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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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The question is if Iran wants them to be apostasizing. Probably not. I don’t think any religious country wants their citizens to be non-religious. Their inability to fix apostasy does not mean that they should throw out their whole social technology infrastructure. But the extent of apostasy is probably exaggerated in Western news, to drum up support for a perceived irreligious youth rebelling against those wicked & oppressive tyrannical mullahs.

Iran's TFR is 1.7. It's basically a Western country

A higher TFR than White Americans while only making 1/4th of their adjusted average wage is incredible. (Not that wages are so important for TFR, but really low wages and really high wages have an effect).

Do they actually have 2% of the population with an extremely high fertility rate? If they wanted such a thing, they'd be better off encouraging religious diversity. I don't see how enforcing Islam helps with that.

Without Islam their TFR would go even lower. An Iran that is legally “Islamic” can direct resources to those subpopulations which are high TFR, and has a generally better chance of one day fixing TFR concerns. An atheistic country is totally fucked wrt TFR and has pretty much zero chance of recuperating fertility except through a quasi-religious fascism.