Iran Learns Locke the Hard Way: Integralism, Postliberalism, and Religious Compulsion
Matthew P. Cavedon
Otes Manor House where John Locke spent the last fourteen years of his life via Wellcome Library, London (CC BY 4.0).
John Locke insisted that toleration and a secular approach to politics would be good for religion. He argued that coerced belief results in hypocrisy and resentment, as well as belief that hinges on political tides, while freely embraced faith will be sincere and resilient. After several centuries of experience with religious liberty and the separation of church and state, together with decades of increased social secularism, it can be hard for Americans to evaluate the strength of Locke’s case. Was he right that political backing of Christianity was bad for religion? Some “postliberal” thinkers suggest otherwise, casting modern institutional arrangements as a main reason why secularism is on the rise.
Two recent books offer Iran as a convincing rebuttal to them: it has elevated religion to a central place in government, yet its people increasingly reject Islam. In 2023, Kevin Vallier published All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism. Vallier had spent several years debating leading “integralists,” traditionalist Catholics who reject liberalism as corrosive to faith. Integralists believe that the way to religious revival is political patronage, while Vallier thinks restoring government privileges for Christianity would ultimately undermine it.
Vallier points to Iran as evidence that Western postliberals are wrong, observing that Iran is far more religiously homogenous than America and suggesting that hopes like those harbored by the integralists would be much more politically feasible there than here. Of course, Iran has attempted a government-driven religious renaissance since its 1979 revolution, which installed as supreme leader a Shi’ite Muslim cleric and requires all laws to conform to sharia as interpreted by government officials. And yet, Vallier observed, the outcome had been precisely what Locke predicted: widespread Iranian disillusionment with Islam.
While Vallier’s book reached the market just three years ago, decades’ worth of developments have rocked Iran since. In late 2022, Jina Mahsa Amini died in custody after being arrested by morality police for violating an Iranian dress code. She was five days short of her 23rd birthday. Over the months that followed, hundreds of protests erupted under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” and thousands of citizens were arrested. While the authorities suppressed this movement, just over two years later, a wave of economic protests exploded. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei admitted that “several thousands” of Iranians were killed in response. Israel and the United States launched Operation Epic Fury in February 2026, killing Khamenei and other leading Iranian officials, and what will happen next remains unclear.
Enter this year’s No Compulsion in Religion—No Exceptions: Islamic Arguments for Religious Freedom (available as a free pdf at the link, with Arabic, Urdu, and Persian translations coming soon) edited by my colleague Mustafa Akyol. The volume sets out the case for Muslims to embrace religious liberty in a wide range of different contexts: decriminalizing apostasy and blasphemy, ending government enforcement of the Ramadan fast, and liberalizing the restrictive laws on women and girls that Amini died for violating. Contributors discuss a variety of cultural and geographic settings, including Pakistan, Sudan, and Indonesia.
One chapter stands out as direct confirmation of Locke and Vallier. Iranian public policy scholar Mohamed Machine-Chian explains in detail “How Compulsion in Religion Made Iran Less Religious.” He observes that religious coercion after 1979 has gone beyond forcing women to cover their hair—and driven resentment. The government totally prohibited alcohol. Since then, Iran has “witnessed periodic mass poisonings from adulterated alcohol,” including the death of 76 people in 2018 from consuming “methanol-laced bootleg drinks.” State officials censor literature, media, “scripts, songs, and even gallery paintings.” As a result, many intellectuals and artists left the country in the 1980s and 1990s.
Resentment has eroded Iranian Islam. Machine-Chian recounts that “the state’s heavy-handed Islamification coincided with a steady de-Islamification of Iranian society at the grass roots.” In the early 2000s, he writes, sociologist Amitai Etzioni reported hearing “fewer calls to prayer in Tehran than in any other Muslim city I had visited”—perhaps most tellingly, one mosque in disuse had even been converted into a political party’s headquarters. By 2019, journalist Nicolas Pelham reported that “Tehran may well be the least religious capital in the Middle East,” while “home delivery is faster for wine than for pizza.” In a confidential 2020 survey, 47 percent of Iranians called themselves nonreligious, 40 percent Muslim, and fewer than a third identified themselves as Shi’ite. Most said they were “spiritual, agnostic, atheist, or followers of other faiths.”
A small percentage of Iranians are true believers in the official religion. A larger number make superficial shows of conformity. The majority resent how political Islam has become the excuse for why they are beaten, jailed, and shot for what they wear, read, drink, and listen to.
It is easy for America’s Christian postliberals and integralists to look at a society awash in vaping, pornography, gambling, and irreligion and long for the government to march forth in the name of the cross. But Iran proves Locke’s point more eloquently than even he could. Religion in a liberal society has to be a fighting faith. Faith that wins one soul at a time claims the victory of sincere love. Belief that compels outward submission, by contrast, receives only the pyrrhic prize of hidden, often quite convicted, resentment. ♦
Matthew P. Cavedon is a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion and the Director of the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice. He is the author of From the Pope’s Hand to Indigenous Lands: Alexander VI in Spanish Imperialism (2024).
Recommended Citation
Cavedon, Matthew P. “Iran Learns Locke the Hard Way: Integralism, Postliberalism, and Religious Compulsion .” Canopy Forum, May 28, 2026. https://canopyforum.org/2026/05/28/iran-learns-locke-the-hard-way-integralism-postliberalism-and-religious-compulsion/.
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