A Qualitative Study of the Religiosity of the New Middle Class in the Way of Grounded Theory

The task of the sociology of religion is to know the various ways of using religion that people use. Therefore, religiosity is the benefit and application of religion in the context of people's daily lives, which has found various forms according to their economic and social situation. The purpose of the current research is to investigate the state of religiosity of the new middle class. This research has been conducted with a qualitative approach and grounded theory method. The participants in this research are religious activists of the new middle class in Shahrekord, who were selected through purposeful sampling. The data was collected through semi-structured interviews with sixteen people in this class. In order to analyze the data, open, axial, and selective coding methods were used, and Guba and Lincoln’s criteria were used to ensure validity and reliability. The resultes show nineteen selected categories in the form of a paradigmatic model with a main category (secularization of religious activism of the new middle class), causal conditions (modernism, rationalism, scientism, individualism, and materialism), background conditions (non-mandatory religious socialization), intervention conditions (high socioeconomic status), strategies (rational religiosity, modern religiosity, ethical religiosity, selective religiosity, and secular religiosity), and consequences (decrease the role of religion in daily life, worldly attitude towards religion, self-diagnosis in religious matters, religious tolerance, desacralization, and tendency towards new spiritualities) are organized. The results show that although the religiosity of the new middle class has taken different forms and distances from its traditional form, religious elements have not yet disappeared from the collective mentality of this class and are accompanying it.