Iran's theocracy is pretty ideologically motivated, they're not just in it for the money.
MAGA is modern Nazism and Christian Nationalism, it was bread out of the Conservative and Republican party of the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s, and has been fully embraced by and has enveloped by both.
Rejecting hate, racism, indoctrination, and cultism is not "experiencing a religious awakening" it's quite the opposite.
Progressives have elevated cultural relativism to a core religious principle. They can’t even articulate why it’s desirable for immigrants to “assimilate,” because in their world view it must be taken as axiomatic that America wouldn’t be substantively less successful if it was culturally more like Guatemala or India.
You could put that in a dictionary as the definition for "cultural relativism." I mean, you just referred to "forced civic integration" like that's a bad thing! That's not Clinton Democrats believed in the 1990s. They believed in the "melting pot," which meant cultural homogenization. More specifically, it meant immigrants adopting Anglo-American culture, like German immigrants.
But progressives rejected the "melting pot," and now think we have a "salad bowl." This fight over the "salad bowl" is completely different than what the fight was about in the 1990s. Bill Clinton wasn't a cultural relativist--he never talked about a "salad bowl" multi-cultural America.
That’s almost exactly what Bill Clinton advocated
> Can we be one America respecting, even celebrating, our differences, but embracing even more what we have in common? …Can we define what it means to be an American …in terms of our primary allegiance to the values America stands for and values we really live by?
> And more than ever, we understand the benefits of our racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity in a global society
> When young people sit side by side with people of many different backgrounds, they do learn something that they can take out into the world. And they will be more effective citizens.
> we must demand responsibility from every American. Our strength as a society depends upon both—upon people taking responsibility for themselves and their families, teaching their children good values, working hard and obeying the law, and giving back to those around us… No responsibility is more fundamental than obeying the law.
Additionally, Clinton may not have used the “salad bowl” metaphor, but frequently used metaphors like “mosaic” and “tapestry woven from different colored threads”.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/commencement-addre...
It’s a lot harder to find decent evidence on the prevalence of religious belief in Iran, obviously, but I’d be willing to believe anything in the 70-90% range based on the commentary below. (Obviously this source is biased, but they at least cite their references adequately.) Large confidence intervals evince a lack of confidence.
https://muslimskeptic.com/2025/01/29/iranians-atheists/#Stat...
So yeah, it seems reasonable to claim that white Republicans are roughly as religious as Iranians overall.
This probably underestimates religious belief of those aligned with the government, however, since we can’t segment them out by political affiliation and the opposition is likely more secular in proportion.
Obviously Democrats in the 1990s weren’t theocrats. Maybe your point is that it’s not about religious attendance per se that makes for a theocracy, but the content of the religious beliefs?