The persistence of religious institutionalism has complicated organizations’ operations in modern pluralistic environments. On the one hand, religious institutions and those who enact them often demand a puritanical adherence toward a religious logic. On the other hand, to enact their purpose, organizations frequently need to engage with others who may adhere to alternative logics—whether profane or derived from a different divinity. Through an 18-month ethnographic study of an eminent purpose-driven organization operating in theocratic Iran, we investigate how organizations can engage with impure elements derived from alternative logics while preserving their institutional purity in the eyes of the dominant religious logic’s custodians. We contribute to the literature on religious institutionalism by developing a grounded theoretical account of how interconnected processual interventions like seducing, taming, syncretizing, and propagating help organizations to enact their purpose amid the purity imperative. Through this extreme case, we advance our understanding of purity as an ongoing aspirational, performative, and discursive process of organizational emergence rather than a rigid and binary organizational state.
