Scholarship on religion and politics has been vacillating between those who ascribe to actors a set of fixed theological characteristics that determine their behavior, and those who focus on their strategic interests and view their ideology as a poor predictor of their action. This paper instead aims to demonstrate how elites instrumentally and interactively construct religious doctrines in the context of political uncertainty. It focuses on religion not as an independent variable, nor a constitutive factor, but a strategic construct. Breaking binaries such as secular/radical and drawing on the “extreme” case of post-revolutionary Iran, I explain that religious narratives are neither historically given, nor accidental, nor unidirectional, nor do they occur after behavioral change. Rather, religion is a strategic tool, crafted to advance elites’ particular interests at a specific time and place. I use newly collected primary documents to process-trace the evolution of religious doctrines in Iran against the background of domestic and international politics. I argue that political actors employ a diverse range of religious ideologies to generate mass compliance, prevent elite defections, and manage the state’s external security threats. This paper contributes to the literature on the non-material sources of authoritarian regime durability and the broader rationalist-constructivist debate on the relationship between religion and politics by demonstrating how ideational factors are constructed to correspond with the vicissitudes of elite competition.