Fred Petrossian
Iranian Religious Minorities: From Resistance and Creativity to Mirroring the State’s Discourse — The Case of Christian Converts
Iranian Religious Minorities in digital era: From Resistance and Creativity to Mirroring the State’s Discourse Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iranian society has been subjected to harsh censorship and repression. Religious minorities, alongside women and other marginalized groups, have faced severe restrictions on their basic rights. This repression has produced both a massive exodus of minorities and the emergence of creative forms of resistance. For example, Persian-speaking Christian converts have launched the Place2Worship campaign to claim their right to churches, Bahá’ís have established a virtual university in response to their exclusion from higher education, and Yarsanis have used digital platforms to sustain connections within Iran and with the diaspora. These initiatives illustrate how digital spaces substitute for banned institutions—online preaching and music replacing churches, or virtual education replacing classrooms. This paper also engages with the intersectionality of discrimination, analyzing how layers of exclusion—religion, gender, and ethnicity—compound the experience of oppression. While we mention several cases involving Bahá’ís, Yarsanis, and women, our primary focus is on the situation of Christian converts as a revealing case study. Yet, alongside creativity and resistance, digital activism sometimes reproduces state-like patterns of exclusion. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence and René Girard’s mimetic theory, this paper argues that persecuted minorities, under pressure, can mirror the discourse of the state by reinforcing “us versus them” divisions. Furthermore, Christian symbols and metaphors—such as the death and resurrection of Christ—are increasingly employed in Iran’s broader political debates, sometimes by non-Christians, to frame narratives of regime collapse and dynastic return. The paper proceeds in three steps: first, by analyzing the situation of religious minorities in the past 47 years; second, by examining how symbolic violence and mimetic desire shape the dynamics of persecution and resistance; and third, by assessing the broader impact of these digital practices on Iranian civil society.