025 study found that more than 70% of Iranians oppose the regime, supporting the separation of mosque and state. A similar study from 2024 found that Iranians “mostly favor hypothetical parties that … emphasize national pride and Iranian nationalism.” In fact, former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s speeches after the 12-Day War in June 2025 notably leaned on nationalist themes, a sign that even the Islamic Republic has been forced to speak the language of its opposition.

When Iranians reject the regime’s theocratic governance, as seen in successive waves of protests across cities large and small, they seek alternative ways to express dissent and identity. Nationalism and secularism are among them. Christianity is another.

For years, human-rights organizations and religious monitors have documented that Iran has one of the fastest-growing Christian populations in the world. In 2013, the Christian population was estimated to be less than half a percent, largely limited to ancient Armenian and Assyrian communities that predate Islam’s arrival in Iran.

Also in 2013, 246 Iranians were reportedly baptized in a single day, one of the largest recorded baptism services in the country since the 4th century. By 2020, estimates suggested the Christian population had increased by more than 200%, with more than one million Iranians identifying as Christian.

These numbers matter less for their precision than for what they signal. Conversions take place quietly and almost entirely out of public view. Underground house churches have proliferated despite the risk of arrest and imprisonment. Bibles, which are considered contraband by the Islamic Republic, are smuggled into the country on compact memory cards. Iran Alive, an Evangelical organization based in Texas, claims to have distributed more than 100,000 Bibles in Iran since 2001, and now reaches an average of 6 million Persian-speaking Iranians daily via satellite broadcasts.

This growth has occurred even as the regime has intensified its repression, cracking down on churches, jailing converts and other religious minorities on vague national-security charges. Tehran even treats apostasy not as a matter of conscience but as a threat to the state itself. At times, the regime has even attempted to exploit Christianity by engaging in performative instances of tolerance to deflect scrutiny of its broader religious abuses.

These shifts mirror Iran’s broader cultural trajectory. The country’s protest movements call not for Islamic reform or a return to revolutionary ideals. They demand freedom of speech and freedom from clerical rule. Meanwhile, Iranian women publicly burn hijabs. Young Iranians chant against the country’s leaders. The language and symbolism of dissent are unmistakably looking toward Judeo-Christian values.

None of these factors alone suggests that Iran will emerge as a Christian society after the regime falls. But they do suggest that Iran may be, if it is not already, a post-Islamic society. In 2023, a senior Iranian cleric acknowledged that roughly 50,000 of Iran’s 75,000 mosques have closed, calling the decline a “worrying admission” for a state built around the principles of Islam. The regime’s attempt to fuse political authority with religious legitimacy has not produced a devout society, rather one actively searching for alternatives.

Christianity’s growth should therefore be understood not as an end state, but as further evidence of a deep rupture between the Islamic Republic and the society it claims to govern.

If the regime falls, Washington is likely to discover an Iran that is more religiously diverse and more Christian than it has long assumed. For decades, the United States has approached Iran as a permanent ideological adversary to be deterred and contained, paying far less attention to the character of Iranian society itself.

The Islamic Republic has forced the West to see Iran through the regime’s own ideological lens and not the decades of resistance to it. Planning for the day after means approaching the Iranian people without the assumptions that the regime spent more than 40 years trying to install.

Mariam Wahba is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Angelo Schiciano is an intern. Follow Mariam on X @themariamwahba.