Attendance of religious services vs prayer affects attitude towards martyrdom

Attending vs devotion. [Link]

But for all the speculation, very few people have examined the supposed link between religion and suicide attacks with an objective scientific eye. Enter Jeremy Ginges from the New School for Social Research in New York. He has used four related studies to show that there is indeed a link between religion and support for suicide attacks, but it's a complicated one.

Ginges studied a wide variety of religious people from various cultures and faiths - from Palestinian Muslims to Israeli Jews, and from British Protestants to Indian Hindus. Across the board, Ginges found that a person's stance on martyrdom had little to do with their religious devotion or to any particular religious belief. Instead, it was the collective side of religion that affected their stance - those who frequently took part in religious rituals and services, were most likely to support martyrdom.

Various commentators have suggested that religious devotion makes it easier for people to buy into the ethos of suicide attacks because some religious beliefs denigrate those of other faiths, promise rewards in the afterlife or glorify the notion of martyrdom. According to Ginges, the advocates of this idea, Richard Dawkins among them, tend to bias their attention towards the more violent aspects of religious traditions or texts, in a fairly simplistic way.

An alternative idea says that the social side of religion is the more powerful influence. During religious rituals such as church or mosque services, large groups of people move or speak as one, invoking a powerful sense of shared identity. By strengthening bonds within a group, these rituals can augment a person's loyalty to that community, often to the exclusion of those outside it. Suicide attacks, which sacrifice a person's life for the sake of the collective cause, could be viewed as the extreme dark side of this cliquey behaviour.

Ginges, together with Ian Hansen and Ara Norenzayan, carried out four studies to distinguish between these two theories and they've consistently found support for the latter, across a variety of religions.