Inside Tehran’s newest metro station, Iranians who can be imprisoned for owning bibles will soon walk past a plaque that declares, “the message of Jesus Christ was the salvation of humans from darkness, ignorance, corruption, depravity and discrimination.”
Elsewhere in the Maryam-e Moqaddas station, or Holy Mary station, a relief of Christ walking on water decorates a vestibule, and his mother Mary is depicted, larger than life, praying among flowers.
State media have characterized the name and motif of the station as a gesture of cultural coexistence. Mary is also a venerated figure in Islam.
But the nearly completed metro station, which is due to be officially opened in early November, has raised eyebrows in a country where religious converts from Islam have been executed and Christian worship in the national Persian language is forbidden.
Among scores of Christians currently imprisoned in the country, one is an Armenian citizen sentenced to 10 years for “illegal Christian activities” after being discovered with several Persian-language bibles among his belongings.
Fred Petrossian, an Iranian-Armenian journalist based in Brussels, told RFE/RL that the new metro station is being made largely to sanitize the Islamic country’s image on the international stage. “It is to say to the West and the outside world that look, we are tolerant, we honor Christianity and other religious minorities.”
On October 29, Iran’s security chief lauded the new station for its potential to play a “significant role in diplomacy.”
Estimates of Iran’s Christian population varies widely but a 2020 survey from the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN) reported 1.5 percent of respondents identified as Christian. That figure would extrapolate to hundreds of thousands across the country.
Most Christian converts practice their faith in secret among small groups of friends and in high-risk “house churches,” which are frequently raided by the authorities.
Dr. Pooyan Tamimi Arab of GAMAAN told RFE/RL that an increasing number of younger Iranians are turning away from Islam amid waves of recent anti-government protests.
“The younger people are [turning away from Islam], the more they identify with labels such as ‘agnostic’ or ‘atheist’ and that means that in a situation in which the majority religion is being doubted, some people will not choose, for example, non-religiosity, but they will choose another religion, like Christianity,” he said.
The Netherlands-based researcher says the trend toward Christianity “must be seen in a bigger pattern of opposition to the theocratic regime [of Iran].”
Among the turn away from Islam documented by GAMAAN, Iran has significantly stepped up its persecution of Christians, with a reported total of 96 converts sentenced to a combined total of 263 years in prison last year, compared with 22 Christians sentenced in 2023.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, “conversion by Muslims to other faiths is forbidden under most interpretations of sharia [law] and converts are considered apostates," a crime punishable by death in some cases.
The Tehran metro station is located within a stone’s throw of the Saint Sarkis Cathedral of the Armenian Apostolic Church.
Ethnic Armenians are permitted to practice Christianity in Iran within strict limits, including a ban on services held in Persian, and potential execution for attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity. Congregations are monitored closely by the authorities and service times must be agreed on with the authorities in advance.
Several representatives of the Armenian church previewed the metro station on October 22 ahead of its official opening.
During that tour, the head of Tehran’s metro system called the facility “one of the most beautiful stops in [a wider infrastructure] project, where human faith and the special respect Iranians have for their Armenian and Christian compatriots merge.”
On the same day the Armenian clergy toured the metro station, 61-year-old Christian Mina Khajavi was released after serving nearly two years in the notorious Evin prison for hosting a home church, which the Iranian authorities deemed was “acting against national security.”
