The gap between reality and the narrative: religious spending in Iran, a victim of media exaggeration

The composition of Iranian households' cultural spending basket has in recent years undergone a gradual but meaningful transformation; a transformation that, more than being merely figures, is a reflection of a change in cultural taste, lifestyle, and the value system of new generations. Based on official data, in 96 (2017/18), the average spending of Iranian households in the religious and beauty domains was not far apart (less than two times), but in 1400 (2021/22) this gap reached more than 4.5 times. At the national level, too, total household spending on beauty has gone from 10 thousand billion tomans in 96 (2017/18) to more than 66 hemt (trillion tomans) in 1402 (2023/24), while religious spending has experienced growth of less than four times. Such a trend indicates a kind of slow but continuous turn from "rituals" to "display" and from "belief" to "appearance" in Iranians' cultural consumption basket; a turn that is not merely economic, but deeply cultural.

What do the statistics say, and how do social networks represent them?

While on social networks religious spending, especially on particular and ceremonial occasions, is made very prominent and at times exaggerated, a look at the real data shows that in 1402 (2023/24), the share of religious spending in Iranian households was only about one-third of spending on cosmetics, beauty services, or cosmetic procedures. This growing gap indicates the formation of a kind of redefinition in society's cultural preferences; a place where identity, belonging, beauty, and even spirituality are no longer given meaning in the traditional forms of the past. This transformation is not the end of a trend, but the beginning of a deep redefinition of Iranians' cultural way of life; and if religious and cultural institutions cannot respond to it with a commensurate language, tools, and policies, the danger will be not only a decline in religious spending, but a generational rupture from the historical and meaning-giving continuum of religion; a rupture that, with the erosion of the symbolic capital of religious institutions, may empty society's cultural future of identity-forming and meaning-giving elements.